Chancellor Rishi Sunak used the UK’s first G7 finance meeting on Friday to urge ratcheting up taxes on the likes of Facebook and Amazon. Facing an economic downturn of epic proportions, the Government is desperate to shore up the public finances and create a ‘level playing field’ between online and high street retailers. Facebook and […]
Where did Covid come from? More than a year after the first cases we are still far from answering this crucial question. Frustratingly, this week’s joint press conference from the World Health Organization and the Chinese government offered more confusion than clarity. China initially opposed the inquiry altogether and blocked investigators from visiting the site of […]
Quarantine is an ancient word dating from the Black Death in 1347 when Venice required arriving ships to stay offshore. It comes from the Italian quaranta, meaning 40 days. Thankfully for me it was just 14. My plane arrived into Canberra just ahead of schedule on a mild day in late November. We were taxied […]
The Government wants to shift 22,000 civil servants out of London by 2030. In the first stage, Leeds, Newcastle and Teesside are reportedly now in the running to host a 750-person “Treasury North” campus. This has sparked a regional tussle. Ben Houchen, the Tees Valley Mayor, has demanded that Teesside, not Leeds or Newcastle, be […]
In the name of tackling childhood obesity, the Government is now proposing to ban all online advertising of unhealthy foods. This extends to social media, commercial websites, personal business websites, promotional emails and text messages. The definition of what is unhealthy is laughable. It ranges from fish fingers and scones with jam and cream to […]
Milton Friedman once explained how problems arise when you start spending other people’s money: “I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get,” Friedman says, “and that’s government”. I wonder what the great man would have made of the Government using emergency procedures to award 8,600 contracts worth […]
For economic liberals the usual instinct — mourning the loss of a Republican presidential ticket — does not apply to Donald Trump’s defeat. He may have cut taxes and red tape, but Trump was a big spending, debt-increasing, trade protectionist who rejected core free market principles. Americans voted for Joe Biden to get rid of […]
One undoubted silver lining of Covid has been the cancellation of the world’s most insufferable and useless virtue-signalling, willy-waving conference: the World Economic Forum at Davos. If you wanted proof of the total vacuity of this gathering of the super-rich and super-woke, it’s that the emergence of coronavirus didn’t get even a passing mention back […]
Britain is on the verge of punching herself in the face in order to have the freedom to shoot herself in the foot. According to the Spectator’s James Forsyth, and ITV’s Robert Peston, the Government is willing to sacrifice a trade deal with the European Union over state aid rules. “The sticking point [in EU negotiations] isn’t […]
Since Covid struck, we’ve heard a great deal about “Build Back Better” and the need to “rethink the role of the state”. What these calls tend to have in common is a heavy bias towards ever more public spending and a bigger state. It’s a curious response to a pandemic that has revealed massive state […]
If recent months have shown us anything it is the British state could barely organise a booze up in a brewery. On paper, Britain was the best prepared nation in the world for a pandemic. In practice, Public Health England failed to ramp up testing in time after rebuffing offers from the private sector. The NHS […]
This week, the Government announced a significant rejigging of the Track and Trace regime, to better integrate the national scheme with local public health teams. The change comes after months of criticism that the contact tracing system was excessively centralised: dependent on outsourced call centre operators who could barely reach more than half the close […]
Just over 100 days ago, England’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer Jonathan Van-Tam claimed that “there is no evidence that general wearing of face masks by the public who are well affects the spread of the disease in our society.” In January, Public Health England took a break from failing to scale up testing to declare […]
Britain has had an agonising four years debating how to leave the European Union. But Brexit was never supposed to be about what the UK was leaving, but rather what she could gain as an independent, sovereign nation. Trade Secretary Liz Truss’ launch yesterday of official trade talks with Australia and New Zealand, and joining […]
“Stay at Home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives,” was a brilliant slogan. Clear, succinct and universal. It suited the seriousness of the moment in March as this frightening plague descended. Along with ‘Take Back Control’ and ‘Get Brexit Done’ it will be taught in communications classes for years to come. But all things, no matter […]
Last weekend YouTube deleted conspiracy theorist David Icke’s channel. The world’s biggest video site banned Icke not for his decades of crackpottery but rather his latest vomit about coronavirus and 5G. This marks an escalation in YouTube’s ‘disinformation’ policies. In the past, they have largely removed content because of harassment—albeit increasingly defined in identity terms—and […]
A Prime Minister appears on every channel at primetime. He’s announcing a national lockdown to stop the spread of a deadly pandemic. It feels like a dystopian movie plot. But the threat of this virus, and the steps being taken to prevent its spread, could not be more real. Police will shortly have the power […]
John McDonnell’s response to the Government’s emergency financial measures this week gave a frightening glimpse into how a Labour government might have handled this crisis. The Shadow Chancellor’s demands, other than those related to sick pay and renters, were an unreconstructed shopping list drawn from Labour’s defeated manifesto last December. He had a go at […]
The Soviet Union had multiple organisations responsible for censorship. The Goskomizdat sorted printed fiction and poetry. Goskino dealt with cinema. Gosteleradio oversaw radio and television. Judging by its latest announcement, the Government wants the UK to make do with one super-censor, Ofcom, charged not only with supervising broadcast media, but also “making the internet a […]
On BBC Breakfast yesterday morning Boris Johnson declared that “it’s not for Government to step in and save companies that simply run into trouble.” The Prime Minister was quite right, which makes the Government’s announcement that it will “review” domestic air passenger duty in response to struggling short haul carrier Flybe all the more confusing. Reports have also […]
