The Conservative government recently published proposals for new legislation to regulate spying in the UK. The draft Investigatory Powers Bill seeks to do many things, particularly gathering up powers already contained in a lot of different existing laws and subjecting them all to a coherent oversight procedure. Most of the discussion generated by these proposals […]
Sometimes it seems as if Britain is surrounded by existential threat. Armed extremism, financial upheaval, cultural confusion – all can feel like they could break a brittle, uncertain society. But these are only the headline concerns of the day. Deep beneath the headlines there is another country where real change happens, sometimes slowly, and sometimes […]
King of Kings: The Triumph and Tragedy of Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia. Asfa-Wossen Asserate, Haus Publishing, $29.95. In late January 1941 a party of soldiers and civilians crossed the border from Sudan into Italian-occupied Ethiopia. The men in uniform included British political advisors, some peculiar soldiers of fortune, and the shambling, eccentric and driven […]
Africa has had a good press this last few years. It deserves it. In most countries life is getting better, and people have more power to work, to spend, to choose. But not everywhere. And particularly not in one country that few know, that fewer have visited, and that today is on fire. Several decades […]
You approach a new James Bond film with finely blended expectations of excitement and concern and dread. Excitement at the prospect of the second most expensive action film ever produced, concern at the health of a venerated British institution, and dread at the prospect of yet another prime turkey in the turkey-infested realm of the […]
The average cycle time between financial crashes is ten years. A decade is about as long as it takes for bad debts to be purged, for financial risk-taking to swing from appetite to aversion and back to appetite again. In other words, the world is about due for some trouble. The only question – usually […]
Sad news: popular capitalism has failed. At least, that part of it that was about popular shareholding has failed. The proportion of shares in British business owned by retail investors (that is, ‘ordinary people’) has been falling for years and is now close to an all-time low. And who can blame those retail investors? The […]
In the English language the words ‘spy’ and ‘Russia’ are fellow travellers. The Russian state is secretive by nature and the methods of the secret state are the methods of the spy services: surveillance, interception, and information control. All of these techniques are part of the political management system of Putin’s Russia, and they have […]
What’s the biggest economic risk from China? A GDP growth crash? A bond price meltdown? Low-cost knock-off competition? Copyright theft and counterfeiting? Actually it is quite likely that the answer is none of the above. The biggest risk from China is competition, but not the sort of cheap-and-cheerful competition that Western companies have grown used […]
Edmund de Waal, a celebrated potter and ceramicist who had one of the literary hits of 2010 with his biographical memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes has now written a study of the remarkable history and nature of porcelain. De Waal has devoted much of his working life to porcelain, and this is not a […]
For as long as I can remember I have been reading financial reports about the coming ‘hard landing’ in China – and explanations from the financial wizardry as to why there won’t be a hard landing as long as the Communist Party is in charge and in funds. Earlier this week it seemed that the […]
For emerging economies there is supposed to be a simple equation: mobile + computing + internet = growth. Mobile technologies put communication in the hands of even the poorest. Computers – nowadays in the form of smartphones – turn communication into an ever more affordable economic tool. The internet hosts the data those tools create, […]
Jeremy Corbyn, an awkward unclubbable left-wing activist who thinks Venezuela is the model of how a society should be managed, is coming closer to winning the leadership of the Labour Party. Of all possible responses from Labour to its humiliation in the recent general election, the Corbyn surge is the least-expected. The Conservatives cannot believe […]
John Plender, a journalist on the Financial Times, has written a book about capitalism and whether it is a good thing – and that is taking ‘good’ in its broadest sense, to include ‘moral’ as well as ‘useful’. Now, there are those who would object that a journalist on the famously pink paper is the […]
Earlier this year, India’s finance minister used the occasion of his budget to declare a truce. There would be no more multi-billion tax raids on big foreign companies in India. Investors could rest easy: the days of ‘tax terrorism’ were over. One month later, the London-listed Cairn Energy opened a brown envelope to find that […]
Why is Switzerland so rich? Why is Portugal so poor? And what exactly is the recipe for going from poor to rich? These are the sorts of questions that development economists and policy folk from a thousand think-tanks spend their days and nights puzzling over. But according to a group of economists and data-crunchers at […]
People say a lot of things about Calcutta, but one thing they never say is that Calcutta is a pleasant place. Intense, chaotic, corrupt, and confusing, yes. Unremitting discomfort and infinite inconvenience, yes. Pleasant, no. Calcutta (or Kolkata if you insist on following the endless name-changes inflicted by the government of West Bengal) is never […]
Keeping secrets, sending secrets, stealing secrets: it’s a very ancient trade. The business of intercepting and deciphering communications has been going on for as long as people have had brains enough to profit from knowing more than their enemies. And today, as this bleakly entertaining new book from Gordon Corera reminds us, the branch of intelligence […]
On the Sunday of the ninth of September 2007 a meeting was called in the Treasury. It was, as they say, fateful – although none of the participants realised it at the time. That afternoon the course of the UK economy and political life was altered for years to come. If things had been decided […]
As the horrible troubles of Greece unwind towards their conclusion there remains one question that no one seems to ask. How on earth did anyone think the Greek economy was worth buying at a premium price in the first place? It was not so long ago that many thought just that. Investment pros will tell […]
