The quickest way to tug at human heartstrings is to invoke the suffering of cute but perilously endangered animals. Writing in The Guardian today, John Vidal takes issues with the BBC’s breathtaking new documentary Planet Earth II. Beautiful pictures are all very well. But “after half a lifetime of writing for the Guardian about the […]
“In the long run, we are all dead,” said Keynes. But growing longevity means the long run is happening later and later. The fact that each generation is outlasting the next is obviously good news. But it also creates a horrendous problem for our governments. Recently, for example, the UK’s Office of Budget Responsibility ignited […]
Free trade is on the run. The president-elect of the United States calls the free market the “dumb market.” He wants to renegotiate past trade deals. The death spiral of manufacturing jobs makes people wonder if trade with China was really such a good idea. Some economists claim to have found evidence that increased trade […]
Earlier this year, I borrowed from Dante’s Inferno and created the Five Circles of Statist Hell. At the time, I suggested that Venezuela was on the cusp of moving from the third circle (“widespread poverty and economic misery”) to the fourth circle (“systematic and grinding poverty and deprivation”). Since we now know that children in […]
What should Britain’s trade policy be after Brexit? Recent coverage has focused – inevitably – on the nature of our ultimate deal with the European Union, or our prospects of signing individual agreements with this country or that one. But there is a bigger opportunity here – one that has the prospect of enriching not […]
“Seven million Britons in poverty despite being from working families,” laments the Guardian. “Housing crisis ‘creates in-work poverty’,” reports the BBC. “British workers living in poverty ‘at a record high’,” thunders the Independent. If you read the headlines, you could be forgiven for imagining that Britain has entered a new age of Dickensian misery. We […]
Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, tells us that we’re experiencing a lost decade. This is the first time since the 1860s that real incomes haven’t risen over a 10 year period. Last time around, it was caused by the collapse of Overend Gurney – a “too big to fail” bank as we would […]
In the year 1929, as America slides into recession, a Republican senator, avowed patriot, Mormon “prophet” and businessman named Reed Smoot decides that he wants to do something about saving the country’s jobs. They are being lost, insists Senator Smoot, because too many countries are selling too many goods into the United States and undermining the lives […]
The sharing economy is quietly changing the fabric of the country, but it’s not just homeowners or car owners who are benefitting. Slowly but surely the sharing economy is helping those parts of the economy that just can’t be reached by other means. One example, of an 83-year-old woman from Stafford, shows why the benefits […]
With its classic cars and colourful buildings, Cuba is a paradise for the casual visitor; an island where the rum seems to flow endlessly and the salsa beats fill the air. But the truth could not be further from the image it projects; look closer at the buildings and you see the chipped façade is […]
Last weekend’s referendum defeat for the Italian Prime Minister, Matteo Renzi, has been depicted as another pro-populist blow against the European Union and its minions, and an advance tremor ahead of the coming collapse of the Italian financial system. It is neither. If there were anything “populist” and anti-status quo in this drama, it was […]
As yet another budget statement comes and goes, political debate over the NHS is still fixated with the funding issue. People think the only solution is to throw ever larger sums of cash at the system and hope for the best. But even with the extra £10 billion – which is what the Government has […]
Philip Hammond, the Chancellor, has dropped the clearest hint yet that the “triple lock” on pensions is for the chop. Speaking in the House of Commons, he confirmed that the lock would remain in place for the rest of the parliament – but said it would then be reviewed, and accused Labour of wanting to […]
It came as no little surprise when, three years ago, François Fillon accepted my invitation to participate in the Margaret Thatcher Conference on Liberty, organised by Britain’s Centre for Policy Studies. Needless to say, no other French politician even bothered to answer the invitations I hardly bothered to send out. In French political debate, “Thatcher” […]
This article is taken from our Weekly Briefing email. Sign up here. There’s been a lot of talk recently about fake news and filter bubbles – about the tendency of social media to show us only the news that’s slanted towards what we already believe. But people often forget that even ostensibly neutral news is already […]
The headline figure of an additional £122 billion of borrowing over the next five years will no doubt have been a source of great concern to many people. This decline in the public finance outlook since March this year (less than half of which is related to the UK’s exit from the EU) is somewhat […]
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