I moved from New York to Britain and I keep getting asked when I’m going back. Not by my family, or my friends back home, but by British people. They tell me about flat wages, looming youth unemployment and an air of decline throughout the country. But no one talks about lunch, because everyone here […]
Depending on who you ask, the welfare state is either the only thing left in Britain worth fighting for or a byword for state failure, waste and deceit. A cursory look at the statistics will leave readers under no illusion as to which is the correct interpretation. In the 2025/26 financial year, we are projected […]
Britain and America have spent a decade arguing about Nimbyism as if it were a housing problem. It is much bigger than that: our inability to build, in a broad sense, has grown into a source of geopolitical weakness. The economic argument has been made already. Growth controls add anywhere from 17% to 38% to […]
More than 20 million people across England and Wales are currently under hosepipe bans. This should be no surprise following the driest July on record, with the Met Office provisionally recording just 5.6mm of rain across England, less than half the previous record, set in 1911. But how much of the blame can be laid […]
People argue endlessly about Britain’s tax burden – now the highest since the Second World War – but almost nothing is said about the time businesses lose to compliance. No Chancellor stands at the despatch box and tells firms they are about to spend another few billion pounds’ worth of working time satisfying new rules. […]
What do Richard Tice, Kevin Hollinrake and Peter Kyle all have in common? I wish I had a wittier answer to what sounds the set-up to a poor joke, but unfortunately I only have one answer – they all own an electric vehicle (EV). If three men, who have wildly diverging political views, lifestyles and […]
The reforms of Michael Gove represented a profound shift in England’s educational landscape, based upon the belief that outcomes improve when there is freedom with accountability. During his tenure as Education Secretary (2010-14), it became possible for all publicly funded schools to become academies, free schools could be created, and there were substantial reforms to […]
‘A Waiter in Paris’ is the story of a young Englishman who graduated from a good university in London with a humanities degree, trained and educated for a world that no longer exists. ‘All while I applied for other, more “prestigious” jobs. Jobs that didn’t appear to exist anymore.’ That’s how Edward Chisholm puts it […]
Few people enjoy gazing into the crystal ball more than economists. Attempting to divine the future, otherwise known as forecasting, is a numerically intensive pastime of many people in the profession. It is also a common mandate of many state institutions. For instance, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) produces aggregate forecasts of government receipts, […]
Andy Burnham may have stumbled on the most effective way yet of prolonging Britain’s managed decline: make people feel that something fundamental has changed when much of the machinery underneath has not. His first speech as Prime Minister was full of ‘common purpose and positivity’, getting Britain to ‘start to believe again’ and ‘bringing back […]
This week, Nimby Watch is in Bath, where councillors are at loggerheads over the concept of safety. I dislike Bath, and do not think it agrees with me, and yet Bath is to be my home? Aren’t you full of surprises? I didn’t have you down as a fan of Jane Austen, and here you […]
Whenever I think about Boris Johnson, the old French proverb ‘après moi le déluge’ comes to mind. It means a blithe, even nihilistic disregard for whatever ruination ensues after one’s own time. For many years, it was thought to have originated with Louis XV or his mistress Madame de Pompadour in the 1750s. It thus […]
At a few minutes past six on Friday morning, in a leisure centre on the Essex coast, the returning officer reached the bottom of a ballot paper roughly a metre long and announced a number that deserves more attention than it is likely to receive. Nigel Farage, 22,239 votes. The commentary had settled into its […]
The problem for bright-eyed and bushy-tailed new prime ministers who take over part-way through a Parliament is they start with a king-sized chip on their shoulders. They walk through Downing Street’s door knowing they aren’t the one who won the election mandate they’re inheriting, and needing to defuse whichever political crisis overwhelmed their predecessor too. […]
One doesn’t like to be a disappointment to one’s parents. But in (at least) one crucial regard, I’ve let my dad down. He is a steam train enthusiast, and I’ve never shown a blind bit of interest. So it was more with filial duty than pleasure that I took the old man to the Didcot […]
As an architect and developer, every day I must wade through the swamp of planning rules, building regulations, financial restrictions and NIMBYism peppering the landscape of the construction sector. One set of rules in particular though, and one sub-set of those rules, grinds my goat so intensely for its sheer wanton stupidity and backward-thinkingness, that […]
