Tim Worstall

Slightly odd way of putting it: A female truant officer who admitted having unprotected sex with a 15-year-old boy was jailed yesterday. Glenda McKenzie, 44, a married education officer, started the relationship when she kissed the boy as she drove him to school. When the teenager ended the relationship, McKenzie sent him a succession of [...]

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Found out who it allegedly is. The internet does indeed deliver. No, go look for yourselves.

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This Royal Gay Scandal has certainly taken an interesting step forward: A royal aide boasts about his fling with an MP in a tape at the centre of the sex-and-drugs blackmail plot concerning a member of the Royal Family, a lawyer claimed yesterday. The assistant to a minor relative of the Queen also claims that [...]

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Apparently George has read a novel and we’re all doomed, doomed I tell you. "Water scarcity is already acute in many regions, and farming already takes the lion’s share of water withdrawn from streams and groundwater." Ten per cent of the world’s major rivers no longer reach the sea all year round. Buried on page [...]

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Yes, yes, I know, Tim’s reading The Guardian so you don’t have to. OK, management pay is up strongly. Much more so than worker’s pay. The bigger question is this: how can Labour ever abolish child poverty if they dare not face down the underlying forces fracturing pay scales all the way through and accelerating [...]

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Sigh: Capitalism’s great advantage is supposed to be that it ensures the economy can learn from failure. That only really happens, though, when someone takes the rap. Weel quite. But instead of wibbling about managers getting payoffs for failure, why not note that someone has indeed taken the rap? The shareholders? They are, after all, [...]

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Still, no one is actually asking the correct question: The Government has been slammed by MPs for failing to respond quickly enough to an EU directive which set tough targets on the amount of waste that can be sent to landfill. If it misses its targets the UK, which sent 18m tonnes of waste to [...]

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Look, please, can we get this straight? The confusion began last week when the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), which had intended to push ahead with national bin taxes, was over-ruled by Downing Street, which is unenthusiastic about the plans before forthcoming local elections. The U-turn was the latest sign of Mr [...]

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At Mr. Eugenides.

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I do wonder sometimes: They will have the power to strip schools of their charitable status – collectively worth £100 million a year – if they fail to pass the new test of "public benefit". Lessee. There’s, ooh, some 200,000- 250,000 (7% of the 3.3 million children in the correct age groups, ie, 11 years [...]

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At the ASI. What are civil liberties for?

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Two at The Business. Strip searching Ministers and the (De) merits of recycling.  

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Tim Montgomerie and Nadine Dorries? Seriously? I’ve no idea why but I was under the impression that Tim was travelling on the other bus. Seriously mistaken, obviously.

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The name is pronounced as it looks. Thanks for that Tyler.

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Killing the Planet! The polar bears! Bangladesh! Just back from a great weekend in Cork at the jazz festival. Oh the inhumanity! How could you Bob? Won’t somebody Think of the Children?    

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Gaaah! More nonsense on population! Surely it wouldn’t take too much effort to design some kind of similar global incentive scheme for the world’s most populous nations – with all the proper safeguards, of course, and done with willing participation? I rather warm to the idea of Global NonBaby Awards (GNBA), paid annually if you [...]

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Sorry, but this ain’t true. The higher moral ground, in a democracy, belongs to consensus drawn from the values of the majority and implemented by the flawed beast that is the law. Those who would exempt themselves from it, no matter how enjoyable the fleeting fame of their martyrdom, deserve no more endorsement or admiration [...]

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What delightfully garbled logic. If we try to leave the European Union then: It was there at the heart of the so-called constitutional treaty, but almost nobody noticed. It is there again in the reviled reform treaty, but no one has mentioned that so far. Turn to clause 57 and article 35, then: "Voluntary Withdrawal [...]

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We hear a lot about what we should be doing for the poor of the world. But what is it that the poor themselves seem to be demanding? Demonstrators will present their demands to parliament today, including a call for a national land commission to grant patta — legal title — to those who have [...]

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Not sure you know, not sure at all. Brian Eno and Damian Hirst at joint 15th? Noam Chomsky at 32? Although there’s the joy of seeing that Rupert Murdoch is rated above both Chomsky and Harold Pinter…that’ll annoy the right people.

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