Tim Worstall

Any suggestion that Britain will have to rescue offshore financial centres would be extremely controversial as tax havens drain the UK economy of an estimated £25bn annually through their role in aggressive tax avoidance and evasion. There’s Ritchie’s number again, the one we’ve already proven is entirely wrong. Amazing how people will run with a [...]

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Something I don’t know and wondering whether anyone does. Executives at Britain’s top companies saw their basic salaries leap 10% last year, despite the onset of the worst global recession in decades, in which their companies lost almost a third of their value amid a record decline in the FTSE. This rise in pay: is [...]

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Oh my: Government-backed regional venture capital funds lost 75pc of their value in the last year, official figures reveal. Looks like government equity performs even worse than private equity. Hoocouldanode?

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At the ASI. Far from taxing inheritances and bequests we should be subsidising them.

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Excuse me, but can we go and shoot these green fuckers now please? In the 1980s, the “Green Revolution” spread to China, which is now the world’s biggest food producer, but by the time Borlaug began to turn his energies to Africa, where Malthusian mass starvation was still a plausible threat, a backlash had set [...]

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Teenagers are being ignored by television programme makers, according to Phil Redmond, the creator of Grange Hill. Statements of the bloody obvious. As you’re now not allowed to advertise anything interesting (KFC, McDonalds, the sorts of things that teenagers might indeed spend their own discretionary money upon) to teenagers then there’s no money to make [...]

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The Crown dependency’s ancient and autonomous parliament, the States of Guernsey, failed six out of six tests of good governance set out by the Wales Audit Office, which was commissioned to conduct the review. Inspectors found that the island’s elected chamber had no clear direction, lacked accountability, was unable to address concerns about the conduct [...]

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Here.

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Hmm. Particular thanks to Professor Ruth Lister, Dr Alan Finlayson andMelissa Benn for their invaluable feedback and suggestions on an earlier discussion paper. I am also indebted to Neal Lawson Melissa Benn and Neal Lawson eh? My God this is going to be terrible, isn’t it? Inequality curtails freedom.To be sufficiently free we must be [...]

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Norman Borlaug has died. It’s said variously that 250 million people have been saved from death by his life’s work or that 1 billion people have been saved from starvation. By Mr. Toenniessen’s calculation, about half the world’s population goes to bed every night after consuming grain descended from one of the high-yield varieties developed [...]

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First, there should be recognition of the breathtaking success of the most aggressively Keynesian economic stance taken since the war and how the state has been forced to come to the aid of a feckless private sector in order to relieve the prospect of mass unemployment and business collapse. I’m not hugely convinced that there [...]

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At the ASI. There’s a fourth way out. We don’t have to choose between taxes, inflation and disembowelling the State (however pleasurable that last would be).

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Certainly, at this stage I don’t believe you. Early results of a study commissioned by the Department of Health revealed heart attack rates dropped by about a tenthin England in the year after the ban was introduced in July 2007. Separate research found an even sharper decrease – 14 per cent – in Scotland, where [...]

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Calls were growing last night for firm action to be taken over a dozen terror suspects named on a UN list of individuals with links to al Qaeda who are still living freely in the UK – many at the taxpayer’s expense. What’s up then? Individuals are placed on the list on the basis of [...]

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I’ve missed this one. Notes from a Hospital Bed. A journo and blogger from around my way who has ended up stuck in Swindon Hospital as: Freelance journalist struck down by a bone and flesh-eating bug. Now battling against the NHS and DWP while trying to get better. Currently going through 6 weeks of traction [...]

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Back a couple of weeks we had a nice little blog spat with Sunny and the like. Essentially, you’re not allowed to praise any of Enoch Powell’s ideas because he was a racist. Yes, his racism means that his views on, for example, monetarism or the universality of human rights cannot be either invoked or [...]

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An investigation into 2012 Olympics spending has revealed that a financial black hole has expanded to £160 million amid accusations of a cover-up by the Mayor of London’s officials. An unpublished report from KPMG, which was called in to conduct the inquiry, revealed the massive accounting discrepancy at the London Development Agency. Previously the shortfall [...]

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This week figures showed that banks tripled the profit they made on mortgages in the last year: time to siphon some of that off. That just doesn’t sound all that sensible. We’re all running around saying that the banks must have more capital to underwrite the risks of their businesses. So we actually want them [...]

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After graduating, Negar changed sex under Iran’s Islamic laws which deem transsexuals religiously permissible, in contrast to the blanket ban on homosexuality, which is considered a sin. Iran carries out more sex change operations than any other country apart from Thailand after the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, spiritual leader of the 1979 Islamic revolution, issued [...]

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And that something was a simple discovery, but – says Wrangham – the most important discovery ever made. The discovery was cooking. That’s right, apes learned to cook, and it very quickly turned them into human beings. Can’t remember who by but in one of those collections from Amazing or Astounding or some such. The [...]

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