Tim Worstall

Is spending going to have to be cut? Sure, but I don’t think it’s going to be as bad as this: Allow me to paint you a picture of a country mired in chaos. The unions are in open revolt. Public sector workers have just stomached their biggest pay cuts in living memory; many face [...]

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And once you’ve accepted that Tracey is the art world’s Chantelle or Jade Goody, Mark Hudson.

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The raison d’être of advertising is to mislead us into buying things we don’t need. Can’t say I’m wholly convinced though. The largest advertisers for decades have been the consumer products companies like Proctor and Gamble. Soap, shampoo, toothpaste: certainly we could argue about whether a specific type or brand is something we need or [...]

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Brussels said UK public debt will rise from around 60pc of GDP this year to 160pc by 2020, 406pc by 2040, and 760pc by 2060 unless there are drastic spending cuts. Pretty scary, no? Of course, this assumes that no gvernment does anything at all to try and change policy: A UK Government spokesman cast [...]

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It’s actually quite rare to see this laid out quite so clearly. And he needs to recognise that the direction that problem-solving takes us (eg, either toward healthcare reform that cuts into the profits of pharmaceutical and insurance companies and offers some variant of Medicare as at least one choice to people under 65, or [...]

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Sunder Katwala of the Fabians: The Taxpayers’ Alliance may just be a pressure group, but it aspires to represent all UK taxpayers and speak in their name. It is very keen on accountability, so why won’t it reveal who its donors are? I am sure there is nothing to hide, so why refuse reveal all [...]

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Harriet Harman today took a veiled swipe at the Tories and the Liberal Democrats for trying to seek party political advantage from the expenses crisis engulfing Westminster. Labour’s deputy leader told BBC Radio 4′s Today programme the crisis, which was reignited this week when MPs received letters inviting them to repay money, was not going [...]

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Guardian headline: Unsafe abortions kill 70,000 a year And in the article: There were 41.6m terminations worldwide in 2003 The facts we might take away from this being that unsafe abortions kill 70,000 a year and safe abortions kill 41,600,000 a year. Update: thinking a little more about this. The unsafe abortions will of course [...]

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So we see a little more spin on that Mussolini story: History remembers Benito Mussolini as a founder member of the original Axis of Evil, the Italian dictator who ruled his country with fear and forged a disastrous alliance with Nazi Germany. But a previously unknown area of Il Duce’s CV has come to light: [...]

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This thought did cross my mind when I saw his comments: Then up pops the mincing pantomime dame of couture to crush the hopes of the curvaceous. In an announcement that embodies perfectly the disdain the fashion industry has for real women, Karl Lagerfeld denounces critics of skinny models as “fat, chip-eating mummies” who are [...]

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My word, this looks very good indeed: The company sells its services through a worldwide network of distribution partners and service providers and has about $1.4m (£866,000) of debt, with none of it maturing this year. On a company that size that level of debt is a rounding error. Our liquidity position remains strong and [...]

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There will now be no compulsory redundancies among Vauxhall’s 5,000 UK workers. Magna, which is in talks to buy Vauxhall and Opel from General Motors, has been accused of being biased towards Germany, which is providing €4.5bn (£4.2bn) to support the acquisition. The deal – which was driven by Lord Mandelson and Unite, the trade [...]

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How will a ‘zero waste’ strategy work? Stockholm’s rabbits burned to keep Sweden heated

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My word, think what fun people are going to have with this, Mussolini was a British agent. Conspiracy theories galore! As the Telegraph puts it: Mussolini, then a 34-year-old journalist, worked to ensure that Italy continued to fight alongside the allies in the First World War by publishing propaganda in his paper, the Guardian reports. [...]

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New book, just published. The Bloomington School has become one of the most dynamic, well recognized and productive centers of the New Institutional Theory movement. Its ascendancy is considered to be the result of a unique and extremely successful combination of interdisciplinary theoretical approaches and hard-nosed empiricism. This book demonstrates that the well-known interdisciplinary and [...]

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Is it the question Guido points to? Or is it something to do with this? though the Eye learns that one MP hopes to break the conspiracy of silence, under parliamentary privilege, when the Commons reassembles later this month. Someone not so much asking about a specific case, but someone asking about the entire system [...]

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Here.

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The local authority, Hammersmith & Fulham Council, has told the corporation that either the Metropolitan Police or the BBC should pick up the bill for security. Corporation sources were adamant that it would not spend the licence fee on policing, saying that it was a matter for the Met. Football clubs have to pay for [...]

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Rather shot yourself in the foot again. But it’s also a rubbish figure concocting a fallacious average. You can’t average out the two sectors because there are five times more unskilled workers in the private sector – most manual jobs have been contracted out from the public sector. The state sector is far more highly [...]

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Instead of alienating European partners with more Euroscepticism, the Tories should adopt a positive stance and follow their own imperative of localism by arguing in favour of a Europe-wide decentralisation to the lowest possible level, including local government, communities and neighbourhoods. So those worried about the erosion of national power and identity should destroy national [...]

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