Tim Worstall

SPIN doctors at Ben Bradshaw’s Culture Media and Sport department are being paid an average of £64,000 a year… Now I’ve done that job….not for a govt department, to be sure….and even including the NI payments as they say, that’s one hell of a pay rate. Hmm, given that I’ve been half of a press [...]

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This rather goes to the heart of one’s ideas about how society works: The really interesting stuff in the BSA survey is in our changing attitudes to homosexuality and cohabitation. Of those questioned, 45% said it made “no difference” whether a child’s parents were married or living together — up from 38% in 1998. Where [...]

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At a special “review conference” in Kampala, Uganda, the nations which have signed up to the court, including Britain, will consider a proposal to let the court try the “crime of aggression” – the offence allegedly committed by Tony Blair. If the proposal, backed by more than 70 countries, passes, national leaders alleged to have [...]

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Downing Street has fiercely denied new claims that Gordon Brown physically attacked his staff in a series of outbursts. And he’ll beat up anyone who repeats them….

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Just read it properly: My God it’s a pile of foetid dingo kidneys. They seem to go out of their way to deliberately make every comparison as awful as possible.

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In a sidebar about the GDP figures: “The fact is, companies clearing out their warehouses boosts G.D.P., but doesn’t do much for those out of a job.” Something of a pity that the article itself is actually about how the restocking of warehouses boosts GDP…..and about how previous company clearing out their warehouses contributed to [...]

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You know all those wibbles about the US Military not allowing aid flights to land? About how it is is troops that get priority etc, and this shows that there’s a military takeover going on? Well, geek is as geek does and this is well geeked. It’s all about the shortage of forklifts in Haiti [...]

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Was the Moon created by a nuclear explosion on Earth? Strangely, this on is at least possible.

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We all knew that Thatcher had more balls than hte rest of the Cabinet put together but odd of The Times to spell it out quite so blatantly: Going to work on an egg Margaret Thatcher ate little else as he changed Bitain, archive reveals

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Interesting: More than half a million homes are at “significant” risk of flooding and the cost of protecting them will double to £1bn a year by 2035, according to the latest data from the Environment Agency (EA). Current spending is about £570 million a year. If costs remained static in real terms then that cost, [...]

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Inequality between economies, and within advanced economies, has never been greater – witness this week’s statistics on the widening wealth gap in the UK. Fact fail first: inequality between economies has been falling as inequality within them rises. Fact fail second: the report mentioned says that the wealth gap is as high as it has [...]

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Lord Turner, chairman of the Financial Services Authority, has signalled a regulatory crackdown on foreign exchange carry trades which he insisted served little or no useful social and wider economic purpose. Here we go, trying to pick winners again. The wise, the omniscient, the benevolent, dictator will make everything better for us. But where do [...]

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This one is actually reasonably funny: ‘If you and your friends all buy one, will they sync up?’

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Osborne teams up with Richard Thaler: latest exponent of the drear conviction that we’re all little idiot baa lambs and have to be driven into behaving properly. You know, managed, prodded, but all for our own good of course. But perhaps most significantly, the crisis has finally put to rest the assumption, which underpinned Labour’s [...]

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A world away from home Andy Murray keeps hopes of a nation at arm’s length Australian Open finalist plays down the pressure of a chance to be the first British man to win a Grand Slam in 74 years Maybe it’s me that’s got it wrong. I thought there were four major tournaments, each of [...]

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Go vote.

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LinkedIn just sent me an email introducing me to my own stepson. The company thinks, in its irritatingly chirpy way, that we may have some things in common.

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Want a baby? Start with SEX Erm, yes, thanks for that. I knew there was something I’d forgotten…..

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Tristram Hunt: Over one hundred acres of US farmland is currently being withdrawn every hour from agricultural use for development. We’re so much better with our Green Belt etc etc etc. How lucky we are to be saved by bureacratic technocrats who know so much better than we do what to do with our own [...]

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Well, yes, umm…. Stephen and Sarah Nunn are believed to be the first people to sell olives grown in Britain……The couple’s glass-covered grove has yielded 200 kilos of olives, which are worth a total of about £4,000 and are being sold for £3.50 pounds per 100g, four times as much as their Mediterranean rivals. Oh [...]

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