Tim Worstall

Yesterday I cooked something that rocked my world so much, I thought I’d share it on my blog and who knows, it may become a occasional feature. Since it’s aimed a blokes or the kitchen-impaired (like me) the kind of food I’ll do will be quite simple and much more aimed at taste than looks. [...]

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Difficult to believe I know but: The graph above shows the percentage increase in the number of NEETs by region from Q2 2010 to Q2 2011. The North East of England experienced a 21% increase while the North West suffered a 28% increase. The East of England also suffered a 21% increase in NEETs. We [...]

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Under AB 889, household “employers” (aka “parents”) who hire a babysitter on a Friday night will be legally obligated to pay at least minimum wage to any sitter over the age of 18 (unless it is a family member), provide a substitute caregiver every two hours to cover rest and meal breaks, in addition to [...]

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Hey, go for it folks. But those who wanted football to carry on here acted admirably quickly, and launched the new Chester FC as a “phoenix club”. Crucially, it’s a mutual: owned by its supporters, who can pay a minimum of £5 a season to become active shareholders. And it is not alone: the night [...]

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In the 120-page study, co-authored by academics at the University of York and Heriot-Watt University, Crisis highlights figures released over the summer that show councils have reported 44,160 people accepted as homeless and placed in social housing, an increase of 10% on the previous year and the first increase in almost a decade. Last year [...]

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It’s quite remarkable how our Mr. Seymour manages to parrot the original Lenin: An explanation for this can be found in the weaknesses of the revolt itself. The upsurge beginning on 17 February hinged on an alliance between middle class human rights activists and the working classes in eastern cities such as Benghazi. Rather than [...]

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We seem to actually be hiring experts: Benedict Garrett, a sex education teacher who used the stage name Johnny Anglais, faces being struck off the teaching register after his way of life came to light while he was working at Beal High School in Ilford, Essex. He faced allegations at a disciplinary hearing of the [...]

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Bloke we know here, Howard, we no longer know here. Bugger. Got bitten by a tick, died of tick disease. Bugger. One of the rickettsiae I assume. Bugger. That thin thin barrier between here and gone. Wake on Thursday, funeral Fri. Bugger. Ex-jailbird, not the brightest on the block our Howard. Kim his inamorata loved [...]

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This is an interesting marketing angle to take. Heineken Light is (as well as being this blog post’s sponsor) a form of that well known American phenomenon, the light beer. All the great taste of the original beer but without all those calories to go with it isn’t it? Which means that advertising the stuff [...]

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So, there’s copious amounts of material for you to choose from on this blog, under the “ragging on ritchie” section. Which are your favourite pieces? Obviously, there’s the Ritchie using the tax structures he himself condems as abuse. But other than that, your favourites in the comments please.

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People in Scotland and Wales will want to know why their chances of accessing a life extending cancer drug are so much lower than their neighbours in England. You have noted that Wales and Scotland do not charge rich bastards for their prescriptions? Whereas English rich bastards do have to pay for their prescriptions, thus [...]

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The HSE credits the Health and Safety at Work Act with an 84 per cent reduction in employee fatalities between 1974 and 2010, as well as a 75% fall in non-fatal injuries. Fancy that. Bureaucracy claims it is doing a good job. Isn’t that just amazing?

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Once again our expert in Irish feminist history has managed to, well, I’m not quite sure how he got it wrong here but wrong he got it: More than 40,000 people sleep on our streets every night. Hmm. When people actually go out and count it it seems that they come up with quite different [...]

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I come across the above phrase and others like it increasingly often these days. It is widely used in right wing libertarian commentary and increasingly openly as far as I can see and hear amongst Tories. What it means is that democracy is at fault in imposing the wish of the majority who vote for [...]

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Yet more rich peeps say “tax me, tax me!“. “I would say to Merkel that the answer to sorting out Germany’s financial problems, our public debt, is not to bring in cuts, which will disproportionately hit poorer people, but to tax the wealthy more,” said Lehmkuhl. “We are always hearing about savings packages, but never [...]

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However, not in quite the manner that he thinks. The UK economy is currently 4pc smaller than its peak in March 2008 and 2.8pc smaller than in September 2008, when Lehman Brothers collapsed and Britain’s banking industry began its long decline. Of the 2.8pc fall, the contraction in banking activity has accounted for one percentage [...]

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A leadership training contract tender by Durham Constabulary required firms to fill out a 38 pre-qualification questionnaire that requested 163 different pieces of information before they would even be considered for the £90,000 contract. If they, you know, sorta relaxed the criteria about who could bid they might be able to get the work for [...]

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Anyone really know what this is all about? Francis Baron, the former chief executive of the Rugby Football Union, has called for the governing body’s acting chief executive, Martyn Thomas, and the five elected board members criticised in the Blackett report to be charged with bringing the game into disrepute. I’ve seen occasional pieces but [...]

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Figures last year suggested that binge-drinking injuries cost the NHS more than £2.7 billion a year. They showed that almost a million people a year were taken to hospital after drinking – a rise of 47 per cent since 2004. This isn’t actually what the figures show at all: The big (old) news is that there [...]

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Home ownership in the UK will slump to its lowest level since the mid-1980s over the next decade, leading to an “unprecedented crisis” in the housing market, the National Housing Federation (NHF) has warned. Now leave aside the fact that this report comes from the builders who are looking for handouts. The actual result is [...]

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