Tim Worstall

“It is in China’s long-term and intrinsic interest to help Europe because they are our biggest trading partner but the chief concern of the Chinese government is how to explain this decision to our own people,” Li was quoted as saying. “The last thing China wants is to throw away the country’s wealth and be [...]

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Heart attack and cancer survival rates leap as Britons live longer No, no. Britons live longer as heart attack and cancer survival rates leap

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To save the economy, stop collecting taxes The squeezed middle: An income tax holiday would be the best way to ease the strain and get Britain spending. Nope. A National Insurance tax holiday, just as Keynes himself suggested would be a good idea.  

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Since then, it has been common for local authorities to “adopt” streets and public spaces, which means that whether or not they actually own them, they control and run them. Now this process is being reversed, with huge implications for democracy. Protest is not allowed in the privately owned places that define our finance centres [...]

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Working at OccupyLSX is the most exciting and engaging thing we’ve ever done, but we can see that some of what we’re doing seems unclear from the outside. Not having a set programme for people to “buy into” is deliberate – we’re choosing a different way of going about things. Our response to systemic failure [...]

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So we don’t want a rent cap, but we don’t want an entire generation under the thumb of rental rip-offs. The most radical answer is also the simplest: more houses need to be built, and they need to be in public hands, so that private landlords are kept honest. The market only looks like this [...]

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Geraldine James, the actress, says she voted Labour in the 2010 general election. Luvvie is Lefty. That really is a shocker, isn’t it?

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From a PR email: I’m writing to let you know that President and Mrs. Carter will join 500 volunteers and future homeowners to build 100 homes in Haiti during the week-long Habitat for Humanity Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Work Project November 5-12.   The Carters, along with Habitat for Humanity, are committed to rehabilitating and [...]

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I know that the PR industry is not exactly a hot bed of superior intellectual activity but do they have to be quite so stupid? One of them has just written to me suggesting that as a result of something I wrote at the Register I might be interested in a video piece they’re touting [...]

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Take pensions: although a strengthened EZ cannot take over the entire pension system given current productivity differentials, it could deliver a basic citizen’s pension, a payment which would guarantee a subsistence minimum for all its retired citizens financed by a Robin Hood tax. Ya Wha’? Pensioners are about 20% of the UK population, take that [...]

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History suggests that in the long term monetary unions either develop into political unions or they collapse. Sign up to have your kiddies ruled from Brussels or accept the short term pain of the collapse of the euro. That’s really the choice being faced. My view of course is that the UK should leave and [...]

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“At a time when closures and cuts dominate the news cycle, next-generation industries are providing jobs and sinking capital into Britain,” he will say. “I want to take aim at the curmudgeons and faultfinders who hold forth on the impossibility of renewables. The climate sceptics and armchair engineers who are selling Britain’s ingenuity short.” Mr [...]

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Or rather, banning people from claiming unfair dismissal. The report concludes that there is nothing in European law that would prevent the Government from abandoning unfair dismissal laws – although regulations preventing dismissal on the basis of a person’s gender, race or sexuality would remain. However, Mr Beecroft warns that simply scrapping the law would [...]

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Ms. Winterson, the novelist.

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Mostly guff but I agree with them here. and on the other, because of advances in financial technology, due largely to information technology. I’m increasingly coming to the opinion that the only way to return finance to that mythically wonderful world of 1945-1979 would be to ban computers.

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MPs have voted to to begin the abolition of the Agricultural Wages Board – which over 140,000 workers in Britain rely on. The AWB has protected the wages and rights of agricultural workers for over six decades. Sign up to stand with them Sigh. Before we had the National Minimum Wage we had a series [...]

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The difference between a contemporary liberal and a socialist is that to a liberal the most beautiful word in the English language is “forbidden”, whereas to a socialist the most beautiful word is “compulsory”. – jmc 1994 Via

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Myth says we pay the EU £6bn – but never counts the sums returned. The £6 billion (actually, rather more now) is the net contribution. That is, we take the amount we send over the Channel, deduct the amount we get back and find that our pockets, collectively, are lighter by £6 billion (and rising).

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Government is keen to emphasise that the studio and technical schools will not limit general learning. But a good education is about more than functional literacy and numeracy or a smattering of science and languages. Young people need not just efficient instruction but the opportunity for exploration – of ideas, history, literature, poetry, music, art, [...]

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So, George Monbiot tells us all that advertising is ‘orrible and links to a WWF (ya, wildlife people telling us all about advertising!) report which says: It is incumbent on the advertising industry to demonstrate that the cultural impacts of advertising are benign. No mateys, that isn’t how it works. It could be of course, [...]

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