Tim Worstall

At the ASI, in which I misquote Shakespeare.

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French president Nicolas Sarkozy, furious that the British were lobbing in their own last-minute demands when everyone else was there to save the euro, told the prime minister: “You can’t have an offshore centre taking Europe’s capital.” 1) It ain’t Europe’s capital. It might belong to copmpanies, individuals, pension funds, whatever, but it doesn’t belong [...]

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Worse, we have made it significantly harder for the 17 members of the eurozone rapidly to put in place the cluster of policies needed to save the euro. Chancellor Merkel said the compromise was workable – to widespread German scepticism; the European Central Bank warmly welcomed the progress, but announced no new measures. If the [...]

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Mr Cameron’s “asks” were rejected, not because they were too great – but because it was he who made them. No other British prime minister of recent years would have had difficulty getting this package through. This was Gallic pay-back time for all that unwise Cameron lecturing – and sometimes worse – from the sidelines [...]

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Parents will be stripped of the right to object to the expansion of grammar schools, under a new school admissions code laid before parliament. Campaigners against academic selection say this could force some schools into a battle for survival as grammars expand to take on their neighbours’ best-performing pupils. The education secretary, Michael Gove, is [...]

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Piece in The Observer about how appalling it is that in Spain, if you’re over your head with the mortgage, the bank repossesses, then you still owe the bank money! This is known as “recourse”. Exactly the same as all mortgages in the UK. Damn these Johnny Foreigners and their strange ways!

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It wasn’t always like this. “Our feral economy,” as Murphy calls it, started going wild in the late Eighties. The trigger, according to Matthew Oakeshott, the former Liberal Democrat treasury spokesman in the House of Lords, was the deregulation of the City in 1986; the so-called “Big Bang”. Suddenly, greed was good. Before then, he [...]

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“If we collected all the tax avoided and evaded each year, we would be one of the greatest economic superpowers on Earth,” says Tax Research UK’s Richard Murphy. Terribly revealing, don’t you think? The equation of economic power with power of the state? Revenue to the state? Green is not being investigated but, says Richard [...]

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A big crowd for something political in Mioscow at least: It was not a chant that many had ever expected to hear, as up to 50,000 Russians from all walks of life stood, the snow falling steadily upon them, a few hundred yards across the Moskva river from the Kremlin. “Russia without Putin! Russia without [...]

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The figures – released by RenewableUK, the industry’s trade body – include four deaths and a further 300 injuries to workers. That’s just in the UK and just in the past 5 years you understand. And when you calculate it by deaths by amount of energy produced it gets worse. The death rate for wind [...]

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Digging into those numbers about booze and hospital admissions. And there’s also one other thing, something I’ve only just noted. We are being given the absolute number of admissions, not the proportion of admissions. So, has there been any change in the number of admissions over this past decade? Err, yes, actually, there has. Finished [...]

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Well, where else apart from the Guardian would you expect to go nowadays to find regular support for a theocratic regime that sponsors terrorism world-wide, kills gays, denies the Holocaust, and brutally suppresses any dissent?

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At the ASI. In which I advance the theory that we don’t choose numbers to put into economic models in order to get correct answers from a left or right point of view. Rather, it’s our views of what are the correct numbers which makes us right or left.

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They have gone virtually unnoticed amid all the bombast, bargaining and breaking news of the past two weeks of top-level climate negotiations. But tucked away in an obscure corner of the giant conference site in the middle of Durban are two South African women, surrounded by a pile of brightly coloured bags, who promise to [...]

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He was also grilled over another controversial deal which saw HMRC forgive Vodafone as much as £4.75bn in tax. The mobile phone company paid just £1.25bn of a tax bill that was around £6bn for its takeover of MannesMann in 2000. This is someone reporting from the finance pages of a major national newspaper. And [...]

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Hospital admissions linked to alcohol problems have reached a record high, prompting fresh concern about the harm being caused by binge drinking. Hospitals in England admitted 1,173,386 patients for treatment for alcohol-related problems in 2010-11, NHS statistics show, up 9% on the 1,056,962 in 2009-10, the first time the figure topped 1 million. In 2002-03, [...]

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Via, from the Northampton Chronicle. Well, he did rather piss all over their chips in Brussels, didn’t he?

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Via, this idiocy: This could be Cameron’s opening. Given the trouble he is going to be in anyway – with his sceptics, if he agrees to the proposed treaty amendments without agreeing to a referendum, and with business, if he effectively accepts Britain’s relegation to a lower financial league – he should summarily end the [...]

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In the interests of full disclosure I should say that I’ve paid tax at the 50% rate ever since it was introduced.  I may not do so in the 2012-13 tax year.  I can tell you that there’s a psychological impact from direct taxes exceeding half your marginal earnings: it’s OK for you not to [...]

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The Dutch bank ING has had another go at the numbers, calculating that the Greek Drachma would fall by 80pc against the D-Mark in a full-blown disintegration. The Escudo and the Peseta would fall by 50pc, and the Lira and the Punt by 25pc. Germany would suffer a “deflationary shock”. OK, so that’s what would [...]

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