Tim Worstall

Record number of council staff paid over £100,000 a year A record number of council officials are paid over £100,000 a year, new figures show. In an inflationary environment this will always be true given that they’re using nominal amounts. OK, cheap shot, because we’ve not in fact got wage inflation at present and the [...]

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Firstly what do we mean when we say ‘capitalism’? Well there are many perspectives on this but most cohere around certain key constructs which themselves drive capitalism’s core growth requirement. It is an economic system in which specialised producers produce commodities for markets but not for their own subsistence. Capitalists have a monopoly of ownership [...]

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To illustrate a piece on youth unemployment in Wales they use this picture:   Hmm. According to the 2001 census, 96% of the population was White British, and 2.1% non-white (mainly of British Asian origin).[205] Most non-white groups were concentrated in the southern port cities of Cardiff, Newport and Swansea. Welsh Asian and African communities [...]

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Not actually very smnart Our Cormac over at Left Foot Forward. In fact, you might says he’s showing himself to be ignorant. Recent commodity price rises in the UK mean we need similar information here. For example, why is it that for the past year, UK oil prices – the Brent oil price – has [...]

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Received an interesting email this morning. From a union funded editor of a major political website. It’s an incredible insight into the standards of current political discourse in this country. You’re an idiot. Laurence Durnan Editor, Political Scrapbook Voted #2 left wing blog 2011-12 for Total Politics magazine Yes laydeezn’gennlemn, the eight year olds have [...]

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I rather like the Cato Institute. Swap emails with a couple of the guys there. I think they do good work. However, this. To be honest, all I can think of is laying in stores of popcorn. It’s going to be a hell of a show.

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The unelected 26 clerics in the Lords can have a major impact on the way the country is run. For instance, when there was a vote in 2006 on allowing terminally ill people the right to die, they organised and voted against the reforms. Eh? So the Bishops insisted that terminally ill people would not [...]

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Sigh, And lurking in the background we have the Oxford Centre for Business (Non) Taxation with their cloud cuckoo notion that businesses shouldn’t pay tax in the first place since they simply pass the cost on to consumers or workers (but never to shareholders, oh no!). Twats. The Incidence of Corporate Income Tax on Wages [...]

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A Work Foundation report: Beyond the personal costs of being NEET, each young person not in employment, education or training bears a cost to public finances (through benefit payments, lost tax revenues, and healthcare and criminal justice costs), and a public resource cost (due to loss of economic productivity from un- or underemployment, lost personal [...]

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How dare they? How damn dare they? Tell everyone that the NHS is not very good at preventing mortality amenable to health care? There is no evidence for this, envy of the world it is! http://www.bmj.com/content/327/7424/1129.full 2003 report in the British Medical Journal. The NHS comes 18 th out of 19 systems studied in the [...]

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Having looked him up, apparently he’s something like the Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the Open University. And entirely ignorant to boot: Neoliberalism is grounded in the “free, possessive individual”, with the state cast as tyrannical and oppressive. The welfare state, in particular, is the arch enemy of freedom. The state must never govern society, [...]

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Therefore there should be no choice in the NHS. You’ve got to admit the logic is delightfully pure and simple.

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The Observer says: were obtained by non-profit-making investigations company Spinwatch, Non-profit making? Seems so: Spinwatch is an independent non-profit making organisation The choice of language there shows idiot leftism at its best. Not making a profit is actually quite easy. General Motors managed it for years. What they mean is “not for profit”, that is [...]

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Dr. Clarke again: In 2010, Labour actually increased its vote in raw terms among those ranked as AB on the social grade [NRS]. Labour’s vote also held up well among those at the bottom of the social grade [DE]. The real loss for Labour actually occurred among their skilled & semi skilled workers. They lost practically all [...]

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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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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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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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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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Currently, 1.7 million families are on housing waiting lists. In the meantime families survive in private rental accommodation that nets landlords profits of £31 billion per year. Oh dearie me. Income is not net profit, net profit is not income. No, I don’t know what the figures is for gross private rent paid but I [...]

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The curse of nef strikes again. That curse being that even when they do manage to get the analysis of the problem correct (a rare enough occurence) they then veer off into entirely insane proposals for the solution. Here they manage to get correct that the major cost of housing in this country is the [...]

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