The world won’t tackle global warming if we deny the vital role of clean coal power November 18, 2015 It is just a few weeks until heads of state assemble in Paris for the UN Conference on Climate Change. At the heart of the meeting’s ambition will be an attempt to secure an agreement, applicable to all countries, to keep global warming below the two degree Celsius target. As the recent discussions in [...]
Father government: Liberals have failed to devise an alternative to the parental role of the state November 18, 2015 Nobel Laureate James M Buchanan was the driving force behind the public choice school of economics, which showed that market failure alone wasn’t a justification for state intervention. You had to consider the consequences of state failure as well. One of his best papers, to my mind, was also perhaps one of his shortest, [...]
Will having Ken Livingstone as co-chair of its Trident review destroy the Labour Party’s credibility on defence? November 18, 2015 Chris Rumfitt, founder and chief executive of Corporate Reputation Consulting, says Yes In the wake of the Paris attacks, security has risen to the top of the political agenda. As the world brimmed with anger and calculated how best to eradicate the Isis threat, Jeremy Corbyn decided it was the right moment to appoint Ken [...]
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is way out of his depth when it comes to security November 18, 2015 Alastair Campbell knows a thing or two about winning elections, and though the current Labour party isn’t in a very pro-Blair kind of mood, they would be wise to listen to the old spin doctor just one last time. “You cannot win a general election if [you are] behind on [the] economy and leadership,” he [...]
Paris terror attacks: There’s no case for rushing in illiberal snooping laws in the new surveillance bill November 17, 2015 Lest my position on current events be misunderstood, let me restate a basic truth I’ve set out in these pages before. Killing terrorists is good. However, achieving that desirable end does not mean that the state needs to become more powerful. Nor does it mean that the state should snoop on all of us, “just [...]
Why it’s time for Ofcom to red card the rising cost of watching live football on TV November 17, 2015 The ever-increasing cost of watching Premier League matches on live TV is hitting fans where it hurts. UK fans pay at least twice as much to watch half the games as fans in Europe. In Germany, France, Spain and Italy, all their live games are available to watch at a much lower cost than in [...]
We’ve nothing to fear from job-killing automation – and the pace of change will be manageable too November 17, 2015 The chief economist of the Bank of England Andy Haldane has been in the news with his prediction that up to 15m jobs in the UK are at risk of being lost to automation. This is a huge number, around half the total number of people in work today. Haldane injected a note [...]
With consumer price index inflation negative but house price rises strong, is CPI failing to capture the cost of living? November 17, 2015 Shaun Richards, an independent economist, says Yes A fundamental problem with the UK official CPI inflation measure is its exclusion of owner-occupied housing costs. Without them, it arrives at an ice-cold annual rate of inflation of -0.1 per cent for October. However, our official statisticians also report house prices rising at an annual rate of [...]
Ring-fencing rules are not necessary to put an end to bank bailouts November 17, 2015 Loyal readers will know that this newspaper has never been a fan of bailouts, and certainly not those that were distributed to certain banks in the wake of the credit crunch and subsequent financial crisis. Indeed, the lack of a robust bankruptcy code for large financial organisations was a factor (albeit only one) behind the [...]
Vote with your wallet: It’s time to turn shoppers into investors November 16, 2015 It frustrates me that consumers are so valued as shoppers, yet so underserved when it comes to putting money to work in other ways. From the moment we are born, we are marketed to thousands of times a day, “trained” as consumers through hundreds of billions of pounds in advertising, yet are left to our [...]