The Crime Lord: Peter Capaldi on the manosphere, London and rocking out with his band as he approaches 70
The New York Times is totally wrong in its attack on London March 10, 2014 AN op-ed in the New York Times slamming the UK’s response to the Ukrainian crisis is making waves. Its author, Ben Judah, makes some decent if unoriginal points about how London depends on Russian cash, but his piece is so full of holes a fisking is in order. Here goes. 1 “On the [Shard’s] top [...]
Cameron is alienating his core voters without attracting new ones March 6, 2014 DAVID CAMERON has a major problem. He is alienating many of the groups that traditionally supported his party and failing to reach out to any new ones. Take the strange performance by his immigration minister James Brokenshire yesterday. He managed to blame the middle classes (a key Tory target) and business (another) for hiring immigrants, [...]
People too scared to save because they don’t trust politicians March 5, 2014 BRITAIN remains in a savings crisis. A shocking 19 per cent of the public have no savings at all, up from 17 per cent last year, and the average stash put away for a rainy day is a miserable £10,208. The total number of people who felt able to add to their savings actually dropped [...]
Britain is in debt to a new generation of foreign entrepreneurs March 4, 2014 IMMIGRANTS are good for jobs. Yes, you’ve read that right: even though much of the public believes that migrants depress the labour market, the truth is that foreign entrepreneurs are actually responsible for a great number of British jobs. Without these migrants, there would actually be fewer opportunities for locals and far fewer start-ups – [...]
A trade war with Russia would be Lehman Bros 2 March 3, 2014 MORALITY and foreign policy make uneasy bedfellows. In 1997, when Tony Blair called for an ethical foreign policy, the country cheered; 17 years later, any politician calling for such idealism would be laughed out of town. After 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, Georgia, the Arab Spring and so on, a battlehardened realism is the order of the [...]
Russia’s Ukraine attack is end of Pax Americana March 3, 2014 THIS is the week Western foreign policy was finally exposed as a sham. Russia has started to invade Ukraine, an independent nation supposedly backed by the West, in what could be the most significant geopolitical crisis since 9/11, and what is anybody going to do about it? Nothing. Pax Americana had been on its death [...]
The coalition’s immigration policy has now lost all credibility February 27, 2014 THERE are two camps on migration. The first, to which the vast majority of the public belongs, believes that immigration into the UK is much too high. The second, much smaller group, is more liberal on this issue. I’m in the pro-migration camp: I think that allowing people to move as they choose is a [...]
The collapse in homeownership is a disaster for social cohesion February 26, 2014 HOMEOWNERSHIP has just fallen to a 25-year low, which means that Britain’s once-vaunted ownership society is in deep trouble. This is very bad news indeed. It is vital, for the sake of social and economic cohesion, that as many people as possible are able to own property; the only form of capitalism that is politically [...]
In Britain, recessions mean more babies. In the US, births fall February 25, 2014 ATTITUDES to having babies can tell us a lot about a country. In the UK, the recession went hand-in-hand with a baby-boom – and yet in the US it was accompanied by a collapse in the birth rate. In both cases, the trend is now going into reverse, mirroring the recoveries in economic fortunes: in [...]
Holidays cost more at peak times. The reason is basic economics February 24, 2014 SUPPLY and demand: remember them? If the demand for a good or service goes up, and its supply doesn’t increase as much, then prices go up. If supply increases, and demand doesn’t, prices go down. It’s not rocket science, and it explains just about everything about our society. It is the reason why some takeaways [...]