We need better communication, not extra rules February 16, 2012 BRITAIN’S comply-or-explain system of corporate governance has come in for some stick in Brussels since the banking crisis. Sometimes dubbed self-regulation, it is seen as unreliable, and a number of senior officials have indicated their preference for codes to be replaced by more prescriptive regulation. Yet the facts tell a different story. Systematic research by [...]
Licensing journalists – it’s just not very British February 16, 2012 OUR national poets understood how much freedom matters. Milton! you should be living at this hour: England has need of you – William Wordsworth sighed at the dawn of the nineteenth century. In the second decade of the twenty-first, when British journalists are rounded up by the police in dawn raids and both a senior [...]
RAPID RESPONSES February 16, 2012 Debt is soaring [Re: The real reasons why the UK is in trouble, Wednesday] Government spending has exceeded income for most years post WWII. There is a cycle which goes from growth, when tax receipts eventually catch up with spending, almost immediately followed by recession, when deficits return. The busts have been getting ever bigger [...]
The real story on high pay – how manipulated statistics misled the national debate February 15, 2012 IT’S much more satisfying shopping the heads of our major corporations than providing unbiased facts about what’s really happening. Now an independent High Pay Centre promises to deliver the “high quality research that this area of debate badly needs”. Deborah Hargreaves, its director, may find that challenging. When chairing the High Pay Commission in 2011 [...]
I’m not waiting for graduation to find recruits February 15, 2012 YESTERDAY’S unemployment figures show that over 1m 16-24 year olds are still unemployed. With university fees rising and continued uncertainty in the global economy, how are we going to be able to help our young people enter the workforce and begin their careers in meaningful roles? I believe there is a simple solution companies can [...]
Santorum’s surge will be tested by past sins February 15, 2012 EXACTLY a year ago, Indiana governor Mitch Daniels called on Republicans running in 2012 to agree to a truce on social issues and focus instead on the economy. Daniels earned some criticism for this plea, but one voice in particular was vocal in its dissent. For Rick Santorum, social and economic issues are one and [...]
RAPID RESPONSES February 15, 2012 Logic-chopping Jamie Whyte’s view that you shouldn’t make yourself worth more dead than alive [Donating organs could prove a costly decision, yesterday] is wise, but I disagree it applies in the case of organ donation by default. Irrespective of arguments that the resulting increase in organ supply would make the value of your organs significantly [...]
Why we should speak out against moves to curtail the UK’s freedom of speech February 14, 2012 DAWN raids by police on the homes of reporters are not something we expect to happen in the UK. But that’s what happened last weekend, when the Metropolitan police sent teams of up to 10 officers to the homes of senior Sun journalists. Reactions were mixed. Brian Cathcart of the Hacked Off campaign, which has [...]
We need radical reforms to raise NHS productivity February 14, 2012 EVERY now and then academic disputes break out into the mainstream. In an article for The Lancet medical journal, Professor Nick Black claims it’s a myth that NHS productivity has fallen over the last decade. Productivity (what we put in against what we get out) may not actually be down 0.4 per cent a year [...]
Donating organs could prove a costly decision February 14, 2012 NEVER make yourself worth more dead than alive. This was the sage advice my father gave me as a boy and I have stuck to it ever since. That is why my life insurance pays out less if I die than the net present value of my likely future earnings. I trust my wife, but [...]