Letters to the Editor – 11/03 – Tax reform, Best of Twitter March 10, 2014 Tax reform [Re: Stop acquisitive politicians forever with a max tax guarantee, Thursday] I wish I thought a max tax would work, but it would likely be far worse than useless, and open the way for a British alternative minimum tax. Recall the political grandstanding that accompanied the withdrawal of allowances from higher-earning income taxpayers, [...]
Russia must back down over Ukraine to avoid a catastrophe February 24, 2014 VLADIMIR Ilyich Lenin was a monster. He was a central theorist of communism, a key player in the Bolshevik revolution, a commissar, a leading instigator of the Red Terror and other massacres, and the first leader of the Soviet Union. For decades, busts of Lenin adorned the communist empire; they were finally torn down in [...]
Letters to the Editor – 27/02 – Baby boom, Socialist Venezuela, Best of Twitter February 26, 2014 Baby boom [Re: In Britain, recessions mean more babies. In the US, births fall, yesterday] Allister Heath is right to draw attention to the remarkable rise in UK fertility rates in the 2000s, and that this is good news for our economic future, provided we build the houses and schools that we will need. However, [...]
How the West should best the crumbling Kremlin March 4, 2014 AN UNLIKELY source holds the key to how the West should respond to Russia’s takeover of the Crimea. While researching for my book Ethical Realism (which I co-wrote with the rightly celebrated Anatol Lieven), I came across a startling fact. Reinhold Niebuhr, one of the US’s best-known twentieth-century political thinkers, was also the author of [...]
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 [...]
The UK is not as dependent on Russian money as you think March 24, 2014 IT IS obvious that Russia is a significant source of jobs, trade and investment for the UK. But it is also important not to exaggerate these links: while they matter a lot for a few industries, they are less important overall than some commentators assume. It is entirely untrue that London would collapse without Russian [...]
Venezuela’s mad socialist experiment is destroying a nation March 11, 2014 IF you want to see how to destroy an economy and a society, look no further than Venezuela. One year after the death of Hugo Chavez, its disastrous communist president, the country is on the verge of total collapse under his equally appalling successor Nicolas Maduro. Food is running out, as are other essentials, even [...]
Venezuela’s mad socialist experiment is destroying a nation March 10, 2014 IF you want to see how to destroy an economy and a society, look no further than Venezuela. One year after the death of Hugo Chavez, its disastrous communist president, the country is on the verge of total collapse under his equally appalling successor Nicolas Maduro. Food is running out, as are other essentials, even [...]
We must accept our limited capacity to resolve conflict in tinderbox Syria August 28, 2013 ONE OF the enduring consequences of the war in Iraq, and to a lesser extent Afghanistan, is a deep scepticism towards military intervention abroad among the British people. In the case of the civil war in Syria, I share that scepticism. There are four questions that need to be asked and answered by policymakers [...]
Imperial offers share buyback as sales grow May 1, 2012 IMPERIAL Tobacco, the world’s fourth-largest cigarette group, set a £500m share buyback yesterday and said it saw a return to sales growth as the company put last year’s problems behind it. The British firm, which sells over 340bn cigarettes a year, reported that half-year earnings beat forecasts as it gained from the ending of a [...]