David Cameron and George Osborne kicked off the pre-Budget weekend with an article last Saturday promising to support home ownership. “Having your own place is an important stake in our economy,” they wrote in The Times. “It’s also one of the best expressions of the aspirational country we want to build, where hard work is… [Read More]
British productivity has flat-lined since 2010 in a manner unprecedented in the post-war era. A worker in France will complete in four days what it takes a British worker to complete in five. We are 40% less productive than US workers and 20% less than the G7 average. British output per man hour improved under… [Read More]
Alternative for Germany (AfD), the party that was founded on the basis of middle-class intellectual criticism of the single currency, has ousted its academic leader Bernd Lucke in favour of Frauke Petry. Previously Petry, Lucke and Konrad Adam shared power in an uncertain triumvirate, but co-founder Petry was voted to sole leadership by 68% of… [Read More]
After what seemed to be an everlasting series of meetings and 11th hour negotiations, Greece finally defaulted on its debt to the IMF this Tuesday. The European Union, set up to secure peace and prosperity across the continent, is experiencing quite the opposite. The IMF’s exhausted patience and Greece’s exhausting funds have created more chaos.… [Read More]
British banking has escaped disruption or any real dose of creative destruction for an astonishingly long time. Even after the financial crisis, five banks continue to dominate the financial market comfortably. Their size allows them to make mistakes (e.g. miss-selling PPI) with little real market repercussions. Battered reputations and low customer satisfaction rarely impact business,… [Read More]
A minority of EU Outers are presenting views online and in the papers that could be read as gloating over Greece. Greece’s imminent default and likely exit from the single currency is an all-too-tempting chance to say ‘I told you so!’ The events that brought Greece to this position are held up, variously, as proof… [Read More]
A crucial Eurogroup meeting last Saturday crushed hopes of a deal before tomorrow’s deadline to unlock the remaining €7.2bn of Greece’s bailout programme. This last tranche of funding would enable Greece to repay €1.6bn to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on Tuesday. Without the lifeline of the ECB’s emergency funding, a Greek default has now become… [Read More]
Prime Minister David Cameron’s much anticipated speech on his renegotiation demands for Britain’s EU membership took a back seat to dealing with Europe’s migrant crisis at an EU summit last night. The talks concluded with an agreement to allow EU member states to opt into reallocating migrants, and the scheme will be finalised by the… [Read More]
Following the demise of communist rule in the bloodless Velvet Revolution of 1989, tension within federal Czechoslovakia grew between Czechs and Slovaks. Both saw the rise of nationalist parties which came to a head when President Václav Havel stood for re-election unopposed, but was blocked by Slovak deputies in their chamber of parliament. The Slovak… [Read More]
Justice Collins’ ruling that an electronic tag must be removed from a 39-year old Somali imam is another step in the direction of judicial supremacism at the expense of parliamentary democracy. DD, as the court called him, is believed to have helped the terrorist group al-Shabaab to recruit vulnerable young people. Justice Collins ruled that… [Read More]