President Hollande can finally breathe a sigh of relief this week after receiving some long-awaited good news. Markit yesterday posted its survey results for France’s first quarter showing a broad based private sector recovery across both services and manufacturing – bon. Their ‘Flash France Composite Output Index’, based on roughly 85 per cent of normal monthly… [Read More]
Civitas today publishes the latest in a series of pamphlets by John Mills, a respected economist and the highly-successful entrepreneur behind shopping channel company JML. In it, he warns that the current return to growth is unlikely to last without a radical change of economic strategy, harnessing exchange rate policy to support domestic manufacturing and… [Read More]
Barack Obama is meeting European leaders at The Hague to discuss Ukraine, but the ‘Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership’ (TTIP) won’t be far from his mind. TTIP is intended to be the jewel in Obama’s legacy crown, a free-trade and regulation-harmony deal that for the world’s two largest markets in concert. David Cameron is also… [Read More]
Late on Thursday night, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatened to ban Twitter. 12 hours later, the site was blocked. Erdogan’s trouble with Twitter has been on-going; ever since the social media platform played a huge role in the anti-government protests of last year, the government has been finding new ways of curbing freedom… [Read More]
In freezing the Carbon Price Floor, George Osborne has taken some good advice.
The Chancellor is about to announce the budget for the next fiscal year and it is safe to say it will be littered with the words ‘recovery’, ‘job not done’ and ‘tough decisions’. As to what else, we have been told there will be one or two surprise ‘crowd-pleasers’ (another penny off beer?) and a… [Read More]
Both Ukraine’s territorial integrity and Russia’s respect for the 1994 Budapest memorandum are dead in the water. The EU and Obama are powerless to stop further land grabs. Avoiding bloodshed and establishing stability is imperative.
‘If one meets a powerful person ask them five questions: ‘What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? And how can we get rid of you?’ If you cannot get rid of the people who govern you, you do not live… [Read More]
Zero hours estimates are rising, through greater use and greater awareness. People deserve to be paid something for their time available.
Energy prices and Labour’s cost of living crisis campaign seem to have lost some momentum in recent weeks. The party political has been overshadowed by more important events in Ukraine. It could also be that Labour don’t want to sound too much of a Debbie Downer during the release of yet more positive GDP figures.… [Read More]