UKIP supporters have probably had a week to forget, after Godfrey Bloom MEP referred to a room full of women looking to engage in politics as ‘sluts’, then refused to discuss the all-white cover of a UKIP brochure, and finally struck C4’s Michael Crick with said brochure. Bloom, who was UKIP’s defence spokesman, has attracted… [Read More]
The Greek government is considering placing a ban on Golden Dawn after a man affiliated with the far-right party admitted to murdering anti-fascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas. The well-known left-wing rapper, who went by the stage name Killah P, was stabbed to death in Athens on Tuesday.
Output by size of the available workforce is a less ambivalent measure of economic success than GDP per worker, as it includes unemployment.
Today, Dr Christoph Lees and Dr Mark Slack of the Doctors’ Policy Research Group (DPRG) have written a comment piece about Professor Brian Jarman’s revelations last week about high mortality in NHS hospitals, according to his Hospital Standardised Mortality Ratio (HSMR). Their piece notes that Jarman’s statistics, which I also commented on yesterday for the… [Read More]
When critics of industrial policy say the government can’t ‘pick winners’ they are echoing the arguments of the great free-market economist Frederich Hayek. In his seminal essay, ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’, he argued that central planning does not work because governments do not have access to all the relevant information to make the… [Read More]
On two fronts, the Doctors’ Policy Research Group (DPRG) is currently seeking to spark debate about the future of the NHS; the need for a rethink of NHS funding and the need for a sensible approach to health and social care integration.
Professor Brian Jarman, the Imperial College statistician and former BMA president behind the Hospital Standardised Mortality Ratio (HSMR) figures that first raised the alarm about possible problems in Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust and at around a dozen other trusts, released new figures last week in an exclusive with Channel 4 News that show the UK… [Read More]
The City will be breathing not one but three collective sighs of relief this week. EU initiatives which would have harmed London far more than any other member states. The Financial Transaction Tax, short selling restrictions, bond sales rules and Libor regulation all seem to be going Britain’s way.
In the months leading up to the Vilnius Eastern Partnership Summit in November, where Georgia, Moldova, Armenia and the Ukraine are expected to sign association agreements with the EU, Russia has been ramping up the pressure on its neighbours in what seems like an attempt to deter them from forging closer ties with the EU.
One of the key policy recommendations of the Wealth of Nations project here at Civitas has been to create a local-banking network based on the German Sparkassen model or the Swiss cantonal banks. So it was interesting to hear the Lloyds TSB chief executive, Antonio Horta-Osorio, announce to the media last weekend that TSB is… [Read More]