Review of the Papers, Monday 23 July
Government Gordon Brown is under mounting pressure to order GPs to open evenings and weekends after business leaders said that £1 billion a year was being lost to the economy because of their inflexible surgery hours. The Confederation of…
Happiness
The latest publication from the IEA landed through the letterbox yesterday (I can't say plonked or thudded, because the IEA publications are always of eminently digestible proportions). It is on one of the most important subjects of modern…
Minimum wages
So wrote Ludwig von Mises in his 1929 book, A Critique of Interventionism. He could have been writing of the state of our political and academic debate today. The Sunday Telegraph reports that "Gordon Brown is drawing up plans to vary the…
Lessons from Rwanda
A couple of months ago, I suggested that the claims for the benefit of the Tory trip to Rwanda might be inflated. In the current mood of dissatisfaction with David Cameron, much of the media and many private commentators are making cynical…
Energy crops - fact and fiction
The excellent Bishop Hill has spotted an announcement by ScottishPower that they are looking to contract farmers to grow energy crops for their Cockenzie and Longannet coal-fired power stations. I can shed (I hope) a little more light on…
Policy Announcements, Friday 20 July
Government Consumers will have stronger protection from rogue estate agents and traders as a landmark Bill becomes law. Measures in the Consumer, Estate Agents and Redress Act will: make it compulsory for all estate agents to belong to an…
ConservativeHome has competition
Welcome to a new blog - ToryHome - that has been setup to put the Cameroonian perspective on stories in the news. It appears to have some relation to Chad Noble, the dormant Centre for Progressive Conservatism, and satiresearch.com. You may…
Review of the Papers, Friday 20 July
Government The independent status of city academies could be undermined by the increasing trend of local authorities to act as "co-sponsors" of the new schools, an evaluation of the scheme by PwC said on Thursday. The annual independent…
More nuclear problems
Tim Montgomery at ConservativeHome thinks "support for nuclear power" should be a core Tory value. I think, if picking a technological winner like that is a core Tory value, that contempt for Tories should be one of my core values. I am…
Who's in charge at the Ministry of Health?
Remarkably, the Department of Health have just announced Ministerial responsibilities in the department, some three weeks after they were all appointed. If it takes them this long just to sort out who is doing what job, is it any surprise…
Government - burning our energy as well as our money
The Government thinks that we should be using energy more efficiently. They are right. So guess which sector increased its consumption of electricity the most in Europe between 1999 and 2004. Industry? Households? No, it was the "tertiary…