The latest Economic Affairs (the quarterly journal of the Institute of Economic Affairs) arrived today. Its leading topic - Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) - reminded me that I never published the short talk I gave at an EU…

Some friends of mine in the energy sector have been excited by a new report by Dan Lewis on Securing Our Energy Future. This report does indeed make some excellent criticisms of current energy policy, but I'm afraid it does not follow (as…

Just a thought: has it reached the point where the best thing that could be done with BA is to break it up and close it down? Is it worth less as a going entity than the sum of its parts? Is it effectively a bed-blocker to making better use…

I love Liverpool. But sometimes you wonder if they go out of their way to maintain outsiders' perceptions... From DEFRA's Waste Strategy Annual Progress Report 2008/9. That's three incidents per Scouser. As usual, the problem has been…

See this article for evidence that (a) for the Chinese, Copenhagen (and climate-change generally) is about getting as much out of the developed countries as possible without committing to any major effort on its part, and (b) Chinese media…

These programmes¹ are examples, like the EU-ETS, where government intervention hands commercial advantage to the VILE (Vertically-Integrated Large Energy) companies, to little beneficial effect. The VILE companies point to the fact that…

I've been angry for years about the level of economic ignorance amongst politicians, civil servants, journalists, financial professionals, intellectuals, the public, and, above all, the mainstream economics profession. Though every…

I can't beat the beautiful job Richard Tyler did in yesterday's Telegraph on a classic example of winner-picking under our Lord and master's revived industrial policy, so I'll just quote bits of it. Click the links to read the articles…

-The Economist- just published its suicide note. Unusually, it has done it well in advance, in the full flush of health and optimism. But it has nevertheless committed itself fully to a course that guarantees its eventual demise, or at…

A couple of small stories on the property market recently have illustrated the extent to which the media seem to have given themselves the job of talking up the market. For a brief while, -The Express- stood alone in its determination to…

From the Socialist Republic of Britain's Telegraph Agency: In the time of crisis Belarus Britain attaches a special significance to the development of industrial giants, President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko the Board of Trade Peter…

There is something rotten in the rugby world, and it's not Dean Richards. The sanctimonious twaddle being spoken on the subject of Harlequins' "bloodgate" by commentators and former professionals is nauseating. Rugby, they would have you…