Remember this 2009 piece about ‘sustainability’ and Aeron chairs? One way to go is to make products which have the opposite of built-in obsolescence – products which are engineered not only to work superbly but also to last a long time, and so save resources that way. But they will […]
Here is what appears to be the first-ever speech by a UK Foreign Secretary (maybe the first-ever speech by any Foreign Minister) on consular work. And v effective it is too. I have written here about some aspects of consular work under Labour, not least the appalling Three Ps which […]
The Daily Telegraph has an Agony Uncle column written by Graham Norton, "TV presenter and comedian". Some of it is online. One question posed to Mr Norton in the newspaper edition is all about three siblings who each have inherited £100,000. One of the siblings has agreed with the solicitor […]
Stop what you’re doing. Read this, a powerful argument by Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry for spreading risk intelligently by turning banks into partnerships and pursuing massive (by which he means MASSIVE) deregulation at the same time. One smart, challenging paragraph after another: Let’s work through the main objections to the partnership model: It’s antiquated. You […]
Here’s a piece by me over at The Commentator which looks at the slippery ideas concerning what we ‘deserve’. In the context of walloping the latest confused burblings against Ayn Rand, this time from the Guardian’s potted collectivist George Monbiot. Me: Lordy! Another wild swipe at AynRand, this time from […]
Thanks to the democratic miracle of #Twitter I have ended up in an unlikely place, namely the website of Labour Teachers (Labour at the chalkface). I was pointed in this direction by a Tweet picking up on my Commentator piece about teaching grammar. And there I find a really good […]
Leading UK journalist Angus Roxburgh has written a book about Putin and Putinism, drawing on his extensive experience in Russia (including a stint as a media adviser to the Putin team): The book is good in revealing all sorts of fascinating stories about the Putin period. My favourite is the […]
I fear that the Prime Minister was ill-advised to allow his name to be attached to an astonishly bad and strange letter sent to ‘Presidents’ Van Rompuy and Barroso by twelve national EU member state leaders. Parts of it was written by the EU’s version of our old friend the […]
Here is my piece over at Commentator on Drone Warfare, beginning with exploding the tragic George Monbiot and proceeding thusly: Not that long ago Europe’s parents and grandparents were being blown to bits in their tens of thousands by bombs simply dropped from planes in the general direction of the […]
The other day we had the pleasure of meeting senior colleagues at Edelman London, part of the global team who prepare the annual Edelman Trust Barometer. The online survey aims explicitly at educated people round the world who follow current affairs. This year’s survey concluded that trust in governments had suffered […]
