One of the consequences of the response to the pandemic and the disruption from Brexit is that labour shortages are appearing across the low-paid sectors of the economy.  So much so that even the metropolitan liberal Guardian has begun to wonder whether the benefits of higher wages for the low-paid …

It is surely bad luck that Extinction Rebellion’s week of protests leading up to the August bank holiday was overtaken by the worst military defeat of a global empire at the hands of tribesmen since the Battle of Isandlwana in 1879.  With the media focused on the cack-handed American withdrawal …

Media has little in the way of memory and the rest of us struggle to remember much of what happened more than a week ago.  And so, the narratives we use in an attempt to make sense of the rapidly changing world we are living in, tend to revolve around …

You can tell a lot about someone’s politics by the way in which they quote Michael Gove.  Anti-democratic supporters of technocracy tend only to repeat the first part of what Gove said on the eve of the Brexit referendum: “I think the people in this country have had enough of …

Have you heard that ice cream causes murder or that global warming has led to an increase in piracy? Apparently in Maine, consuming more margarine leads to more divorces, while increased US spending on science, space and technology results in increases in suicides by hanging, strangulation and suffocation.  Actually, these …

When you’ve already declared a “Climate Emergency” based on the belief that we have just eight years left to prevent global warming of two degrees above pre-industrial levels, then it is difficult to find further words to describe the seriousness of our predicament.  This is why lazy media editors around …

Putting a positive gloss on the news is especially important as we attempt to recover from a pandemic.  And if that positive gloss is green in colour, so much the better. And so yesterday we were treated to the news that: “More electric vehicles were registered than diesel cars for …

The increase in oil prices is filtering through to consumers according to the BBC: “Petrol prices have reached an eight-year high after nine straight months of rises… the average price of a litre of petrol is now 135.13p, a level not seen since September 2013, as rising oil prices push …

We learned recently that one of the last coal power stations in the UK is bidding to become the first commercial nuclear fusion plant on Earth.  The news should be taken with a large pinch of salt… nuclear fusion has been 25 years in the future since before I was …

The great thing about life in the decades after the signing of the Kyoto protocol was that nothing really changed.  Sure, politicians talked up targets for getting to “net zero” at some point in the future.  But besides that, we all kept consuming; and as our demand for goods and …