Prior to 1965, August bank holiday was sensibly held on the first Monday of the month.  A trial period between 1965 and 1970 led to the holiday being moved permanently to the last Monday in August from 1971.  And so, rather than being a summer bank holiday, it became a …

Even before the 2008 financial crisis it was becoming clear that commercial property was facing change.  At the soft end of this change was the rise of serviced offices as an alternative to traditional renting.  The serviced office environment offered far more flexibility – notice periods were shorter than traditional …

In the late 1980s Britain suffered a series of disasters which many attributed to the public spending cuts made years earlier by the Thatcher government.  During the first, 1979 to 1983 government, Britain lost more than two million industrial jobs.  Over the same period, so-called “red tape,” including much health …

How do you convince people that the worst recession in living memory is not so bad after all?  One way is to follow the Bank of England’s lead and give so gloomy a forecast at the beginning of the crisis that anything short of the complete collapse of the economy …

This is the introduction to Tim Watkins’ latest book: Why Don’t Lions Chase Mice? No, it is not a trick question. Indeed, the answer you gave is probably the correct one. A lion is a very large and powerful animal whereas a mouse is a very small but surprisingly nimble creature. …

    The arithmetic is simple enough.  Fossil fuels – coal, gas and oil – make up 84.5 percent of our energy consumption. Hydroelectricity accounts for 7 percent; nuclear 4.5 percent.  Wind and solar – the supposed salvation of human civilisation – provide 3 percent; with other renewables adding one …

Prior to 19 March 2020, the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine was quietly doing pretty much what it had been doing for the previous 75 years.  Its antimalarial properties had been known for much longer.  Originally derived from the bark of the Cinchona Tree and sometimes referred to as “the Jesuit powder,” …

“Levelling-up” is the latest unrealisable dream to enter the lexicon of the establishment media.  The idea – which merges the Covid-19 recession with the anticipated shock of a no-deal Brexit at the end of December – is that to remain in government beyond 2024 Boris Johnson’s Tories will need to …

Imagine that you had to fight a pandemic without a theory of germs (some readers, no doubt, will point out that we don’t need to imagine, we just need to look at the cack-handed government response).  Anyway, you might get a few things right, albeit for the wrong reasons.  You …

The UK is on track to record the largest decline in annual GDP for 300 years, with output falling by more than 10 per cent in 2020.  Those are not my words, they are the conclusion of the latest Fiscal sustainability report (FSR) from the UK government’s Office for Budget …