A favourite book of my childhood was Our Island Story, H E Marshall’s magisterial (and chronological) account of this country’s history. Twenty years ago, this newspaper and the think tank Civitas collaborated on a venture to supply thousands of these books to primary schools across the land. Readers contributed more than £25,000 and free copies were...
Tag: Comment
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Putin will soon turn his war machine on Britain
In October 2022, in the dead of night, specialist troops and officials from Moscow slipped into St Catherine’s Cathedral in Kherson and exhumed the bones of famed 18th-century Russian commander Grigory Potemkin. He was a favourite of Empress Catherine the Great and played a critical role in the annexation of Crimea in 1783. No one...
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Reeves’ appraisal of Britain’s economy is becoming laughable
First quarter growth was 0.7pc, while the second quarter, announced last week, yielded a still healthy 0.6pc. This annualises at what, by the standards of the post-financial crisis slough of despond, is a positively rip-roaring 2.4pc. Much of this gain is admittedly just a rebound from last year’s mild recession; things are likely to slow...
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Entitlement and laziness are crushing the life out of Britain
And how does the political class react? There’s the growing hostility towards business, with Labour bleating about the miseries of employment under “unscrupulous” bosses and the need for more worker “rights”. There may well be circumstances in which greater flexibility benefits both parties, which is why millions of voluntary agreements are already in place. But...
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Britain might be leading the world on Net Zero, but no one is following
In China and much of the rest of the “developing world”, net zero targets appear to mean nothing at all beyond their usefulness in undermining the West. Economic growth is routinely prioritised over climate change goals. Similarly in the US, which pays lip service to net zero while simultaneously celebrating its position as the world’s...
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Australians delight in outshining silver-polishing Poms
Every four years around this time, antipodeans develop a passion for demographic mathematics, pointing out, for example, that New Zealand has won one gold for every 1.7m head of population. This kind of medals-per-capita reasoning has helped them to best, or “bist” as they like to pronounce it, Australia in past Olympics, but this time...
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Five days, 17 medals and the best start to a Games for 112 years. It’s great, Britain!
Britain is living through an unparalleled era of Olympic success. As recently as Atlanta 1996, the team mustered just one solitary gold, thanks to Steve Redgrave and his crew-mates in the coxless four. From 2012, they have hit 29, 27 and 22, with every chance of a fourth straight 20-plus haul in Paris. What renders...
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Labour is about to crush what’s left of Britain’s economy
Likewise, Amazon has made next day delivery of just about anything you can think of completely standard, creating vast wealth in the process. It might be worth pausing to consider what the entrepreneurs behind those successes had got right, but instead Labour’s allies just want to destroy them. Finally, while we may not always commercialise...
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Ed Miliband is the new face of Britain’s Net Zero folly
The electricity grid needs to be able produce around 45GW peak demand, and to supply all the population night and day, winter and summer. In our interconnected and sophisticated modern world power cuts are disastrous. To prevent power cuts, energy must be always available, and the only way to have that is to have it...
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Is James Timpson the most dangerous man in Britain?
It has long been unfashionable to say this too loudly in Westminster, but prisons are vital to public safety and cutting crime. We need more of them. Unsurprisingly, Labour’s newly appointed Prisons Minister James Timpson doesn’t agree. A key-cutting CEO turned prison reformer, he has a history of employing former inmates. He was until recently...
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Nazi cruelty vs British pluck – one of the greatest stories of the Second World War
Ealing Studios’ The Foreman Went to France appeared in cinemas in June 1942 when British morale was low. The Blitz was over, a Nazi invasion looked unlikely, and America had entered the war; but Britain had suffered a defeat in Singapore four months earlier that had nearly cost Churchill his job, the tide was unturned...
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Whisper it, but the election shows that Britain is fast turning French
Britain, the Brexiteers claimed in 2016, is fundamentally different from the Continent – above all in its political culture, but also economically and constitutionally. At first sight, the 2024 election would seem to confirm that judgment. France appears likely to elect Marine Le Pen’s radical-Right National Rally as the leading party in the National Assembly,...
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