EU referendum and the political class



"This guy cracks me up"

Poor old Gerald Ford was derided for, apparently, being unable to walk and chew gum at the same time. But today’s front rank (sic) British politicians are open about their inability to do two things at once.

As momentum grew in the Conservative parliamentary party for a referendum on membership of the ailing European Union, David Cameron and Ed Miliband both said that to hold one would be a “distraction” from the more pressing business of saving the euro.

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Dirty Hari



“Uh huh, I know what you’re thinking; you’re thinking does this article contain six lies or only five?”

Drowned out by Hackgate this summer was another spectacular story of media self-immolation. Johann Hari, columnist at the Independent, winner of the prestigious Orwell Prize, regular on Newsnight Review, and darling of the left was caught stuffing his columns with lies.

It began in June when a blogger noticed that some of the quotes given by Hari’s interviewees were identical to quotes which had previously appeared in those interviewees published works. Hari defended the charge, saying that “When you interview a writer – especially but not only when English isn’t their first language – they will sometimes make a point that sounds clear when you hear it, but turns out to be incomprehensible or confusing on the page. In those instances, I have sometimes substituted a passage they have written or said more clearly elsewhere on the same subject for what they said to me so the reader understands their point as clearly as possible” He called any allegation of plagiarism “totally false”

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No more Solyndras: time for the sun to go down on public spending



$535 million
Whenever I watch Dragon’s Den (Shark Tank to readers in the United States) and I see some entrepreneur waking away with £50,000 in his pocket I try and come up with my own ‘Dragon’s Den idea’.

I wonder how far I’d get if I turned up and said “I want $535 billion and I’ll go bust in two years”? I might not get too far with Duncan Bannatyne, but if I was pitching to Steven Chu, Barack Obama’s Energy Secretary, I might be in with a shot.

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The Tea Party and the Occupy Movement: two sides of the same coin but only the former really gets it



That is, like, soooooooo Tea Party

My mother always used to tell me that what was sauce for the goose was sauce for the gander. Apparently not. Many of the same people who get swivel eyed about Tea Party rallies are running out of laudatory epithets for the various ‘Occupy’ protests.

Back in January it only took a pair of crosshairs on a web page for New York Times columnist Paul Krugman to deduce that the Tea Party were behind the horrific shooting of Gabrielle Giffords.

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Healthcare - Public and private



Move over love, we've got another two to fit in here

In the summer when the shocking abuse of residents at the Winterbourne View care home in Bristol was revealed Polly Toynbee took to the pages of the Guardian crowing that " The "dead hand of the state" looks rather more welcoming than the grasping hand of private equity"

This week saw a report from the Care Quality Commission found that half of all hospitals were filing in their duty of care for the elderly and that 20% of all hospitals were so bad they were breaking the law.

Does this call into question the entire basis of publicly provided health and social care as, for Ms Toynbee, Winterbourne View did for private provision? Ms Toynbee has yet to address the CQC report.

Quantitative easing: why it doesn't work



Laying the foundations for recovery

In the second year of my economics degree we were mixed in with some first years for some lectures. In the first week one of the freshers asked “Why don’t we just print more money, give it to people, and make them richer?”

We second years laughed, but that economic ingénue might be having the last laugh. As the Bank of England prepares to print another £75 billion of new money, she seems to have a seat on the Monetary Policy Committee.

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A woman has the right to choose...sometimes



Seriously

Laurie Penny is one of the silliest people on the planet. But she might have outdone herself.

On her New Statesman blog back during the furore over Nadine Dorries ill fated abortion law amendment Ms Penny was fulminating about the "anti-choice minority" who wanted "to roll back women's right to reproductive choice"

Well, as ever with the left, its not 'choice' Ms Penny supports, its choices she agrees with. Even cherished reproductive choices.

Less than a month after venting at the 'anti-choice' crowd Ms Penny took to the very same blog to bemoan "The selective abortion of female foetuses" around the world. She spoke of the "tens of millions of potential human beings, neglected to death, murdered at birth or (in increasing numbers) terminated when an ultrasound scan showed that a woman was due to come into the world"

Read that again and tell me how it differs from the rhetoric of the anti-abortion camp.

Cognitive dissonance, they name is Penny.

The hills are alive with the sound of praxeology



When I told a friend of mine three years ago that I was interested in Austrian economics she asked “Isn’t that just selling cuckoo clocks and lederhosen?” True, she wasn’t the brightest, but Austrian economics was fringe stuff. An influential school originating in Vienna in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century it was largely buried under the Keynesian avalanche of the 1930’s. That’s changing.

The Austrian school survived in America where émigré economists escaping the turmoil of 1930s Europe inspired a new generation. Perennial presidential candidate Ron Paul is an advocate of Austrian economics and the Ludwig von Mises Institute dominates the field.

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We are on the economic brink



It just happened

Yesterday the Bank of England announced another round of quantitatuve easing worth £75 billion.

Andrew Lilico responded by asking

"Perhaps the Bank of England is privy to data that makes it believe that further collapse in the British banking sector is now inevitable. If so, an increase in QE is inevitable and correct. But are we really there yet?"

It seems Lilico's question has been answered. Today came the news that

"Moody's has cut its rating on the debt of 12 UK banks, including the state-supported Lloyds Banking Group and Royal Bank of Scotland"

The banks are back on the verge of collapse.

Beyond credit easing and council tax: How Osborne can sail us toward 'calmer, brighter seas'



Under pressure

The Labour conference last week was all about Ed Miliband but that didn’t really matter, few are listening to him.

The man currently front and centre of British politics spoke at the Conservative conference in Manchester yesterday, Chancellor George Osborne. His brief, the economy, dominates politics.

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