Category Archives: Uncategorized

It was Schumpeter who said capitalism was characterised by waves of creative destruction. The constant search for improvement throws out the old and welcomes the new. In the last century out went the businesses shoeing horses, and supplying coaches and carts for the horse drawn age. In came the petrol car and van, and the […]

The government is asking the question again, should more of the civil service work outside London? It is a good time to review this, given the larger changes being discussed about the balance to be struck between working in an office and working from home. The case for more civil servants in future working away […]

Many people who rent would prefer to own their own home but cannot afford to. Anyone who owns a home is free to rent if they wish, but most do not want to do so. Over the long term owning is cheaper than renting. Paying the interest and making the repayments of a 20 or […]

As a free trader I think it is usually a good idea to specialise and then to buy in the goods and services you do not produce yourself. All individuals practise this, relying on the supermarket for our food and the power company for our electricity. They are better at those, with economies of scale, […]

We hear a no deal exit is still likely, with the UK rightly declining to make the unreasonable concessions the EU wants. All those Remain commentators need to explain the current strength of the pound against the world’s main reserve currency, as they are ever ready to blame Brexit when the dollar is strong. Those […]

Yesterday I defined some of our defence needs. Today we need to discuss how we carry this into effect. Central to our defence against a major challenge lies our membership of NATO. NATO is our best protection against another world war. It was born of the experiences of the twentieth century where it took massive […]

The world has been mercifully short of wars for NATO in the last few years. Mr Trump’s decision to disengage from hot war in the Middle East has made a difference to the demands on our armed forces, after years of war in  Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and the wider Middle East. This does not mean […]

The public have had an enforced home course in doing much more on line. During the lock down you had to pay bills by electronic means, buy non food items over the net, talk to friends and family by phone or video conference. I had to do most of my  contact work by video or phone […]

As we exit the EU we will have more scope to decide what items should be matters for national security or resilience. Under EU rules we were allowed to favour UK suppliers of defence equipment, though even here the UK ended up buying support naval vessels from abroad and only confining the warship programme to […]

The UK spends a very high proportion of its total government transport budget on railways. It is embarking on a mega project to put in HS2. It could get more railway capacity much more quickly at a much lower price if it made some changes and stopped HS2. There are overloaded lines – assuming we […]