James Conway - 16 May 2012 - Economy
Criticality. It is the term used by physicists to describe the process in which a fissile material attains a critical mass that leads to a nuclear reaction. In essence, it quantifies the point at which a chain reaction will occur, that point where the process towards the core destroying everything ...
Ryan Bourne - 14 May 2012 - Economy
At the moment, the stimulus debate shapes up something like this: all parties recognise the need to eliminate the deficit (i.e. the rate we add to our debt), but think we should do this without fundamentally harming the recovery in the short-term. Those who advocate more spending than planned think ...
Kieron O'Hara - 14 May 2012 - Economy
A moment of nostalgia: doing out my mother’s loft the other day, I happened across my old copy of the Treasury’s Economic Progress Report of March 1981 (do we still have the Report? One imagines it has gone the way of sweet cigarettes and flared trousers). Devoted to Geoffrey Howe’s ...
Ryan Bourne - 11 May 2012 - Economy
There’s something deeply annoying about the debate surrounding spending cuts, both here and in much of mainland Europe. Governments have allowed opposition parties and public sector workers to frame the current response in terms of austerity vs. growth – accepting as axiomatic that increased Government spending is a prerequisite (a ...
Ryan Bourne - 09 May 2012 - Politics
The Queen’s Speech was somewhat anti-climactic. There was a distinct lack of, or lack of detail on, supply-side measures needed to enhance our economic growth rate. These events are always suitably vague, so this was largely to be expected. But the Speech seemed to lack a coherent vision or theme ...
Administrator CPS - 08 May 2012 - History
Today we celebrate the birthday of one the most important political and economic philosophers of the 20th century, Friedrich von Hayek. Born in Vienna, educated in Freiburg, Chicago and London, Hayek was one of the leading minds supporting the resurgence of classical liberalism. While Hayek’s work won him a Nobel ...
Huseyin Djemil - 03 May 2012 - Prisons & Addiction
The Government committed to transforming drug treatment when it took office. The idea of their Putting Full Recovery First plans is to give drug addicts and offenders a second chance - to free them from their dependency. Huseyin Djemil (CPS author of Inside Out - how to get drugs out of prisons) fears their recovery has ...
Ted Bromund - 02 May 2012 - US Politics
Last month, I had the pleasure of speaking at the Centre, and of spending ten days in London and Oxford. Goodness knows there’s plenty of media coverage of the U.S. in Britain – sometimes I think there’s too much – but the closer you look, the less satisfactory it is. ...
Ryan Bourne - 01 May 2012 - Economy
Nile Gardiner has a new column on Telegraph blogs in response to Paul Krugman's New York Times article 'Death of a Fairy Tale'. In the column, Krugman had attacked British austerity by highlighting an economic report which stated that 'Britain is doing worse in the current slump than it did ...
Jeremy Jennings - 01 May 2012 - Europe
In a follow up to yesterday's blog about Marine Le Pen, Professor Jeremy Jennings of QMUL writes on the losers of the first round of the French Presidential election. If Marine Le Pen was the symbolic winner of the first round of France’s Presidential elections, who were the losers?Most obviously, Nicolas ...
Ryan Bourne - 30 April 2012 - Economy
Whilst in Kuala Lumpur last week, I was reliably informed that the initial ONS data suggests the UK is in recession - with a 0.2% contraction in Q1 2012. This surprised me, and proved difficult to square with much of the economic survey data.Though it is of little help to ...
Jeremy Jennings - 30 April 2012 - Europe
Professor Jeremy Jennings, expert on French political philosophy, notes that Marine Le Pen and her anti-EU policies are the real winners of the first round of the French vote. Make no mistake. There was only one winner of the first round of France’s presidential election on April 22 and it was ...
Centro Einaudi - 27 April 2012 - Europe
In the first of a quarterly series of updates from the Italian political scene, the Centro Einaudi - a think tank dedicated to the legacy of former Prime Minister Luigi Einaudi - notes that as the economic situation returns from the brink, it becomes harder to convince the Italian public ...
Lord Lawson - 11 April 2012 - Energy
Following on from our online debate "Is there a valid economic case for 'going green' in an 'age of austerity'?", Lord Lawson hits back at Tim Yeo in the final part of the debate.As President of the Renewable Energy Association, described on its website as “The voice of the renewables ...
Kieron O'Hara - 10 April 2012 - Constitution & Democracy
Kieron O'Hara blogs on the aftermath of the government's proposal and subsequent backing-off of New Labour-style security database measures. During the Easter holiday, the dust has sort of settled after the argument about civil liberties versus security, particularly with respect to monitoring the Internet for communications – now ‘draft legislation’ as ...
