Politics Roundtable

British Citizens and expatriates: you can sign a petition calling on Prime Minister Tony Blair to end the EU’s unfair trade barriers against developing countries, and to scrap the Common Agricultural Policy here.

Professor Stephen Hawking and I agree that climate change and nuclear proliferation are probably the most urgent challenges that we face as humans. As Professor Hawking says:

We foresee great peril if governments and society do not take action now to render nuclear weapons obsolete and ...

I haven't yet read Philippe Legrain's book Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them , but I have read this article (amongst others) on the subject: Don't believe this claptrap. Migrants are no threat to us , in which Legrain says:

Just as EU trade barriers that ...

The Director of Yale University's Center for Eating and Weight Disorders explains the miracle formula used by diet books to become bestsellers for over a century now: "easy, rapid weight loss; the opportunity to eat your favorite foods and some scientific 'breakthrough' that usually doesn't exist." As one ...

One of the big advantages of Social Policy Bonds, in my view, is that they can target problems whose magnitude is uncertain. People have wildly different views about, for instance, climate change or the likelihood of nuclear conflict. (I have wildly different views myself depending mainly on the line taken ...

I'm not going to comment directly on the latest British Airways strike, or on the way it's being (mis)reported; (though this is colourful: "British Airways workers are to strike for the right to take time off for a cold or ingrown toenail, without it counting as sick leave."). ...

Referring to the UK’s central Government the current ‘Economist’ says:  

When the government is searching for new ideas it always has to look abroad (usually to less centralised places such as America), since councils in Britain have little freedom to experiment with new ways of doing things. Trust the locals ...

Nearly 30 convicted killers released from jail over the past 10 years have gone on to kill again, according to Home Office figures released yesterday. Convicted murderers who were set free to kill, [London] ‘Daily Telegraph’, 26 January

Along with most of my generation I have an instinctive ...

From the Economist (subscription)

In recent weeks, a rush of climate-change bills has started circulating in America’s new Congress. … A national cap on emissions of carbon-dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, looks closer than ever. … Part of the approach is likely to be a carbon-trading system, ...

If we’re not careful we become obsessive about a single particular quantifiable measure – to the exclusion of things that really matter but that are less quantifiable. It could be the exchange rate for foreign currency, our weight, or the number of kilos we can bench press. The effects can ...