Italy and Kenya have both joined the list of countries banning plastic bags this week. If you’ve ever driven down a highway in Kenya, you’ll know why this important. What do climate change and the slave trade have in common, asks Jean Francois Mouhot. Electric cars have gone mainstream over the last few weeks. Yesterday [...]
Archive | January, 2011
Sponsor a tax evasion billboard
Did you see the tax dodger ads in the papers this week? On the day that VAT went up, campaign group 38 Degrees placed ads in several major newspapers. The ads showed chancellor George Osborne as the ‘artful dodger’ out of Oliver Twist, and calls for a focus on tax evasion instead of VAT. Despite [...]
Solar, by Ian McEwan
I don’t normally review novels here, except when they’re particularly relevant. Ian McEwan’s Solar would qualify, being a novel inspired in part by climate change. It tells the story of Michael Beard, an overweight and aging physicist who won the Nobel prize twenty years ago and hasn’t had an interesting idea since. He plays on [...]
Why ending the ‘war on motorists’ is bad news for drivers
The government has announced an end to the so-called ‘war on motorists’ this week, with a series of new pro-car policies. But are they actually counter-productive, and in danger of making things worse for drivers?
How to really beat the VAT rise
Sigh no more – as VAT rises to 20% in the UK today, we can exclusively reveal fourteen top-secret ways to beat the taxman, from keeping chickens to choosing a less decorative biscuit. Yes, really.
Books of the year, 2010
It’s been another year of great reading, and here’s my re-cap. They aren’t all new and I couldn’t possibly rank them in an objective fashion, but here are the five best books I’ve read this year: The New Economics, by Andrew Simms and David Boyle What economics is, where it has gone wrong and how [...]
Books
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