Society

Inflation fell to 0.3 per cent in January, the lowest level since records began in 1989. As the above chart shows, the government’s target of two per cent CPI inflation is now a long way off. The ONS has attributed the slow down to falling fuel and food prices — the latter is thanks to the on-going supermarket price wars. As Citibank’s Michael Saunders explains in his invaluable economics briefing (pdf), the weakness is concentrated in food, fuel and energy. Excluding energy, tobacco and alcohol, the year-on-year inflation level was 1.4 per cent, up from 1.3 per cent a year ago: Although inflation year-on-year has already sunk to a record low,

Veterans of Eurozone crisis summits, hoping for another nail-biting drama, had queued to get ringside seats. But yesterday’s meeting over Greece with Eurozone Finance Ministers ended without result. And you shouldn’t be surprised. We’ve been here many times before – Eurozone committees keep minutes but lose hours – and this was not a meeting during which decisions were to be taken. While some Eurozone watchers have convinced themselves that there is now a new script for Greece’s relation with its Eurozone creditors, no Eurozone government but the Greek share that view. It’s not just that other capitals are hostile to Greece’s own game plan of forcing other governments to make a new

Question: Is abortion on gender grounds illegal in the UK? Answer: yes and no and maybe – depends who you ask. Ask Britain’s biggest abortion provider, the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, and they will tell you that the law is ‘silent on the matter’. Try the British Medical Association and they’ll say that it may be permissible in some circumstances. Ask an academic, like Professor Sally Sheldon, and you’ll get a nuanced answer about how the illegality of the practice is ‘far from clear’. Meanwhile, the government repeats in vain that ‘abortion on the grounds of gender alone is illegal’. So who’s right? Well, everyone apparently. The way abortion law is framed

Can I write an entire blog post about one sentence? I’d certainly like to. The sentence in question is ‘The potent form of the drug, known as ‘skunk’, is so powerful that users are three times more likely to suffer a psychotic episode than those who have never tried it.’ It’s from a piece in the Mail on Sunday which claims in its headline that ‘scientists show [not “research suggests”, you notice] cannabis TRIPLES psychosis risk: Groundbreaking research blames ‘skunk’ for 1 in 4 of all new serious mental disorders.’ The MoS is infuriatingly pleased with itself for having got hold of this research ahead of publication – they’re pitching

Weekends are quality time in the Alderman household. On Saturday evenings, following the termination of the Sabbath, my wife and I are accustomed to sit together, review the week that has just ended, and map out the week ahead. But last Saturday the conversation took a very different turn. My wife and I considered the drama that had unfolded in Copenhagen, and asked ourselves, for the very first time in over forty-one years of marriage, whether we should not make plans to leave (flee?) England – this green and hitherto pleasant land in which we had both been born and educated– and seek shelter in some foreign field. We considered

To listen to the debate about Labour’s prospective Mansion Tax, you’d think that the UK didn’t have any wealth or property taxes. So your CoffeeHouse baristas looked up the figures, which are collected by the OECD. Our stamp duty, business rates and council tax give the UK the highest property tax in the world. This has been the case decades. And it’s becoming more, em, progressive. Once stamp duty used to be charged only on the pricier properties. Osborne’s cunning decision to leave the £250,000 threshold untouched and the asset boom caused by low rates mean more people are being hauled into stamp duty (via fiscal drag). For the first time, someone buying the average UK