Society

Councils the length and breadth of Britain are smelling the money Red Ken is making and talking of introducing congestion-charging schemes. Interest groups are starting to complain at the introduction of yet another tax on motoring. But there are better models than Ken’s, which could bring real benefits. Charging for road use is hardly a new idea. Beginning in 1663, a series of Private Acts of Parliament gradually transferred responsibility for highways from parishes to private Turnpike Trusts, which collected tolls and invested in roads. Over two centuries, about 10,000 miles of highways were thus privatised. Economic historian Dan Bogart has shown that Turnpike Trusts led to major improvements in

We’re barely ten seconds into our interview when Jeremy Grantham, one-time bedpan salesman from Doncaster, now hugely successful US money manager, is off on a favourite tack — mixing it with his competitors in the investment world. In this case what has drawn his ire are some reported comments from a well-known American fund manager whose views I have alluded to in a recent newspaper column. ‘I’m going to start with an ad hominem remark,’ he announces down the line from Boston, his adopted home, where he has built from scratch a global fund management business that looks after more than $140 billion of other people’s money. The pundit in

It is exactly 20 years next week since British Airways was privatised. Arguably, it was the most successful of all the Thatcher-era privatisations. Under the redoubtable Lord King and his marketing-wizard sidekick Colin (now also Lord) Marshall, a demoralised, loss-making state enterprise had been turned by five years of vigorous, not to say brutal, leadership into ‘the world’s favourite airline’. The share offer in February 1987 was 32 times oversubscribed, and almost 10 per cent of it was set aside for the airline’s staff, many of whom became proud owners of a stake in a business which seemed to have been miraculously transformed. But that was then, and this is