Britain’s energy policy is a mess. We have the highest energy prices in the developed world, which is damaging competitiveness, crippling our economy and accelerating the decline of our industries. This is not just economically illiterate, but also environmentally counterproductive and socially regressive. The drive to reduce carbon emissions produced by the UK may seem
Home Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, told the Commons that new applications for refugee family reunion visas would be suspended. She later said in a radio interview: ‘I have St George’s bunting. I also have Union Jack bunting.’ An injunction stopping the Bell Hotel, Epping, from housing asylum seekers was overturned by the Court of
It’s that time of year when the local librairie-papeterie in your French holiday village is full of signs for la rentrée and English newspapers carry ads for gel pens and shoes with Velcro fastenings. I used to love this season as a schoolboy – discovering if I’d made the under-13 football training squad. For the
While Greek and Roman thinkers were influential in developing ideas such as citizenship, justice and equality, the notion of universal ‘human rights’ (1948), especially those involving one’s ‘identity’, would have struck them as absurd. ‘Identity’ derives from the Latin idem, ‘the same, unchanged’, via the French identité (14th century). The term has been colonised by
Flagged up The Finnish air force announced that it is to remove the swastika from its flag (which was designed in 1918) to avoid awkward encounters with foreign dignitaries. Some other unlikely places you can – or could – see a swastika without any links to Nazism: – Christian catacombs in Rome. – Above the
Waning interest Sir: Michael Simmons correctly points out that the Treasury’s large-scale issuance of inflation-linked debt is adding heavily to the government’s interest bill at a time of relatively high inflation (‘Borrowed time’, 30 August). What he may not know is how complacent the Treasury has been about this matter. On the day Vladimir Putin
