Travelling around Britain, one is given the sense that built up areas are mostly ugly, while the countryside is mostly beautiful. As a lover of the urban, this is distressing. For new buildings to be ugly feels as inevitable as death and taxes. But it does not have to be. Over almost a decade, a
There’s a saying that when you tax something, you get less of it. Sometimes, this is a good thing. The government taxes smoking, alcohol, and petrol partly because we think these things have costly side-effects—like pollution or burdening the NHS—that we want to discourage. But most of our taxes do not fall on activities with
On 1 December, The Spectator will be hosting a conference on the geopolitics of energy, featuring MP David Lidington, the UK’s minister of state for Europe, and Price Waterhouse Cooper’s chief UK economist John Hawksworth. Tickets are still available and can be purchased online. The UK is quite windy. We need to reduce our carbon emissions.
