Martin Vander Weyer is business editor of The Spectator. He writes the weekly Any Other Business column.
If John Prescott needed an easy-to-read précis of the Electoral Commission’s findings on all-postal ballots, published last week, a brave civil servant could have given it to him in four words on a Post-it note: ‘Whoops, not enough fraud.’ The Commission was expected to report widespread hanky-panky in June’s pilot all-postal Euro-elections — especially among
As in warfare and international relations, the Brits punch above their weight in the debate about globalisation and the onward march of the transnational market economy. The Guardian columnist George Monbiot, in The Age of Consent (Flamingo 2003), was the first anti-globalisation campaigner to offer a coherent manifesto for a movement which until then had
Here are four connected facts. First, on Monday, Standard Life – one of Britain’s most respected investment institutions – cut the value of its payouts to 2.3 million pension savers by 15 per cent. Second, some 30,000 people have lost their jobs in the City of London this winter – including Alex, the cartoon archetype
An awful lot has happened since the Canadian journalist Naomi Klein shot to radical prominence with the publication of No Logo, the first sacred text of the anti-globalisation movement, shortly after her co-religionists besieged the 1999 world trade talks in Seattle. They went on to wreck the World Bank/IMF meeting in Prague and, less successfully,