More than 87,000 properties in England and Wales, worth £100bn in total, are owned by anonymous companies registered in tax havens. (The Week, 23 March 2019) If you think this is sleazy, wait until Britain is out of the EU. Given the main cheerleaders of Brexit one has to conclude that one motivation of the …
Continue reading ‘Britain is the bolthole for crooked money from all over the world’ »
If we really want the parties to reconnect with voters, we should import – from Australia, say, or Brazil – a far more important innovation: compulsory voting. Obliging people to cast a ballot may sound illiberal: but it has the huge advantage of forcing political parties “to reach beyond their comfort zone”. Labour could no …
Don’t smoke The Hisayama Study, an ongoing investigation of a suburban Japanese community, has found that smoking in mid to late life not only raises the risk of lung cancer, but also ups the chance of developing dementia. Smokers who quit, even in their 40s or 50s, didn’t see the same rise in risk. Don’t …
Only 40% of adults in the United States believe evolution to be “true”. A third of American adults positively believe it to be false, presumably believing that God delivered man and woman, fully formed, to the Garden of Eden five thousand years ago, as per one of the Hebrew creation myths (there were two of …
According to data produced by the General Social Survey Americans are getting more miserable. On a scale between 1 and 3, where 1 represents “not too happy” and 3 means “very happy”, Americans on average give themselves 2.18. In 1993 the figure peaked at 2.26. The downward trend has been confirmed in the latest World …
