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It’s kinder to push people into work than to park them on benefits My Times column on Britain’s remarkable and unexpected plunge in unemployment and what lies behind it: Five years ago, almost nobody expected that inflation would vanish, as tomorrow’s figures are expected to show, or that unemployment would plummet, as Friday’s numbers will […]

How the general election could produce a constitutional crisis My Times column on what might happen if the British election prouces a messy result: had a bad dream. It was April 2016. The country was tumbling into a constitutional crisis, dragging the Queen into a gathering storm in the week of her 90th birthday. The […]

By 2030 working while driving may be as easy as working while on the train My column in The Times on British transport priorities: By the time HS2 is fully operational in 2033, more than a quarter of all cars on our roads will be fully autonomous, according to a forecast by the consultants KPMG. […]

No-take zones and marine reserves are needed, because over-fishing is key My Times column on fish and oceans: The decision to create the world’s largest marine reserve around Pitcairn Islands seems to have taken campaigners by surprise. Environmentalists and celebrities had been pushing for this reserve and others in British overseas territories (around Ascension Island […]

Getting emissions down is not going to be easy My Times column on carbon capture: Carbon dioxide is not the most urgent problem facing humanity, compared with war, extremism, poverty and disease. But most presidents, popes and film stars think it is, so I must be wrong. For the purposes of this article let’s assume […]

Their energy makes the difference between misery and prosperity This essay appeared in the Wall Street Journal and later in shorter form in the Sunday Times The environmental movement has advanced three arguments in recent years for giving up fossil fuels: (1) that we will soon run out of them anyway; (2) that alternative sources […]

Booming cereal yields are good for the planet, but Europe lags behind My Times column on farm yields and land sparing: If something drops out of the news, it usually means it is going well. Mad cow disease killed nobody last year; Mozambique and Angola are growing their economies at a furious lick; the Somerset […]

Public bodies are often immortal in a way that private ones rarely are My latest column in The Times: The latest report into Jimmy Savile’s astonishing freedom to roam the wards of Stoke Mandeville hospital will not lead to the end of the National Health Service. Nor will the forthcoming report that apparently finds a “systemic […]

If it won’t reform, then it should devalue My Times column on Greece: For an expert on game theory, Yanis Varoufakis, the Essex University-trained economics professor turned Greek finance minister, does not seem very good at negotiating. His style reminds me of the old joke about playing chess with a pigeon: it knocks over the […]

Consumers are the ones that benefit from buying what they want My Times column on free trade: An American friend recently sent me a gift as a thank you for a weekend’s hospitality. It arrived in the form of a card from the Post Office telling me to pay a hefty sum of tax before […]