Monthly Archives: September 2011


In the seven years between 1642 and 1649 astaggering one in ten of the adult male population of the British Isles died.This was more than three times the proportion that died in the First World Warand more than five times the proportion that died in World War Two.   If disease, dislocation and famine are added tobattle deaths, and the timeframe extended to include the Cromwellian […]

Uncivil war


Old fashioned economic stimulus has a new name for the twenty-first century. Concepts such as Keynesianism, state intervention and pump priming have been replaced by quantitative easing. According to Bob McTeer, quantitative easing is “different from traditional monetary policy only in its magnitude and pre-announcement of amount and timing.” And if we accept quantitative easing is not so very far removed from traditional monetary policy, it […]

A stimulating proposition



Electrocute means, and only means, to put to death by means of a powerful electric current. It should not be used for a mere electric shock. This was a distinction I hadn’t full appreciated until reading Mind the Gaffe – something of a pedant’s handbook. Its first recorded use in English was on 7 June 1889 when New Jersey’s Trenton Times described how a prisoner had […]

Shocking vocabulary


Malaria gets its name from the Italian mala aria (bad air), and was originally associated with the swamps and marshlands of Rome. The word was first recorded in English in 1740, when Horace Walpole wrote: “A horrid thing called the mal’aria, that comes to Rome every summer and kills one”. So ubiquitous was the disease that it acquired a specific name– Roman Fever, where its virulence […]

Bad air, miasma and malaria



> The United Nations has announced, with headline grabbing flair, that the world will welcome its seven billionth inhabitant on 31 October 2011. The prophetic accuracy is tempered by caveats that the date is merely a projection, based on current statistical assumptions.  Of course, nothing nearly as accurate can be achieved in a world of imperfect census data. United Nations officials have merely balanced guesses on […]

>Welcome to the world, number 7,000,000,000


> In the frontier thrusting early years of the nineteenth century, the British Armyattracted some of the boldest, bravest, most eccentric and unorthodox officersever to grace the field. Looming large over them all was General Sir CharlesJames Napier, Commander-in-Chief in India and Governor of Bombay Presidency. His most notable campaign led to the subjugationSindh in modern day Pakistan. In conquering the province, Napier had far exceededhis […]

I have sinned



> Two minutes after midnight on 12October 1999 a baby boy was born in Sarajevo, Bosnia. He was 3.55kg (8lbs),healthy and welcomed in to theworld by the Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan. The baby,Adnan Mević, was given such high profile attention after being selected by theUnited Nations Population Fund as thesymbolic sixbillionth person concurrently alive on Earth. Just twelve years later and theDay of […]

>Prophecies of doom – the warning echoes of Thomas Malthus


> In 1807 the Slave Trade Act was passed, makingthe slave trade illegal throughout the British Empire. The statutory manumissionof slaves within British possessions would follow in the Slavery Abolition Act 1833. The Royal Navy was the means by which the 1807 Actwas to be upheld, with British ships forming the bulk of the WestAfrica Squadron. This was officially a multi-national force, and ships fromPrussia, the […]

>International rescue



> This is a tale of two tables and a moral on lies, damnedlies and statistics. This morning’s Daily Chart in theEconomist features a table of government debt. Streaking ahead of the rest, thedubious distinction of topping this chart fell to Japan, with gross governmentdebt reaching 230% of GDP. The financial markets are swirling with speculationon an imminent Greek debt default, and the Hellenes labour under […]

>Dealing with debt


> Out of the five best performing education systems inthe world, four are in Asia. Out of the top ten, seven are in the Asia Pacificregion. The OECD collects data on reading, maths and science scores on astandardised basis. Top of the table is Shanghai, China, with top places foreach. They are followed by South Korea, Finland, Hong Kong and Singapore.  The top ten is completed […]

>Top of the class



> Westfield Stratford City has opened to a barrage ofpress attention, helped by large crowds, Nicole Scherzinger and a slow news day.It has been billed as Europe’s largest urban shopping centre, which seems anunusual caveat. What is an ‘urban’ shopping centre and does this descriptorsuggest that Stratford City is not Europe’s biggest shopping centre?  Stratford City has missed out on being the UK’slargest shopping centre, with […]

>Biggest of the big


> Each September generations of political hacks, geeks and insiders have heard the siren call of the sea and headed to Britain’s seaside resort for the annual party conference. Accompanying them, and providing a welcome end of season bump to hotel and guest house owners, are tides of journalistic flotsam and corporate jetsam. This tradition continued well into the 21st century, but the lure of the […]

>Do they like to be by the seaside?



> In terms of rank rottenness,Dunwich would vie with the fictional Dunny-on-the-Wold as the most rottenborough in the British Parliament. By the time of the Reform Act 1832, the bulkof the constituency was underwater, leaving only a tiny village of “44 housesand half a church” It was a very different Dunwichthat received its entitlement to two representatives in Parliament in 1298, andeven this was a shrunken, […]

>Under the waters


> Winston Churchill is best known as the war-time Prime Minister who led Britain through survival to victory. Whilst constituting the most celebrated period of his political life, the five years of his premiership in the 1940s represent only a fraction of his overall Parliamentary career. Churchill was a Member of Parliament for just under 64 years, between 1900 and 1922 and again from 1924 to his […]

>The extraordinary career of Mr Churchill



One of the biggest political battles within the Coalition surrounds the fate of the 50p tax rate. Those on the right question its effectiveness, with the Institute for Fiscal Studies suggesting it costs more in lost taxes than it yields in additional revenue. Others have suggested it is an essential plank in restoring fiscal stability, and a manifestation of Cameron’s statement that ‘we are all in […]

The long life of a temporary tax


Murdo Fraser MSP has made an attention grabbing pledge in his bid for the leadership of the Scottish Conservatives. If he wins the election in October, he will wind up the party and start again. He argues that the Conservatives are a toxic brand north of the border, and that Scotland needs and deserves a new centre-right political alternative free from the emotive baggage of the […]

Phoenix parties – the strange death and resurrection of centre-right parties



> The ‘Economics focus’ column in the Economist is not the first thing I turn to when my weekly copy arrives. Nestling at the back of the finance and economics section, it is quite rare that I ever read it at all. This week’s column (The celestial economy) drew my attention by presenting the graph above. Depicting the world’s top three countries by economic dominance, it […]

>The irresistible march of the dragon economy


> A special report on the future of jobs in this week’s Economist included a list of the world’s top ten employers. In 2010 the two largest employers in the world were the US Department of Defence (covering all branches of the American armed forces) and the Chinese Army, with 3.2m and 2.3m employees respectively. The list demonstrates a number of trends, including the rise of […]

>Millions on the payroll