Who are your heroes? Thatcher, Churchill, Disraeli, Blair? Or perhaps you prefer Burke, or Mill, or Locke? How good are you at understanding why those that are heroes to your seem like villains to others, or why some that seem mundane to you are heroes to others? Do you understand what a hero really is? Let […]
Were you in Eastleigh? I was. It was cold. I wanted to pledge that, if there were a Conservative victory, within just months we would see warmer weather. If only all political promises were so certain of fulfilment. But they aren't – and often events are no more under the control of politicians than is […]
Dear Robert, Thankyou for your charming letter. It's always a pleasure to debate with someone so measured and courteous. I have had an interest in the comparative merits of reduced rates and raising the income tax threshold for a long time. My first published piece on the topic was the income tax and NI section […]
Follow Andrew on Twitter. So the AAA has gone. Osborne said everyone should judge him as Chancellor and the government as a whole by whether we reduced the deficit and kept the AAA rating. Well, the deficit now seems certain to rise in 2012/13 compared with 2011/12, and the AAA has been lost. Some Labour […]
By Andrew Lilico. If you heard some composer of modern music were directing an orchestra playing music on cash registers, would you expect that to be worth listening to, or pretentious rubbish – an artistic dead-end? I would instinctively assume the latter, as I expect would most people. Yet when we hear the classic opening sequence […]
Follow Andrew Lilico on Twitter. Shortly after David Cameron was elected as party leader in 2005, I attended a Bow Group event at which some senior party figures explained how they were intending to change our political strategy following Cameron's election. At that event I made myself no friends at all, and generated not a […]
Follow Andrew on Twitter. Thank heavens that's over. If I never hear the words "equal marriage" again until doomsday, it'll still be too soon. On the second reading I make it that Cameron had 136 MPs vote against him vs 127 against, with 42 abstensions. In the aftermath of the vote, many Cameroons declared that […]
Civil partnerships were introduced with almost no fuss, bringing to proper culmination a process that extended from the decriminalisation of homosexual relations, through equalisation of the age of consent, to civil partnership – a state form of gay marriage. Almost everyone was content with that. Male civil partners routinely spoke of their "husbands", invitations to […]
Follow Andrew on Twitter. In the main political discussions about economic questions this week, two important related fallacies have been repeated. Here I seek to unpack and expose them. Here's the first: "If the government taxes the rich to give money to the poor, that increases GDP." A number of commentators took exception to my […]
Household income and expenditure needs can be variable from year to year. Some years income-earners become unemployed or temporarily sick and income is low. Some years there are sudden major expenditure items, such as houses or divorces. We can call these "negative shocks". Some years income-earners get high bonuses or dividends, or inherit money. Some […]
Follow Andrew on Twitter. Jonathan Portes is head of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, an overtly and devoutly Keynesian thinktank greatly respected by UK economists. He has occasionally been accused of being biased in his economic analysis. That seems to me to be a deeply unfair and confused allegation, since it is […]
Follow Andrew Lilico on Twitter. So we're going for a renegotiation-then-rerferendum strategy. OK. Some of us may be doubtful now as to whether any adequate renegotiation could be achieved (and what I write below might make why even clearer), but since we are going to attempt to renegotiate, let's proceed in good faith for now and […]
In response to the latest mild gossip about highly hypothetical leadership challenges to Cameron we've had the usual chorus of responses: "Have the Tories learned nothing?", "Do these Right-wingers not comprehend that Cameron's failing has been not to drag his party enough to the centre, not dragging it too far!" and most commonly of all "How […]
Follow Andrew on Twitter. In October 1962, as the Conservative government negotiated (unsuccessfully) for Britain to join the European Economic Community, Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell declared that Britain's joining would mean "the end of Britain as an independent European state, the end of a thousand years of history!" In 1970, the Conservatives won the General Election […]
I've argued vigorously against deposit insurance ever since 2007. A bank deposit is a loan to a bank. If you loan money to a chip shop and it goes bust, you'll own a chip shop. If you loan money to a bank and it goes bust, you should own a bank. Deposit insurance of fractional […]