Last year, the Deep End featured a Julie Bindel article on prostitution. In a more recent article for the Spectator, she covers the same issue – in particular the failure of legalisation in the Netherlands – but makes some useful additional points. Advocates of liberalisation – whether of the law on prostitution, drug dealing or […]
Last week, our esteemed editor, Mr Timothy Montgomerie, made the case for taxing wealth in preference to income (The Times (£)). In doing so, he provoked a fierce reaction from his fellow rightwingers. The counter-arguments varied widely in their intelligence. At the stupid end of the spectrum was that old cop-out about more growth or […]
The internet is, of course, a wonderful thing. For a start, there’d be no ConservativeHome without it – and, then, where would we be? Yet, however powerful and convenient a tool of communication it may be, there is an ever-present tendency among some internet boosters to mistake the medium for the message. It is a […]
It is said that some goods are too important to be left to the market – for instance, healthcare. And, yet, there are various aspects of our health and wellbeing that we routinely entrust to private sector providers. Nutrition, for instance, or the provision of clean water. Then there’s our eyesight, which, for millions of […]
The ongoing failure of the Eurozone to collapse as widely predicted, is, for some, a bit of a head-scratcher. As noted last month on the Deep End, the deep pockets of the European Central Bank are enough to keep the money markets at bay (for the time being). But what about the ordinary people of […]
It’s a sword dangling over George Osborne’s head – the threat of agencies like Fitch, Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s to downgrade Britain’s international credit rating. Any such move would be politically embarrassing, but would it have any practical significance?Other countries, such as Japan and America, have been downgraded, but without much impact on the […]
If you’re feeling a little hoarse, it might not be some zoologically-challenged ready meal that’s sticking in your throat, but rather the first sign of an infection. If you’re really unlucky, the bug that you’ve come down with will be antibiotically-resistant – an increasing problem (and not just in our hospitals). As unacceptable as the […]
Will Hutton is in a state of shock. Writing in the Observer he explains why: “I was stunned to read in a recent IMF working paper, with the hardly catchy title Income Inequality and Current Account Imbalances, that the whole – yes the whole – of the deterioration of the British current account deficit between […]
Sweden – home of Abba, meatballs and social democracy. Well, not so much the social democracy anymore. In fact, as the Economist reports, 21st century Sweden is more of an inspiration to the right than to the left: “Sweden has reduced public spending as a proportion of GDP from 67% in 1993 to 49% today. […]
Matthew Taylor is currently chief executive of the Royal Society of Arts and, before that, was Tony Blair’s most senior policy advisor. Regarded as one of the most original and open-minded thinkers on the left, there is, of course, little room for even the best of Blairites in today’s Labour Party. Nevertheless, one must welcome […]
The US political map is famously divided between Republican ‘red states’ and Democrat ‘blue states’. Though this might be an American exception to the political colour scheme that applies elsewhere in the world, it works well geographically – given that most of the blue states are coastal. So, is there something about the oceans (or […]
It is a well-known fact that over 99 per cent immigrants to Britain come from just one country called Immigrantland (this is why they are called immigrants). Moreover, Immigrantland is remarkable for the homogeneity of its population – any one of its citizens is culturally and economically indistinguishable from any other. There’s no need to […]
In terms of the popular vote, the Republican Party has lost five of the last six presidential elections. Some might say they ought to try a different tack. However, as David Brooks points out in another brilliant column for the New York Times, change isn’t easy: “Change is hard because people don’t only think on […]
Is it possible to be excited about an issue, without taking an extreme position on it? Regular readers of the Deep End will know that is what we’ve tried to do in regard to shale gas – declining to condemn the Britain’s nascent industry as a bound-to-happen environmental disaster or to prematurely celebrate it as […]
At once accessible and complex, the writings of George Orwell are frequently misinterpreted. For instance, the concept of ‘Newspeak’ (the variant of the English language promoted by the fictional one-party state in1984) is often alluded to in condemnations of government jargon and official gobbledegook in the real world, which misses the point that the purpose of […]