Bacon Butty piles on to one of the notions I criticised here. Food miles are, if anything, less useful than embodied energy as a policy target – after all, a whacking 22 per cent of CO2 attributed to UK food transport originates from sea and air transport. Obviously, the first place to start, especially as…
Read More More silly metricsOne good thing about blogs is that it is difficult to get away with the standard techniques of dishonest debate. Resort to straw-man arguments, and you almost always collect a bucket of shit in short order. In national newspapers’ opinion pages, not so much. Dominic Lawson, Sunday Torygraph editor, wants the world to know he’s…
Read More Dominic Lawson: Intellectually DishonestAnyone remember this post from March last year? The Tories somehow managed to swing a deal on the freehold of their HQ in Smith Square that would have left them paying a yield of 6.42% to the buyer, a £2.2m hit to cashflow. I had originally had the impression that the deal had been suspiciously…
Read More The party of business, againTories? Tories? Did someone say Tories? Yes, they surely did..Teh Grauniad covers a speech by Alan Duncan, the shadow DTI Secretary, to the Centre for Policy Studies, on the topic of youth. Verbatim: We need to empower teachers so that they can exert the control too many parents are unwilling or unable to exert,” Mr…
Read More All you need to know about the ToriesRemember when it was meant to be a duty on us all to defend freedom of speech, Western values, the Enlightenment, democracy and probably golden retrievers as well by publishing the Danish cartoons? Well, can anyone tell me why the same sort of people – Harry’s Place/Kamm/etc – aren’t noticeably furious that Bartholomew’s Notes on…
Read More Thundering SilenceSo the Tories are going to sell Smith Square in order to pay off their chunk of those dodgy loans. That’s funny – didn’t they sell it before? Back in 2004, after Michael Howard won an election of one to become Tory leader, one of the first things he announced was that the Tories would…
Read More Future Reminiscences of a Real Estate Operator