“At the minute, it would appear that more people are damaged by sunbeds than by nuclear power in the UK,” Sounds about right. And of course there are benefits to nuclear power beyond turning that strange orange colour.

The Conservatives have been rightly looking to Sweden for ideas on education policy, now they should be looking a little further south, to Denmark, for inspiration on tax policy. In Denmark, a centre-right government has been in power for eight years and, despite technically being in a recession, the country’s thoroughly modern market economy and pro-active labor market policies – whic...

The financial crisis keeps developing in its own way, unpredicted by the politicians and the regulators who are hoping to use it to extend their power and are, unfortunately, finding that their actions do not seem to have the results they predict. That, of course, will not stop them from taking action, any action; nor will it stop them from trying to accumulate more power. One does not need to be ...

Until now the European Union has relied on standard competition rules to deal with abuse of market power in the generation sector. We argue that relying only on general competition rules is insufficient to address those concerns, given the specific characteristics of the electricity market and the high level of concentration in some segments. As

A few weeks ago, I pointed out that if the allocation of scarce resources that have competing uses is no longer the province of voluntary market exchange, but state control, it gives all manner of power, sometimes life and death power, to state functionaries. I wrote about the issue of healthcare, but we have had another example here in socialist Britain, in the form of our state education system....

SCOTTISH ministers have backed one of the country's main power firms after it raised fears over the UK government's nuclear power subsidy.

The news of Sir Ian Blair's departure has provoked a political row over who can "hire and fire" the head of the Metropolitan Police. I don't want to rehash the arguments both ways about Blair himself but there are some wider problems. The biggest problem is that a lot of political power has been devolved (and yes, the Greater London Authority is a form of devolved power even though it is...

Some people really don’t understand about trade, do they? Britain could become a booming market for solar power from next year when the UK introduces a support system used successfully by dozens of other countries. Last week 240 MPs signed a parliamentary motion supporting the mass rollout of solar photovoltaic (PV) power. The support was the biggest

I know, my friends, that you are concerned about corporate power. So am I. So are many of my free-market economist colleagues. We simply believe, and we think history is on our side, that the best check against corporate power is the competitve marketplace and the power of the consumer dollar (framed, of course, by legal prohibitions on force and fraud). Competition plays mean, nasty corporations ...

It is possible that, having told the lie often enough, Gordon Brown and his government ministers have actually started to believe their own fiction about ability of wind power to meet our energy needs. But one quick look at the facts about wind power should be enough to make any rational person stop and question the whole basis on which the government's claims are repeatedly made. Therefore the