The big political theme of my life has been the rise of free market values and the decline of collectivism. When I was first old enough to be aware of what was going on politically, in the seventies, the state played a big role in things. It would intervene and manage things quite extensively. The
Advice to Young Men is one of the less well known of Cobbett’s books. It was published in paperback in the eighties when there was a bit of a Cobbett revival, but aside from that it has rarely troubled the shelves of bookshops. It would be a stretch to say it is a forgotten classic,
Margaret Thatcher was buried today, and was given a burial that was consciously modelled on that of Winston Churchill. It was fitting in one way – it was a bit of a jarring anachronism. And that is pretty much what the woman was. The cliché that the media hatched for coverage of her passing was
I love banking bail outs, and so should you. What would life be like without them? Without bail outs bankers would have to behave like the rest of us, and where is the fun in that? Of course, banking could be a pretty straight forward job. You look after people’s savings by investing them in