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Since becoming Chancellor, Reeves has gone out of her way to emphasise the need for growth and how important it is that the City plays its part. Not just those working there but the regulators. The FCA has certainly got the message. In July 2024, it proposed relaxing the current rules so that directors of listed companies who make misleading profit projections in prospectuses will not be liable if they have only been negligent rather than reckless or deliberately dishonest….

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“They slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God.” Those words from the poem, High Flight by John Magee, were said by President Reagan on the afternoon of Tuesday 28 January 1986. They ended his address to the nation after the Challenger Shuttle exploded barely 2 minutes after its launch earlier that day. The seven astronauts on board did not disappear into the sky. As described in Adam Higginbotham’s magisterial, detailed and gripping account of the tragedy and…

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Will the Supreme Court (“SC”) deprive women of their sex-based rights? This week we have a hearing which will be the UK’s equivalent of the US’s Dobbs case, which limited rights which women had taken for granted for a long time. (Contrary to what some may rush to assume, this case is not about trans rights but about the rights of women – 51% of the population and not, therefore, a trivial matter. Nor is it about culture. Legal rights…

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In Britain since the 1961 Suicide Act, a person can choose the time and manner of their death without being criminalised (if they fail). Plenty (mostly men) do so: 6,069 suicides in 2023, up on 5,642 in 2022, the highest rate since 1999. The data and analysis can be found here and here. There are some people who are unable to do so because of their almost total physical incapacity. Worth noting that all the very sad court cases brought to change the…

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Forget the naysayers. The Archbishop of Canterbury should not resign. He stands in the now well-worn – if not at all honourable (and who now cares anyway about quaint nonsense such as “honour“) – tradition of leaders of organisations in charge when something dreadful happens but Who Are Not To Blame. Why should he fall on his mitre when no-one else ever does. No. No. Clinging on like a limpet using a variety of grotesque shameless excuses is the British…

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If you want to understand (and you really should want to) how gender ideology – the belief that men can turn into women simply by saying so based on some internal feeling they have – captured so many public institutions and members of the political class in recent years, how, in particular, it led to the Gender Recognition Reform Act in Scotland (blocked by the UK government), how Scottish women mobilised and fought back against it and the price they…

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The Post Office Scandal – Where Now? It would be a glorious apotheosis of the great big Post Office scandal if all the defendants stood trial together in a specially constructed cage, like those used for Mafia trials in Sicily  – investigators, lawyers, consultants, accountants, Board members, civil servants, Ministers, the whole damned lot of them.  Sadly, it ain’t gonna happen. It would not be very British, and in any case, there isn’t a cage or court room big enough. The numbers…

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This week the government will – after the usual pro forma apology – finally announce payment of compensation to the victims and their families of the blood contamination scandal. The scandal started in the 1970’s. Three-quarters of the victims are dead. No-one has been held accountable. Other countries facing the same issue have managed to pay compensation and hold some of those responsible accountable. Inordinate delays after scandals seem to be an example of British exceptionalism at its worst. Given…

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