Today

30 Jul 2022
Does Nadine Dorries understand her Online Safety Bill?

‘Read the Bill’. That was the response I got from Nadine Dorries, the Secretary for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, when I warned of the danger her beloved Online Safety Bill poses to free speech. Dorries, a firm supporter of Liz Truss’s bid for the Tory leadership, indicated on Thursday that Truss backs the Bill in its unamended state. Numerous civil liberties organisations have campaigned against elements of the Bill from day one. And yet Dorries argues that the Bill will make free speech more secure, because somehow, she sees something they do not. Granted, the Bill does not impose outright, sweeping bans on speech. But what the department and, evidently, the Secretary of State do not seem to understand is that the real danger lies with the subtle pressures on free speech that the Bill will impose.

Does Nadine Dorries understand her Online Safety Bill?

Tuesday

16 Mar 2021
David Davis: Scotland – A deficit of power and accountability

For the past few months, Scotland has been transfixed by the Holyrood inquiry seeking the truth of what went wrong with the investigations into the former First Minister, Alex Salmond.  The inquiry is investigating matters of the most serious kind. Serious for the proper handling of sexual harassment complaints in Scotland. Serious for the accountability of those in positions of power, including the Scottish Government’s Permanent Secretary and its Lord Advocate. And serious, if the former First Minister’s claims hold any water, for the future of the present First Minister’s administration of Scotland. These matters are unquestionably something that should properly be dealt with in Holyrood. But Holyrood has great difficulties exposing what went on.

David Davis: Scotland – A deficit of power and accountability

Wednesday

14 Nov 2018
Why the Cabinet must reject Theresa May’s Brexit deal

Let’s be clear. If the Cabinet supports the Prime Minister’s proposed deal today, and they somehow manage to whip Parliament into allowing it to proceed, then a whole raft of irreversible consequences will flow from it.  This will begin the breakup of the United Kingdom, not just isolating Northern Ireland, but also undermining the Unionist cause in Scotland. The so called backstop will not actually be a backstop at all but a foundation for EU ambition to constrain our opportunities and limit our competitiveness. In Brussels they admit this privately. This deal will contrive to make the Customs Union inescapable forever and effectively trap the UK to perpetual domination from Brussels. The supposed negotiation over the future economic partnership will be deliberately slowed down to take years.

Why the Cabinet must reject Theresa May’s Brexit deal

Saturday

20 Feb 2010
The great bailout

Hank Paulson’s new book is called On the Brink, but it could well have been entitled Over the Edge.Hank Paulson’s new book is called On the Brink, but it could well have been entitled Over the Edge. The story of his role as US Treasury Secretary throughout the great banking crash of 2008–9 gives an impression of people being swept along by a swirling chaos of unexpected events, often completely out of control.‘This is the economic equivalent of war,’ Paulson said in the middle of the financial crisis in 2008, scrambling to find a resolution for AIG before the insurance behemoth brought down the entire economy. Warfare is certainly what it felt like. For those who lived out the financial crisis on trading desks around the world, reading Paulson’s account will be like reliving the nightmare weekend when Lehman Brothers collapsed in September 2008.

The great bailout

Wednesday

22 Apr 2009

Saturday

28 Feb 2009
A few thoughts on the apocalypse

It is hard for me not to like James Lovelock. South London grammar-school boy, walker, mountain climber, scientist and admirer of Margaret Thatcher: what is not to like? But as the creator of the Gaia hypothesis, he is arguably one of the most influential and provocative radical thinkers of the last 50 years.Forty years ago he thought up the Gaia concept, and was attacked for what people misguidedly saw as a mystical idea, when it was a very scientific concept. He was described as a maverick, which he probably took as a compliment.He is doing it again, with his new book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia (Allen Lane, £20). In it he predicts that it is too late to reverse climate change. Worse, it is approaching a tipping-point, and will soon accelerate with cataclysmic consequences.

Wednesday

2 Jul 2008
Brown’s security strategy is the worst of all worlds

It’s draconian, expensive and ineffective, says David Davis. All the evidence shows that the Prime Minister is eroding our civil liberties pointlesslyAs shadow home secretary for five years, it became an office joke that, faced with difficult policy questions, I would demand ‘get me the evidence!’ I am a scientist by training and, while 69 per cent of the public believe I took a principled stance in resigning from Parliament, that decision was also based on a rigorous empirical assessment of the evidence. The reality is that the relentless stream of repressive measures taken by this government over the last eleven years — whether 42 days pre-charge detention or any other — has not made us any safer. In many cases, they have jeopardised our security.

Saturday

21 Aug 2004
Victim nation

The compensation culture costs Britain £10 billion a year. David Davis blames the human rights industryOne hardly knows where to start. The teacher who won £55,000 from the taxpayer because she slipped on a chip. The parents of the Girl Guide who won £3,500 after singeing her fingers cooking sausages. The prisoner who successfully sued the government when he fell off the roof while trying to escape. The 200 travellers who were granted retrospective planning permission to set up a permanent camp on the edge of a small village because they had a ‘right to family life’. The serial murderer who successfully demanded the delivery of hard-core pornography to his prison cell because of his ‘right to information’. My favourite is the case of Peter Foster, the Australian conman who exposed intimate details of the Prime Minister’s family affairs and then claimed that deportation from Britain would infringe his ‘right to respect for private and family life’.