Thanks to a healthy combination of private sector innovation and pragmatic public health policy, the UK had, for a long time, led the way in reducing smoking rates. Over the past decade, they have plummeted from 20% in 2012 to just 14.7% in 2021. 

Nixon to China is not an iron rule it’s just an observation about politics. It’s those who have their rightward flank protected who can make a move towards communists. Equally, it’s only those who have their leftward - or planning - flank protected who can do this:

Some truth-telling from the Member for Great Yarmouth: ‘By a continuous process of inflation… governments can confiscate secretly and unobserved an important part of the wealth of their citizens.’

From Kate Bingham, the only person to have done something successfully in recent years through governance - largely, by not being like government - a useful description of the basic problem:

This is one of those terrible ideas that needs to be stamped upon, hard. Rachel Reeves’s Treasury is looking to keep millions of pounds levied on polluting water companies in fines that were meant to be earmarked for sewage cleanup, the Guardian has learned.

Terrors: In December the ONS pushed back the publication of the overhauled labour market statistics to 2027, the latest of several postponements from spring 2024.

We thought this was interesting: The Conservative government spent more than £130m on IT and data systems for the scheme to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, which will never be used, the Observer can reveal.

We are told that: The United States on Friday grounded SpaceX’s Starship and ordered Elon Musk’s company to investigate why the spaceship spectacularly disintegrated in a fiery cascade over the Caribbean during its latest test mission.

This is untrue: And rarely have stories named the ultimate authors of this disaster: ExxonMobil, Chevron and other fossil fuel companies that have made gargantuan amounts of money even as they knowingly lied about their products dangerously overheating the planet.

Lord Mandelson is going to Washington as our Ambassador. What is he up to? We cannot know, but here are some ideas about how he might spend his time.

‘Our government is in thrall to private sector greed.’ This is the narrative spun by some tax commentators and outlets like the Ethical Consumer and Paid to Pollute, and given by the mainstream media.

This seems rather alarmist: Without urgent action to accelerate decarbonisation, remove carbon from the atmosphere and repair nature, the plausible worst-case hit to global economies would be 50% in the two decades before 2090, the IFoA report said.