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Indoor work relief for the middle classes
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John Stuart Mill described the British Empire as “outdoor relief for the middle classes”. The phrase “indoor relief”, at the time, referred to the state-sponsored workhouse programme, which invented jobs for the poor to prevent them being idle. Mill was implying that the Empire was a gigantic job creation scheme. But in the 21st century…
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Nature ISN’T fragile – nor a bossy mother-in-law
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The Green movement needs to rethink its philosophy from the ground-up. That’s according to Peter Kareiva, a leading conservation expert and chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy, the world’s biggest environmental group. It must abandon the idea that nature is “feminine” and in particular that it’s “fragile”, he said, because not only is this artificial,…
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Who killed ITV Digital?
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After 25 years of watching the Murdoch TV empire unfold, the battle plan to beat him should be fairly obvious. You buy the best content – the most popular sport and movies – and raise lots of capital, and make watching it easy. Then you dig in for a very long fight. In other words,…
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Cameron’s ‘Google Review’ sparked by killer quote that never was
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Prime Minister David Cameron launched a sweeping review of UK intellectual property law based on an assertion – that the founders of Google believed they could "never have started their company in Britain" – he can’t support, from a source nobody can find. We know this because new information released by No 10 in response…
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Are you a Nouveau-Reithian?
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How to fund a great BBC … without creating 142,000 new criminals a year Not one Hollywood studio or record label company has ever incarcerated anyone merely for not paying for media consumption. A few years ago the entertainment industry filed civil suits against individuals, but received so much criticism it stopped. Now they target…
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Our ‘digital economy’ is still a circular firing squad
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The British ISP industry has spent a small fortune of its customers’ money fighting the people who would, in a saner world, be its business partners – only to suffer a crushing defeat. On Tuesday Lord Justice Richards threw out BT and TalkTalk’s judicial review against the 2010 Digital Economy Act. Yet as trench warfare…