News Round-Up
12 July 2025
by Toby Young
Emergency Exit at English Heritage
12 July 2025
by Mike Wells
We're publishing an original article today by two social scientists – Professor Donald S. Siegel and Professor Robert M. Sauer – about the disgraceful behaviour of Britain's teaching unions over the past 15 months.
by Dr. Donald S. Siegel and Dr. Robert M. Sauer In his seminal article in 1971 on the economic theory of regulation, the Nobel Laureate George Stigler of the University of Chicago argued that government agencies were often “captured” by the industries they were designed to regulate. Before Stigler, the common view was that noble regulators worked assiduously to correct “market failures”, in order to promote the public interest. Stigler argued that if regulators have other goals in mind besides promoting the public interest (e.g., covering up their own government failure or enhancing their power, prestige, budget and future income) they will eventually represent the interests of the industry they are charged to regulate. This cynical behaviour of regulators is referred to as “regulatory capture”. It is what leads to a “revolving door” between defence contractors and the Ministry of Defence, pharmaceutical companies and the MHRA, and large energy firms and the Environment Agency. When there is regulatory capture, the interests of firms become more important than the public interest, which results in a net loss to society. Traditionally, capture theory applies mainly to private sector interests, i.e., firms and industries. However, capture theory can be equally applied to public sector unions. In the U.S., it was recently discovered that the American Federation of Teachers and the CDC have colluded on school ...
Following further pressure from SAGE on delaying Britain's unlock, the Prime Minister has said that Number 10 may have to "wait" for more data before pushing ahead with ending the lockdown.
Facebook has been accused by a Conservative MP of "showing its true and ugly colours" and smothering free speech to cosy up to China as it did a U-turn on its ban on posts debating whether Covid-19 could be man-made.
More than 28 million people booked appointments with their GP in March making it one of the busiest months ever, and practices expect to remain this busy for some time due to the patient backlog caused by lockdowns.
As Cummings lobbed his grenades yesterday, I kept asking: How come we haven’t heard about these scandals before? Why haven't BBC News, ITN, Channel 4 News and Sky News exposed these scandals? Could Ofcom be to blame?
Last year, many journalists dismissed the Covid lab-leak theory as conspiratorial nonsense. But if we are to avoid another pandemic, we must take the theory more seriously and ensure it is investigated, says Matt Ridley.
Northern Ireland has become the first part of the U.K. to offer appointments for Covid vaccines – including that made by AstraZeneca – to its entire adult population.
A summary of all the most interesting stories that have appeared about the virus in the past 24 hours – not just in Britain, but around the world.
The claim, repeated by Dominic Cummings to MPs yesterday, that without a lockdown in March 2020 "the NHS is going to be smashed in weeks" is demonstrably false. Infections were declining even as the words were spoken.
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