News and Updates

It’s time to cheer the Environment Agency.  At a moment when it would have been easy for its senior leadership to be distracted by a deluge of public criticism over huge sewage discharges into rivers and onto beaches, reports of...

You'll likely have read that Tata Steel is closing two blast furnaces in Port Talbot before it has built the taxpayer subsidised electric arc furnaces to replace them in 2027.  By the end of the year there will be no...

2023 was a very good year for identifying plants in the wild although I did not spend enough time doing it.  I'm determined that 2024 will be better.  This is a good January resolution. Common centaury is my plant of...

I learned French at school, but not very well.  I now wish I'd tried much harder.  The school had two French teachers and one German teacher and so it all depended which form (determined by the 11+ results) you fetched...

When I used to travel to the USA regularly, I was often accused of cynicism by academic colleagues.  In response, I usually said that I was merely being sceptical, pointing out that this was an Enlightenment virtue much needed if...

Did you see the news of the UK's becoming the first G20 economy to halve its greenhouse gas emissions with the average household using less energy than in the mid-1990s – even when you factor in imports?  The UK's output...

In our house, Mrs Thatcher gets a reasonably balanced obituary.  One persistent negative feature is regret that her policy of selling council houses – which we welcomed — was not balanced by an equivalent house-building programme to ensure a continuity...

Glory Be.  The DfE has published guidance for schools on sex and gender which says that schools must tell students that biological sex is a fact, whereas gender identity is merely a set of contested beliefs linked to the equally...

Thank goodness that's all over for another year.  How effective the meeting will prove to have been we shall see in time, but on balance I remain positive.  As good as might realistically have been hoped for, given all the...

The Government aims to install 600,000 heat pumps a year from 2028 as gas heating is phased out.  That is, it plans that the public will pay for and install these in their homes.  This is not going well despite...