This post risks an ungracious tone, a few days after learning that Trump’s first trade deal is with the UK.

A little example of what near everyone gets wrong about trade.

We’ve spent most of the last century with the people of this country stating they’d like to live in houses with a nice front and back garden - and the planners, the authorities, insisting that they’re going to build flats, apartments, for everyone.

Covering car parks with solar panels. Well, OK. From direct observation it is possible to note this is much more common in Iberia than the UK.

The recent mauling the Conservative Party candidates took in the local elections has been attributed by different commentators to different things.

On 8 May 1899, in Vienna, Friedrich Hayek was born. He would become the dominant intellectual influence of the later twentieth century and is still influential in economic and political theory today.

Note what the actual claim is though. In their analysis of whether environmental laws hold up building the government has not pointed to any academic evidence that it does so.

It is not coincidence that progress in science, the free market, social progress and evolution itself are all linked by a selective death rate.

We’ve suggested before that Big Government has allowed every fool with a prejudice to impose that upon the other 75 million of us.

There is a case for saying that there has been progress in such areas as science, medicine and engineering because we know what their aims are, but that there has been no ‘progress’ in art because it has no goal.

This isn’t what Baroness Batters - formerly head of the National Farmers’ Union - means to say but it is what she does say: Batters said: “One of the long-term and growing challenges to farming is that land is often more profitable for anything else, other than producing food.”

Apparently beer may only be sold in half pint cans.