Philippe Legrain

France’s draft plan to ban on wearing the burqa would involve a fine of €150 for wearing the full veil, Le Monde reports. Anyone forcing a woman to wear a full veil faces up to a year in prison and a €15,000 fine. Meanwhile, Belgium’s draft law would make it a crime to wear clothing [...]

Sky News are reporting that a secret study commissioned by some of Britain’s biggest banks warns that tighter banking regulation could provoke a  double-dip recession. Yet again, the big banks are attempting to blackmail the rest of the country in order to protect their licence to gamble and make monopoly profits with government guarantees. Of [...]

Amid all the worries about cheap Chinese exports undercutting Western products and costing Americans and Europeans their jobs, people often forget that China’s explosive growth also creates huge new opportunities for Westerners. A decade ago, Chinese tourists were rare birds. Now, they are the world’s fourth-biggest spenders. They spent $43.7 billion last year, 21% more [...]

I debate with Andrew Green of MigrationWatch on BBC Radio 4′s PM programme, yesterday, 29 April 2010. Bizarrely, Green lambasts the BBC for failing to give him airtime and then claims that his extremist anti-immigration group speaks for the majority of the British people. Listen to the clip here.

The Guardian, 30 April 2010. The Duke of Westminster will cheer this house price bounce. For most of us it’s divisive and unsustainable

This article appears in today’s Guardian. House prices rose by 10.5% in the 12 months to April. A typical home now costs £167,800, according to Nationwide – more than in August 2008, the month before Lehman Brothers collapsed, credit seized up and the economy fell off a cliff. It’s as if the financial crisis and the worst [...]

Once-poor countries such as Greece and Ireland were long countries of emigration. Then came the long economic boom, and they became countries of immigration – spectacularly so in Ireland’s case. But now boom has turned to bust, and people are increasingly emigrating again, as a recent BBC documentary highlighted. As Emmet Oliver pointed out in [...]

We’ve already had a raft of books delineating the economic crisis, but it takes a brave soul to suggest ways to stop the rot. Enter Philippe Legrain, a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics’ European Institute, who sets out to determine how the global economy is changing, and what reforms are needed to [...]

Calls to boycott Arizona over its outrageous new immigration are mounting, the New York Times reports. The Guardian reports that: Among those calling for a sweeping boycott was the San Francisco city attorney, Dennis Herrera, who urged city departments to look at contracts with Arizona that could be terminated. Herrera said: “Arizona has charted an [...]

Paul Krugman claims that liberals are divided on migration because: Democrats are torn individually (a state I share). On one side, they favor helping those in need, which inclines them to look sympathetically on immigrants; plus they’re relatively open to a multicultural, multiracial society. I know that when I look at today’s Mexicans and Central Americans, [...]

Goldman’s use of intelligence drawn from its unrivalled pool of market sources to trade on its own and its clients’ behalf – a strategy championed by Mr Blankfein – has been a competitive advantage. Bank executives speak of its ability to manage – even “embrace” – conflicts of interest that arise from its position at [...]

The law, which proponents and critics alike said was the broadest and strictest immigration measure in generations, would make the failure to carry immigration documents a crime and give the police broad power to detain anyone suspected of being in the country illegally. Opponents have called it an open invitation for harassment and discrimination against [...]

Though ironically they copied the image from Italy’s Northern League. Hat tip: The Straight Choice

Writing in the FT, Chris Huhne demolishes the Tories’ scaremongering about the perils of a hung parliament: It is demonstrably wrong to argue that sound economics requires single-party government… Of the 14 countries that enjoy the top AAA rating for creditworthiness with all three rating agencies – Fitch, Moody’s, and Standard and Poor’s – 10 [...]

Ken Clarke and the Tories are trying to scare people by claiming that a hung parliament would cause a crisis in the markets that could push Britain into the hands of the IMF. Yet as Cleggmania has swept Britain this week, the pound has strengthened against the euro every day, as this graph from FT.com [...]

New Statesman, 21 April 2010. Claims that Britain’s population will soon reach 70 million do not stand up to scrutiny.

From Monday’s Panorama (BBC1, 19 April 2010)

This article also appears on the New Statesman‘s blog, the Staggers. Is Britain full? In the 1930s the Daily Mail campaigned against letting in German Jews on the basis that it was; since then the UK has accommodated more than 10 million extra people. But what was once a far-right trope is rapidly becoming conventional wisdom [...]

It is outrageous that governments bailed out failed banks. There were better alternatives. But given that mistake, it is understandable that governments – and taxpayers – want to get their money back. The IMF has therefore proposed that G20 countries levy a tax on banks’ balance sheets, to pay for future bailouts or the recent [...]

China and the next five largest energy-consuming countries in East Asia could stabilise their greenhouse gas emissions by 2025 without compromising growth, according to a major new World Bank report. The report, Winds of Change: East Asia’s Sustainable Energy Future, says that an extra investment of $80bn per year – or an average of 0.8% of regional GDP [...]