Sunday Times: Alistair Darling swings the axe

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For longer-term gains, Tom Clougherty, executive director of the Adam Smith Institute, the Thatcher-ite think tank, would be bolder. “There’s plenty of government spending that could be ditched altogether," he said. “Do we need a business department that does nothing for business at £3 billion a year? Do we need to spend £3 billion on culture?"

Published in the Sunday Times here

Sunday Herald: Children of the revolution

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Everyone underestimated Thatcher's resolve to deregulate and break the power of the state. Like council house sales, privatisation had been the preserve of right-wing think tanks, such as the Adam Smith Institute. Most economists believed that a modern economy required significant state ownership to regulate the free market.

Published in the Sunday Herald here

Telegraph.co.uk: Happy Easter! Hundreds of CCTV cameras are watching you this Good Friday

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Eamonn Butler, a director of the Adam Smith Institute, has just completed what he calls an "alternative Easter egg hunt for CCTV cameras" on the ancient Procession route from Westminster Abbey to Westminster Cathedral... Mr Butler, author of the Rotten State of Britain, walked the Procession this week and counted 155 CCTV cameras. "If I had better eyesight and a pair of binoculars, I could probably have spotted more. But with binoculars looking at CCTV cameras, I'd probably have been arrested."

Published on Telegraph.co.uk here

Evening Standard: Boris rejects bid to build housing on Green Belt

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The idea to ease the capital's housing shortage will be studied in a BBC documentary called England's Green and Pleasant Land which will be shown on Easter Monday. Proposed by the independent Adam Smith Institute, the idea is that woodlands are created alongside housing developments.

Published in The Evening Standard here

Telegraph.co.uk: No wonder we fear and hate children

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In his excellent new book, The Rotten State of Britain, Eamonn Butler points out that throughout history every generation has complained about the next. What is new is a welfare state that has absolved parents, especially fathers, of responsibility for their offspring, a system that encourages unsuitable people to have children and then discard them (people who the RSPCA would not allow to keep pets), and one in which the law does not back up adults who discipline children.

Published on Telegraph.co.uk here

Independent on Sunday: Matthew Bell: The IoS Diary

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No one escapes suspicion, least of all respectable academics such as Dr Eamonn Butler, Director of the Adam Smith Institute. In an embarrassing indictment of the surveillance culture he has just written a book about, Butler was last week detained by police for, er, walking along the street. Ironically the incident occurred while he was being interviewed about his book, The Rotten State of Britain. "We'd finished the inside shots, so we went outside to do some set-ups of me walking down the street," he tells me. "After about two minutes up screeched a red police car, and two armoured officers got out to ask our business. Pretty obvious, I'd have thought, since the cameraman had a huge camera on a tripod and the interviewer was carrying one of those microphones like a shaggy dog." Officers explained the offenders had been captured on at least four different security cameras, and they were merely following procedure.

Published in The Independent on Sunday here