Welcome to Matt Ridley's Blog

My Times column on Britain's strong track record in the life sciences:

Mitochondrial replacement therapy (misleadingly termed three-parent babies) is to be permitted by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. I’m glad. The scientists who have developed the technique, Sir Doug Turnbull, Mary Herbert and others, are friends; the work has been done partly on the premises of the International Centre for Life in Newcastle, of which I am honorary president; I took part in the parliamentary debate last year on whether it was ethical and safe; and I have met some of the families suffering from the dreadful diseases it could cure. So I have emotional skin in the game.

My Times column on the high cost of Britain's climate change policies:

We now know from three different sources that Britain’s climate and energy policy is not just too expensive but has also been dishonestly presented. Peter Lilley MP, an unusually numerate former cabinet minister, has written a devastating new report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation, published today, on the costs of Britain’s Climate Change Act 2008. It reveals “at best economic illiteracy and at worst deliberate deception” by government.

It comes as the National Audit Office has rapped the government’s knuckles for “a lack of transparency [that] has undermined accountability to parliament and consumers” in its energy policy. And a non-executive director of the former Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC), Tom Kelly, found a systemic underestimation of the costs of the policy as well as “weaknesses in the original governance arrangements that were not rectified over time, a lack of transparency and a tendency to groupthink.” No wonder DECC sat on the Kelly report for a year before releasing it.

My column on European fragmentation in the Times (5 December):

The Italian referendum and close-shave Austrian election are symptoms of a continent that may be teetering on the brink of political disintegration. It’s just possible that an empire may be collapsing before our eyes, as the Habsburg and Ottoman empires did before it, in or around the same neighbourhood.