Welcome to Matt Ridley's Blog

My Times column, December 23, 2013:

There is a common thread running through many recent stories: paedophilia at Caldicott prep school and in modern Rochdale, the murders of Lee Rigby in Woolwich and by Sergeant Alexander Blackman in Afghanistan, perhaps even segregation of student audiences and opposition to the badger cull. The link is that people are left stranded by changing moral standards, because morality is always evolving.

My recent speech in the House of Lords on the dangers of too much regulatory precaution over electronic cigarettes has sparked a huge amount of interest among "vapers". I am reprinting the speech here as a blog:

I congratulate my noble friend Lord Astor, on securing this debate. It is an issue of much greater importance than the sparse attendance might imply and one that is growing in importance. I have no interest to declare in electronic cigarettes: I dislike smoking and have never done it. I have only once tried a puff on an e-cigarette, which did nothing for me. I am interested in this issue as a counterproductive application of the precautionary principle. I should say that I am indebted to Ian Gregory of Centaurus Communications for some of the facts and figures that I will cite shortly.

There are, at the moment, about 1 million people in this country using electronic cigarettes, and there has been an eightfold increase in the past year in the number of people using them to try to quit smoking. Already, 15% of ex-smokers have tried them, and they have overtaken nicotine patches and other approaches to become the top method of quitting in a very short time. The majority of those who use electronic cigarettes to try to quit smoking say that they are successful.

My Times column on how earthlings communicate with life in space:

The Hubble telescope has revealed that Europa, a moon of Jupiter, has fountains of water vapour near one of its poles, which means its ocean might not always be hermetically sealed by miles-thick ice, as previously assumed.

Europa’s huge ocean, being probably liquid beneath the ice, has long been the place in space thought most favourable to life, so the prospect of sampling this Jovian pond for bugs comes a little closer. My concern is a touch more mundane. Who’s in charge of the response down here when we do find life in space?

My fellow Times writer the cricketer Ed Smith posed me a very good question the other day. How many of the people born in the world in 1756 could have become Mozart? (My answer, by the way, was four.) So here’s a similar question: how many Britons born in 1964, if educated at Eton and Balliol, could have achieved what Boris Johnson has achieved? It’s clearly not all of them; it’s probably not one; but it’s not a big number.

My point? There is little doubt that Boris Johnson is a highly intelligent man, notwithstanding his inability to cope with a radio ambush of IQ test questions, and that he would be a highly intelligent man even if he had not gone to Eton and Balliol — barring extreme deprivation or injury.

The recent burst of interest in IQ, sparked first by Dominic Cummings (Michael Gove’s adviser), and then by Boris, has been encouraging in one sense. As Robert Plomin, probably the world’s leading expert on the genetics of intelligence, put it to me, there used to be a kneejerk reaction along the lines of “you can’t measure intelligence”, or “it couldn’t possibly be genetic”. This time the tone is more like: “Of course, there is some genetic influence on intelligence but . . .”

My Times column was on the likely effect of weaker oil and gas prices on competitiveness:

The Chancellor is to knock £50 off the average energy bill by replacing some green levies with general taxation and extending the timescale for rolling out others. On the face of it, the possibility that global energy prices may start to fall over the next few years might seem like good political news for him, and some of the chicken entrails do seem to be pointing in that direction. There is, however, a political danger to George Osborne in such trends .

For Government strategists reeling from the twin blows of Ed Miliband’s economically illiterate but politically astute promise of an energy bill freeze and the energy companies’ price hikes, the prospect of lower wholesale energy prices might seem heaven sent. But in many ways it only exacerbates their problems, for the Government is right now fixing the prices we will have to pay for nuclear, wind and biomass power for decades to come. And it is fixing those prices at quite a high level.

My Times column is on immigration:

It looks as if David Cameron is determined not to emulate Tony Blair over European immigration. Faced with opinion polls showing that tightening immigration is top of the list of concerns that voters want the Prime Minister to negotiate with Europe, he is going to fight to keep a Romanian and Bulgarian influx out as Mr Blair did not for Poles in 2004. It is the ideal ground for him to pick a fight with Brussels.

One reason is that he now has more political cover on the issue of immigration. It is no longer nearly as “right wing” an issue as it once was, though popular enough with UKIP voters. Migration as a political issue seems itself to be migrating across the political spectrum from right to centre, if not left. Where once any kind of opposition to immigration was seen by left-wing parties and the BBC as just a proxy for racism, increasingly it is now a subject for real debate.