(AFR) — The European Union is preparing to shore up its companies and markets against Chinese companies that try to buy European rivals or win government contracts using Beijing’s deep pockets. Brussels has long been a fierce critic of China’s subsidies to its global companies, and has been fighting Beijing through the World Trade Organization — but it is now taking matters into its own hands. “There is a growing number of instances in which foreign subsidies seem to have facilitated the...

London | A nation awaits news, its stiff upper lip a-quiver. British social media has become a bedside vigil. For unserious Boris Johnson, things have never been more serious. Around this puckish optimist, there's only gloom and anxiety. British politics since Brexit has been an extreme sport, a theatre of the absurd. The unthinkable is always thinkable now, and Britain is thinking it. The British public feels like children in a family with a mortal illness: we are told that everything is...

London | Barely three months ago, Britain voted in a majority Conservative government. You remember the Conservatives, right? Shrink the state, cut the welfare bill, slash red tape, reform the labour market, encourage competition and let the private sector flourish? That was in the world BC (before coronavirus). This selfsame Tory government is now funding employers' wage bills, expanding welfare payments, subsiding rents and looking at part-nationalisation of Britain's airlines and probably...

London | About two weeks ago, an Italian couple with a child in my son's south London year 3 class took their kid out of school. The mum furiously told the parents' WhatsApp group that we all had our heads in the sand, and we would be like Italy in a few weeks if we didn't wake up. Many of us felt she was over-reacting a bit, probably traumatised by the lockdown that was about to get under way in her home country. Who wouldn't be? We kept sending our kids to school, going to children's...