WE MUST NOT FORGET Whilst we engage in the ceremony and formality of Remembrance Sunday, with the poppies, the parades and the silence, our thoughts turn to those in our own families who gave their lives. My father fought throughout and survived WWI. My uncle, his brother, was killed on the Somme, so I never had […]
The Price of Big Government Many U.K. readers will have seen the excellent Channel 4 documentary by Mark Durkin last evening which brought home the scale of the public debt here. I have already explored these figures many times, so I will not repeat them. The programme examined in depth the fact that big government (as […]
Quantitative Easing America came in for a good deal of criticism in Seoul for its latest batch of QE from the Fed. Quite right too. To expand the money supply whilst spending at cosmic levels on borrowed money risks a very bid bang indeed. Even if there is no explosion economically, it further damages the economic […]
G. 20 and the Balance of Power It is clear from the reports of goings on at the G.20 that the balance of economic power has shifted away from the United States. The condition of its own economy, the fact that it was at the heart of the global financial crisis and the fact that the […]
G20 in Seoul Correspondents report that the U.S. is on the back foot at this summit and does not exhibit the clout of previous summits. This is not surprising. In the height of the crisis the priority was to stop a global financial collapse. Now it is how to build recovery. In determining that path, […]
The £10 Trillion Debt and Flat Tax. PwC has just published the result of an in depth financial survey which confirms what I and others have been saying since the start of the financial crisis, except their figures which are worked from scratch, are worse than mine, which came from the IMF. I have stated […]
The Falklands and the Retired Admirals A group of very distinguished retired Navy grandees, one an ex- minister, have written to the Times complaining that the scrapping of the out of date Harrier force places the Falklands at risk from invasion. There are two issues here. One political, one military. They are wrong on both. […]
President Bush George W. Bush has published his memoirs. All of this is designed to improve his image. It might do this if we caught a glimpse of a wiser man, who could see that things did not work out as planned. Instead we saw self justification for a range of bad judgement calls and […]
Mid-Staffs the NHS and the U.S. If this heading baffles, read on. The public enquiry into, literally, hundreds of deaths at this Staffordshire hospital, due to inadequate care, has begun. Everyone even vaguely connected will be called to give evidence, including senior NHS managers and even Ministers. It will be held in public. This is all very good […]
Bishops off to Rome There has been a certain amount of propoganda among the players in Church politics (that other form of politics so closely woven into the history of our democracy in these islands) that the good old Cof E is actually a Catholic church. In the sense that the word catholic means open […]