Labour has made a mess of its farming inheritance tax idea. It is has backfired badly. At a time when the major priority should be to maximise home production of foods of all kinds, there should be a coherent plan to do so, with an enthused and re-energised farming community on side. Instead, the small […]
Welby was right to resign as Archbishop. Nobody could possibly support his earlier decision to stay on or believe his assertions he did not know years ago exactly what Smyth was up to and what went on in those youth camps when he, Welby, was present. Unfortunately this latest drama in the public life of […]
The election of Trump, not by some quirk of electoral college distribution, but with a popular vote majority, 312 EC votes, the Senate and likely the House, was unforeseen by everyone and a political earthquake for the West. Last time Trump’s Presidency began in chaos with no plan and very little understanding of how Federal […]
Nobody saw it coming, least of all Donald Trump. But an extraordinary coalition of Americans united to give him the very kind of power that he so admires in dictators. He has the Electoral College, the Popular Vote, the House, the Senate and the Supreme Court all with majorities in his favour. The world is […]
No. Or to soften that short dismissal, not as the government would have hoped either short or long term. And it will be very difficult for the Labour party in the country to explain. But there was good stuff, buried in the noise around fuel payments and death duties on farmland. There was for the […]
I would like to think yes but I am almost sure the answer is no. But what she looks as if she is going to do is to shore up the current model and make it function not as a drag on growth, which has been the case since the 2008 crash, but as an […]
Money is what any economy is about. Because who has it and what it is used for shapes not only the social structure but also the destiny of the nation. Some countries exercise control of all the financial levers which determine the shape of their economic model and, as already discussed in a previous post, […]
There was a time when debt was considered to be not a good thing. But times have very much changed. Now debt is so much a part of the economic structure that it almost operates as a second currency. Not only is the government in debt, borrowing is also the foundation of business. It is […]
What is money? It is not a thing. It is a measure. It measures values of all economic activity including services, labour, assets, goods, skills, knowledge. This list is another seemingly endless recital. But the key element is that, like centimetres or grams, without something to measure, it has no value in itself. In past […]
Great Britain, as it was then mostly known, was the leader of the industrial revolution. We assembled the largest empire in the history of the world, out of our ability to build ships and railways and every single component of both manufacturing and consumption. Self sufficiency and independence were a given. Now, manufacturing accounts for […]