This Blog has already advanced the view that the form of independence which Alex Salmond is offering to the Scottish people is a pig in a poke, since his model of a free Scotland sharing the pound would be dominated by the economic policy of Westminster, whose parliament and government would contain no Scottish MPs […]
Once again the question of NHS funding has been raised. The ring fence is shown to be diluted by the fact that the increasing numbers being treated offsets the maintenance of expenditure limits, so that the NHS is actually suffering from a year by year decrease, or will do unless something is done. This brings […]
George Osborne said yesterday that house prices could go on rising for ten years. If the rise is greater than inflation, the economic outcome will be no better than a series of booms and busts, with such side-effects as to cripple the global competiveness of the economy. For example, if average house prices rose at […]
A spat has broken out in Westminster because the current chair of Ofsted is not having her contract renewed. She and many others allege this is because she is a Labour supporter and she is to be replaced by someone who is better disposed towards Tory ideals. So? This is the kind of argument that […]
The Ukraine is caught up in a political crisis arising out of its history as a country with a turbulent past and disagreement about its aspirations for the future. Its population is split between a majority in the east, mainly of Russian ethnicity who lean towards Moscow both culturally and economically, and a majority in the […]
As this blog has said repeatedly, you cannot have a currency without a government. The Eurozone thought you could. There are in history few more spectacular examples of wrong thinking. Retaining sovereignty while giving it up to fiscal governance by some federal structure is on one level impossible and on another inefficient. All of this […]
Yesterday I posted a warning about the nature of the economic recovery in the UK. Today it is worth looking at the issue at the heart of the failure, since the end of WWII, to establish sustained economic renewal not characterised by boom, bust and most recently, crash. It is the over valuation by markets, […]
Politically the Coalition can take justified comfort in the strong performance, relative to weakness elsewhere, of the UK economy and if this can be sustained it will place the Coalition parties in pole position for the general election next year. Unfortunately it is not a simple as that. There are other political issues and they […]
If a novelist set out to write a story about a political party cutting its own throat, the writer would be hard pressed to invent a more astonishing chain of events than that which now transfixes Westminster. The Lib Dems, having built a reputation as a sensible party with level headed, if not exciting people […]
There is something deeply troubling about the disclosure in the newly released papers from the Thatcher government era showing that the claim by the N.U.M. that there was a hit list of seventy odd pits, ridiculed at the time by officials at the very highest level, was true. Government in a democracy must be based […]