At last there is a sort of agreement to give Greece a kind of helping hand. It will get that besieged country past the next hurdle in the crisis strewn road its membership of the single currency demands, but it is no final answer nor, is it enough. Yet it is potentially the most important step forward […]
David Cameron did rather well at the EU summit. He had a rampant euro-sceptic mob of Tory MPs at his back and a spendthrift European commission at his front, egged on by the majority of EU members, who are net beneficiaries of the financial re-distribution mechanism at the heart of the EU. In the overall scheme of […]
To open minded people of goodwill and human compassion the decision of the Synod to block the appointment of women bishops beggars belief. In fact the majority of every voting component of the church and its members wish to proceed, but a small and selfish minority have been able to exploit checks in the voting […]
Here we go once again. Each side blames the other. You can open a spreadsheet, setting out the flash points in the order in which they occur and find that each side claims the other is responsible for the flare up. This time it was the assassination of the Hamas military leader, but that attack was in […]
When the Bank Of England uses newly made electronic money to buy government debt to the tune of £375 billion, the practical effect of the move is that the debt is paid off. If you buy your own mortgage for its face value, the money you owe on your house is due to you, so […]
The Republican party is once again talking about cutting taxes as a means of stimulating the economy. They are beginning to extol the virtues of Ronald Reagan’s trickle down economic theory. This would be good if it had worked. It did not. The growth it produced was fuelled by debt and asset inflation. Deficits grew […]
This is a very good victory for President Obama. As this blog has said before, the election was Romney’s to lose and he lost it. It was much tighter than the electoral college tally suggests, but even so the current showing of the President ahead of the challenger by over 2.5 million votes is convincing. […]
If we take the politics out of it, the British economy is fighting back hard against a staggering catalogue of problems brought about by flawed government going back decades. It is once again growing, as well as cutting, but like America, the growth is fragile. There is, like America, uncertainty as to whether the government […]
This piece of very good news was not widely dwelt on by commentators, but it does represent a refreshing realism, so absent from the Foreign Office whenever it thinks about eastern Europe. As this blog has repeatedly asserted, Russia is an integral part of what we might call Greater Europe and forms its eastern frontier as Britain is […]
There is no doubt that the standard in English which the current modular system of GCSE exams produces, falls short of what many young people need to get a good, or indeed any, job, unless they achieve the top grades. This is why Michael Gove is changing the system. Quite separately there is the question […]