Labour achieved a stunning breakthrough on June 8th, denying the Tories their expected victory. Now the May government totters forward, propped up by the DUP, with a Cabinet split over Brexit and austerity and a Tory party split between the hard cliff edge Brexiteers and those with a bit more common sense. The only unifying […]
Set in the mid nineteen nineties, this fast moving thriller lifts the curtain on sex, sleaze and corruption in high places. Tor Raven’s novel captures the mood of those times with a host of fictional characters who engage in political intrigue, money laundering and murder, pursued by an Irish investigative journalist and his girlfriend, […]
Public Inquiries have fallen into disrepute. They take too long and even longer to deliver a conclusion. Rarely does that conform with what everybody who heard the evidence would have themselves concluded. They cost a fortune and are then forgotten. Occasionally they work; Bloody Sunday (in the end) and Scarman come to mind. But Scott, […]
I, like many others, find the arguments from distinguished economists, over whether and how to end austerity, quite limited and often confusing. So I am going to throw into the argument some simple principles of my own. Since economics is a cause and effect discipline rather than an exact science, anyone can contribute. You cannot […]
The Bank of England’s Financial Policy Committee is worried, with due cause, at the ballooning level of personal debt, which risks turning into a disaster in the event of a change in the economic climate. There is no doubt there are storm clouds on the horizon, but there is no agreement on the direction of […]
This Blog has been sceptical that the DUP would sign a deal with May. But they have been helped on their way by a one billion pound cash handout. To buy power with the most bigoted and provocative political party in the UK, is just about the sorriest outcome of an election in the history […]
First things first. Grenfell Tower need not have happened if notice had been taken of tenants and occupiers, and proper judgment had been exercised about fire safety measures during and after the refurbishment. There is little doubt that both local and national governments have questions to answer; the police are now investigating and there is […]
Set in the mid nineteen nineties, this fast moving thriller lifts the curtain on sex, sleaze and corruption in high places. Tor Raven’s novel captures the mood of those times with a host of fictional characters who engage in political intrigue, money laundering and murder, pursued by an Irish investigative journalist and his girlfriend, the […]
May was in a strong position before the snap election. But her egocentric personality and intellectual isolation demanded a personal mandate, not a hand-me-down from Cameron. Moreover rebel Tories on both sides of the Brexit argument in a party chronically split for decades on this issue, meant that troublemakers could inflict defeat upon the government […]
The dreadful fire at Grenfell Tower, an event which becomes more shocking with each new day, is the final act in a process which began in innocence, but has ended with a terrible truth told in the deaths of innocent men, women and children, burned alive in their homes in the middle of a summer […]