As this Blog has already remarked, it looks as if the Yes campaign of Alex Salmond is now without all of its wheels. England has ruled out a currency union and the President of the EU commission pointed up serious problems about joining Europe with any kind of a smooth passage, if at all. The […]
It is ironic that at a time when the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England both are in crisis, the two men at the helm of each in England, Archbishop, soon to be Cardinal, Vincent Nichols and Archbishop Justin Welby, are the strongest leaders either church has had for decades. Both comment freely […]
The decision of the senior Church of England bishops to deny to its gay members blessings to support civil gay marriage and to further deny its clergy the right to gay marriage and also to continue with the edict that civil partnerships among clergy are acceptable ‘provided the partners remain celibate’ is ungenerous, cruel, unfeeling, […]
In the chaos and distress now experienced in large parts of the country as the result of quite unprecedented weather patterns, among the multitude of things which have become clear, one above all stands out. The infrastructure, whether it is drains, power lines, railways or the maintenance of natural systems like dykes and rivers is […]
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 […]