When Lehman Brothers went bust in 2008, it was the signal that the financial system was gripped by problems it could not resolve. Some commentators at the time suggested that had it been saved all would have been well and the global crisis would not have happened. It may not have happened at that moment, […]
The concept of Self-Regulation underpinned by statutory authority or supervision may seem like splitting hairs and it is. Unfortunately to preserve the freedom of the press on the one hand and to regulate it on the other, hairs have to be split. Choosing a Royal Charter as the means of doing it is a stroke of genius […]
All governments tend to be unpopular mid-term. The better ones cope because by mid-term unpopular policies are beginning to show signs of delivering positive results which will be at their booming best around the four year plus mark, when successful prime ministers have called elections and won a second or even a third term. The […]
It may seem an odd reflection, but it is the view of this blog that in spite of Huhne/Price/Rennard and who did what and why and who knew what and when and all the subtexts of scandal washing over the Party,the Lib Dems are in a good place. They had the guts to enter government, […]
This week Sergey Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister, is travelling to London for talks with William Hague, the British Foreign Secretary. The two sides are close on almost every aspect of where they would like progress to be made but have between them an impasse. The Russians see the post cold war West as meddling […]
The answer is both and neither, but of the two Vince cable has a much more coherent understanding of the problems facing the economy. Cameron is promoting a strategy which is in part succeeding, but also failing: Vince has analysed what might be going wrong and how best to deal with it. This blog was trenchant […]
There is something very serious happening in America. It is not just to do with money, although money is the catalyst. It is to do with democracy and government. It is not to do with government at every level. Democracy is the engine of almost every strata of public administration and leadership at State and local […]
Not because of ill health surely? Ill health and slowly dying more or less in public are an ancient feature of the papacy. This is perfectly natural in a religion primarily concerned with life after death, which preaches its availability to all, or to all who believe and behave in the ante-chamber of life on earth. Paedophilia, theft, […]
To fight a mid-term bye-election as a government party is difficult. To fight when the sitting MP resigned and is awaiting sentence for a crime is very difficult. To fight when, on top of all that, the headquarters of the party is engulfed in a sleazy scandal involving sex and the abuse of women, when […]
The Chancellor now has his back to the wall. Only bits of his policy are working. Growth is not, neither is the deficit reduction. This is because it was never quite as simple as that. There are two primary problems. One is that the government spends more than it receives. The other is that the […]