John McDonnell, Labour’s Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, wrote an article for the Independent last weekend in which he pointed out the folly and failure of George Osborne’s austerity fetish, and told us about the new economic strategy that the Labour Party is currently devising as an alternative to the Tory government’s slash and burn…
For most of the last 30 years it looked like socialism had been soundly beaten by its old adversary, capitalism. From the mid 1980s when Margaret Thatcher’s second government defeated Britain’s striking coal miners, until around 2009 when the extent of the banking crisis had sunk in, free-market capitalism was the only game in town.…
Jeremy Corbyn’s unexpected leap to the front of the Labour Party leadership race has inadvertently created a modern miracle: it has united every organ of the mainstream media from the Guardian to the Telegraph, and every politician to the right of Dennis Skinner. They all agree that his plans for the economy are bonkers. If…
Late at night on the 20th of July the Conservative government’s Welfare Reform Bill was endorsed by the House of Commons thanks to the abstention of most of the official opposition’s MPs. The acting Labour leader, Harriet Harman, instructed her party to abstain because she thinks that the Labour Party will be condemned to the…
Last month’s general election for the UK parliament provided a harsh reminder to some political parties that electoral success is all about telling a good story. The narrative has to be one that the electorate wants to believe or, at the very least, one that appeals to their common sense. The Scottish National Party won…
All around the world government ministers are obsessed by the size of their deficits: the gap between revenue and spending that can only be filled by borrowing money. This year’s deficit gets added to all of the previous years’ deficits, which accumulate into an ever-expanding mountain of debt. As the debt piles up, so too…
http://anotherangryvoice.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/green-party-monetary-policy-ahead.html: A very pertinent article from Another Angry Voice pointing out that the Green Party is the only one in the UK that has recognised the stupidity of our monetary system. He explains that the Conservatives, in their ignorance, are amplifying the ill-effects of the system thanks to their idiotic Help To Buy policy while…
http://anotherangryvoice.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/universal-basic-income-sanctions.html :: Here’s an article from Another Angry Voice in which he compares means-tested benefits with universal basic income. The comments are interesting in that they concentrate on the problems of funding UBI rather than attacking the concept of it. Are we getting to the point where the argument for UBI hs been won in…
In the recent referendum on Scottish independence 63% of those eligible to vote declined the opportunity to make Scotland an independent nation (c.2 million voted against and another 0.8 million didn’t bother to turn out). On the face of it this might look like an overwhelming majority of Scots are in favour of continuing with…
The Scottish independence referendum was about different things to different people, but a common theme was the hope of finding better ways of doing things: ways of tackling poverty and inequality; ways of moving government closer to communities, of making democracy more responsive; ways of encouraging an economy to thrive. For many people who are…
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