When you’ve exhausted your indignation at, and despair of, the people who voted for Donald Trump please read this article by Thomas Frank which goes some way to explaining what’s just happened in the USA, why we’re in the throes of Brexit, and why the likes of Geert Wilders and Marine LePen are looking increasingly bright-eyed and…
A year ago I wrote that “Labour’s *New* Economic Strategy Makes Me Want To Scream”. With frustration, that is, not delight. Last November John McDonnell, Labour’s shiny new shadow chancellor, was telling us that diversification, innovation and public investment were going save us from the dead-end of Tory austerity. Mr. McDonnell appeared to be as…
I’m struggling to decide which of the Labour Party’s factions makes me more angry. The ship of state is wallowing adrift in uncertain seas. Captain Cameron has fainted from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the foot and his officers have scuttled off to hide in the heads hoping that someone else will clean up the…
Five hundred and twenty six years ago we were at war. I say “we” because I happen to live on a scrap of ground that was, in 1490, part of the nation of MacLeod of Dunvegan. I say “nation” because that is what it was: land populated by people who lived under the rule of law…
The media were a-buzz this week with stories of overspending NHS Trusts in England. We’re told that 65% of Trusts and 90% of hospitals ended the financial year in the red with a total combined deficit of £2.45 billion. If you dig into just about any of our governments’ health strategy documents in the UK and…
John Mason MSP is a former accountant who is the Deputy Convener of the Scottish Parliament’s Finance Committee. Last month he was the focus of a lengthy conversation on twitter after stating that the “UK deficit (is) £1.5 trillion”. For those of you with time to squander the entire twitter exchange can be found here: https://twitter.com/JohnMasonMSP/status/703699151461203968…
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…
Here’s a little film that gets to the bottom of the money problem.
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.…
All of the main political parties in the UK agree that government debt is a bad thing. All of them would like to fund 100% of government spending from taxation alone. There are many respectable economists who will tell you that this phobia of government debt is irrational, and I’m inclined to agree with them,…
