The 2019 Institute for Public Policy Research Economics Prize posed the question: “What would be your radical plan to force a step change in the quality and quantity of the UK’s economic growth?” This was my response. Growth For Growth’s Sake? I like your question. The quality of economic activity is habitually ignored by…
If the UK has another general election this year (or next) Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party will lose. Again. In their euphoria at outperforming everyone’s expectations in the election just past Mr Corbyn and his merry crew appear to have overlooked the fact that they polled the best part of a million votes fewer than the…
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…
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…
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…
