That’s where the real constitutional debate needs to be – around a radical constitutional option that puts Scotland back into the hands of its people: devo-local, if you like. Trevor Davies, The Scotsman 10/5/2012 [Politicians] see themselves as propping up something which is tottering rather than letting citizens build anew something that is soundly […]
Tag: politics
There’s a funny little Panglossian piece by Tory peer and former minister Michael Bates on ConservativeHome. If it’s any indication of the thinking going on among ministers at present, however, it’s deeply worrying. The ex-Paymaster General displays an extraordinary lack of understanding of basic economic accounting and logic. His main idea is that despite the […]
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Unemployment and Policy
This post is on 2 pages. Please click on the appropriate page number at bottom of text to navigate. There’s a very interesting take on UK unemployment trends in the July NIESR Review, written by the NIESR director Jonathan Portes. One should perhaps bear in mind that he has previously worked to formulate employment policy […]
This post was published on LabourList on 16th August 2012, under the title ‘Labour must free the Press’. The first instalment of Lord Leveson’s inquiry report into the Culture, Practice and Ethics of the Press is due in the autumn. It’s vital that Labour are ready to argue for a truly free press. We should […]
“Budget Hero” – Public Media’s Most Despicable Financial Propaganda is the title of a great anti-austerity piece by William K. Black on the New Economic Perspectives site. It appears that some very strange and economically ignorant people have designed an on-line game to demonstrate their destructive view of how the economy works. Bill Black is […]
The riots that engulfed London and other cities in England began one year ago today. Just to hark back to my piece ‘Riots: Looking Deeper’ on this topic last year, written one week after they started. I think it’s fair to say that it was a reasonable analysis. In particular the Independent Panel set up […]
This is a response to ‘The Spirit Level’ and the response to it, with discussion of the implications to be drawn for tackling inequality. You can also download it as a pdf (67kb). This article is on 5 pages, and you can go to the next page you want by clicking on the relevant number […]
A version of this post appeared on LabourList on 1st August 2012. The charge sheet against Messrs Cameron and Osborne as the architects of the coalition’s economic strategy is growing, and it may not be long before they, like their buddies Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brooks, find themselves in the dock.Not perhaps the dock of […]
Whichever side of the argument you might be on, it’s worth looking at a very cogent and entertaining video talk by the late Professor G.A Cohen on some of the problems of ‘actually existing capitalism’. I found it while following up a reading of his Tanner Lecture, ‘Incentives, Inequality, and Community’, given at Stanford University in 1990-91, which contains a powerful argument against […]
‘We need to be clear how equality, and what kind of equality (including of what), services our notion of the good society.’ To give David Miliband some credit, he is asking the right question. It’s not clear from his New Statesman sally whether he has the right answer. As characterised by the older brother, ‘Reassurance […]