Nick Clegg found himself in hot water for using the same B word that gave Gordon Brown trouble in 2010. The excuse was that it was an early draft of a speech which should not have been released. Oh, of course! It is not surprising our politicians have a reputation for not being honest with […]
It may seem odd, but the idea of full employment has so disappeared from the political vocabulary that today the phrase is never heard. Yet in the post war period no political party could expect to win an election without full employment as a declared policy objective. What happened? Full employment was generally achieved until […]
Before the start of the global economic crisis in 2008, it was generally assumed that printing money, the term used for nowadays creating new money electronically, was the road to ruin. Zimbabwe and post WWI Weimar Germany were cited as benchmarks for this madness. This has not turned out to be the case. Quantitative Easing, as […]
The markets thought so, at least for a while. The problems of the euro are now so complex that there is no single decision which will fix the whole thing, but the decision of the ECB to print unlimited money to buy the bonds of effectively bust countries is at last a recognition that the […]
The answer must be yes, but it will be difficult. A faltering economy is the most likely hurdle to deny a US president a second term in normal times. But these are not normal times. When Obama came to office promising change, he faced the biggest economic problems in all America’s history. The scale of […]
So, is this government any different to the last one? Yes, but not in the way commentators report. It has shifted the Tory component to the right. Cameron has removed from areas of controversy ministers who might cause distraction because of their personal views or doings, Hunt, Lansley and Greening, but they are still at […]
The media is building anticipation of a cabinet reshuffle. Certainly one is needed to sharpen up the perception of a government in control of events, not the victim of them. Whatever Cameron does will impact the Labour front bench. What makes this latest prospect of musical chairs most interesting is that it is the first […]
In his acceptance speech Mitt Romney told the Republican convention that he would pursue a more assertive foreign policy than Barack Obama. We need to remind ourselves, especially American readers, just where things had got to before Obama was elected. The situation in international relations was this. The United States was the most despised country […]
Europe is preoccupied with the dominance of Germany and the fate of Greece. Britain should be preoccupied with the American Presidential election. It is not. It should be, because what happens in the US in November will have far more impact on the island nation than anything which may, and anything might, happen to Greece […]
The statistics released yesterday by the Bank of England show that quantitative easing has done little more than cause the economy to bump along the bottom or stop things getting worse. Moreover it has boosted asset prices, helping the wealthiest 5% of the population disproportionately to the rest. Not only does the current use of QE fail […]