Counting the Cost Already there are recriminations over the blanket nature and length of the flight ban over the UK and EU. Part of the trouble is the rule requiring airlines to pay hotel and other costs of stranded passengers. This regulation was established to deal with the practice of over booking. It was never […]
Things Turn Nasty It is not just the political establishment which has been turned on its collective head by the dramatic emergence of the Lib Dems as real contenders in the election. So strong is the surge thus far that if it advances further the Lib Dems will become the front runners. If not they […]
Financial Education I have just learned that a casualty of the so called wash up process in the last days of the now dissolved Parliament was the provision to provide financial education to children. One would find it difficult to identify a more pressing educational need in a country, the public finances of which are at […]
Flying Again Now the planes are once again in the air, questions are being asked about whether they should have been grounded in the first place. I am not qualified to comment on the science. I do know that there was little experince of this type of ash cloud, but there was some. In the […]
Political Earthquakes These are rare in the UK but they happen. They are not to be confused with upsets (Heath 1970) or landslides (Blair 1997). There have been two in the last 104 years. The first one to look at, the better known today, is 1945. The country and the world expected Churchill to win. […]
Will the Bubble Burst? No I do not think it will. I know that Labour, the Tories and a good few partisan newspapers and commentators hope it will, but not this time. This is not 1983. Then I was very active in politics as a founder memeber of the SDP, its constituency Chairman, first for […]
Tory Agony The Tory party is in a place that nobody within its leadership expected to be. If the Lib Dem surge sustains and it most likely will, Cameron cannot win outright and may end up excluded from Government altogether. A fourth defeat in a row. How has this happened? For it is so little time […]
Ash Cloud Over the last 100 years there have been very few great climatic events sufficient to disrupt travel and nothing on the scale of the present closing of north European air space. Yet in the history of the world, such events are common. Having gone through a quiet period, we can expect more are […]
Lib Dem Surge Regular readers will know this Blog predicted a Lib Dem surge more than once. Sometimes it was illustrated with a comparison with the Prussians charging fresh out of the woods at Waterloo, when Wellington and Napoleon had fought each other to a near standstill. Well the Lib Dems have certainly charged out […]
Nuclear Deterrent One of the biggest policy blunders made in the past was the cancellation of Blue Streak, the U.K Military Rocket project. Cancelled because of vulnerability to a pre-emptive strike and soaring costs, the technology became part of the European Space effort and the prototype for Stage I of the Arianne missile launcher for […]