The heat threatening to fry George Osborne’s chancellorship will ease following the thumbs up from Standard and Poor’s. Nevertheless he must use the respite to set his political house in order. The budget was the biggest PR disaster since Geoffrey Howe’s extra dose of Thatcherism in the early eighties. Howe was attacked for dogma, but Osborne’s problem […]
Nearly two decades ago my youngest daughter was at primary school when her mother and I became concerned with her having difficulty with arithmetic. She did not appear to know or be taught either her tables or simple long division. We went to see the Headmistress. We were told over coffee that our ideas were ‘old […]
There have been some encouraging shifts in both US and UK foreign policy under both Obama and the Coalition, which have generally improved the international standing of both countries since the Bush/Blair era. However this trend for improvement has been reversed over the Syria issue. Here the fault lies not so much in the hostility […]
There has been an interesting thread running through the various high profile interrogations by Parliamentary Select Committees as well as the appearances at the Leveson Inquiry, which leads always to the same place. It is not a good place. It is the place of third rate leadership. It matters little whether it is a newspaper […]
For several days this story has had wings and more recently we have seen footage of groups of people undergoing some form of training before taking up their duties of guarding Olympic venues. G4S has suffered a public relations calamity, its Chairman refuses to back its Chief Executive, the Home Office is again in the firing line […]
The new lending scheme initiated by the government through the Bank of England is imaginative and offers the kind of initiative which, properly used, will help the economy. The key phrase is ‘properly used.’ We know that there is mounting anxiety that the crisis in the euro zone is stifling the recovery in the U.K. […]
Once again violence has flared as the so called ‘marching season’ gets under way. These protestant marches are all part of a ‘marching tradition’ we are told. Maybe so. This does not make it right. On a recent visit to Ulster I was struck by the sense of hope and engagement at every level and […]
The test of any government is whether it can get its legislation through its parliament. For a coalition government this test is fundamental to its survival. The Coalition led by the Tories, with the Lib Dems enjoying the taste of real power for the first time in nearly a century, has just failed that test. […]
The Liberal Democrats are not doing well on Constitutional Reform. They botched the campaign on the A vote and now are promoting a peculiar notion of an elected House of Lords through the Coalition, of which they remain fractious members. The proposal to elect hundreds of Lords for single fifteen year terms is an unusual form […]
All the politicians want an inquiry into banking, the form of which is in dispute. This blog will therefore not comment on the specifics, but on the principle. It has become a feature of modern government that ineptitude is an integral component. This is because the quality of politicians has fallen to such a low ebb. The […]