Lord Carey, in an article in the Daily Mail today, makes assertions about the public attitude to the Church of England, and about the role of the Prime Minister which are unfounded and unfortunate. Yes, it is true that the Church is no longer held in the respect that it was and it does not […]
Brussels will argue and try to convince itself, that it is good. There has been firmness with flexibility, the complex governance structure sustaining the single currency functioned, Cyprus is a worthy member of the Euro family, the future of the Euro is still assured. Many onlookers think differently. They see a shambolic presentation of a new […]
The Tories are obsessed with home ownership in the same way that the Catholic Church is obsessed with sex and the Church of England with gender. It is the ruination of the potential for something more valuable and worthy from all three. Harold Macmillan presided over the great post war Tory triumph of building 300,000 new houses […]
Osborne has delivered a budget for 2013, the centre piece of which is little short of financially ridiculous. The great economic disaster of ranking property as the mainstay of the economy, fuelled by excess credit providing mortgages which require little to no equity stake from the buyer, only correctable through house price inflation, was the wick which […]
When Lehman Brothers went bust in 2008, it was the signal that the financial system was gripped by problems it could not resolve. Some commentators at the time suggested that had it been saved all would have been well and the global crisis would not have happened. It may not have happened at that moment, […]
The concept of Self-Regulation underpinned by statutory authority or supervision may seem like splitting hairs and it is. Unfortunately to preserve the freedom of the press on the one hand and to regulate it on the other, hairs have to be split. Choosing a Royal Charter as the means of doing it is a stroke of genius […]
All governments tend to be unpopular mid-term. The better ones cope because by mid-term unpopular policies are beginning to show signs of delivering positive results which will be at their booming best around the four year plus mark, when successful prime ministers have called elections and won a second or even a third term. The […]
It may seem an odd reflection, but it is the view of this blog that in spite of Huhne/Price/Rennard and who did what and why and who knew what and when and all the subtexts of scandal washing over the Party,the Lib Dems are in a good place. They had the guts to enter government, […]
This week Sergey Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister, is travelling to London for talks with William Hague, the British Foreign Secretary. The two sides are close on almost every aspect of where they would like progress to be made but have between them an impasse. The Russians see the post cold war West as meddling […]
The answer is both and neither, but of the two Vince cable has a much more coherent understanding of the problems facing the economy. Cameron is promoting a strategy which is in part succeeding, but also failing: Vince has analysed what might be going wrong and how best to deal with it. This blog was trenchant […]