Conservatism
Direct questions without fear or favour…
After a lengthy silence Truss, yesterday, actually kept her appointments with local radio (just be aware the link takes you to a full hour of her every reply!) The summary below is probably the worst of a bad lot (no wonder @Parody_PM said that she had cancelled the rest of the day’s appointments because she’d... Read more
The price for the delusions of ‘Britannia Unchained’
I liked this FT article on how Truss learns the hard way that Britain isn’t America. It also partly sums up how I recoil when Labour MP’s proudly display their American (often academic) experience. For Britain is not America. Particularly and most of all when Britain has separated itself from the market on its doorstep,... Read more
Truss Conservative government is a ‘doomsday cult’
Is the remarkable comment of a UBS economist. (Personally, I don’t know what he means but it is quite surprising that he felt able to say it.) What interests me more is that he added that: Modern Monetary Theory has been taken into a corner by the bond markets and beaten up . Regrettably I... Read more
From Greece fear to Greece fact:
The Conservatives, when campaigning to take over from the last Labour administration suggested that further Labour government would make the British economy ‘like Greece’. In fact the Conservatives themselves have done the job instead: Quite remarkable ineptitude when Britain has its own currency and Greece does not…... Read more
Italy: Fascism or conservatism?
Although the original poster is probably not someone I would wish to follow, I thought the actual video clip he pointed out was interesting. The mainstream media tells us that the next Italian PM is a fascist. Yet she sounds not unlike a member of the UK’s current Conservative government on a bit of an... Read more
Mitigating the ‘abacus economics’ of the Chinashop budget
Chancellor Kwarteng disallowed any Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) report on the impact of the budget plans, because the budget decisions were simply based on ideology. And as was shown with the OBR’s Brexit impact statement, that is not ideal if your beliefs trump evidence. So the OBR was not required to point out that... Read more
Balanced budgets are no more…
Today’s budget from Kwasi Kwarteng suggested that the UK needed a new approach for a new era, to break away from the vicious cycle of stagnation and low growth. Problems simply caused, let us not forget, by 12 years of Tory government. I liked this tweet: But… What Kwarteng is doing is to change abruptly... Read more
Lazy PM to Crazy PM?
Or has the idea that government created money gets things done been reinforced?. Although I think, for both the last PMs, I should have preferred just crazy to both lazy and crazy… For in fact, I thought Johnson a real constitutional threat and pretty crazy with his dissembling statements – and of course that was... Read more
Funerial reflections…
So probably, the UK knows how to put on rather a good funeral and it is actually entirely (surely not?) all organised by the public sector. I think we can conclude that the public sector is more than capable of ‘delivering’ – it just needs investment in the wherewithal so to do. This really shouldn’t... Read more
Doesn’t this mean capitalism is broken?
To distract somewhat from the current mournfest, I actually think I should point to another remarkable article from the FT. This points out that in spite of the dissimilarity in pay between the governors of the central banks there is an equally striking dissimilarity in their GDP’s… If GDP means anything then that should surely... Read more