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I haven’t talked about recent UK macroeconomic data for some time, mainly because there hasn’t been any new story to tell. To recap, growth in the UK relative to other comparable countries was strong in the three decades before 2010, but then the UK entered a period of relative decline, exacerbated by Brexit. In addition the UK had a terrible pandemic, not just in terms of government policy and…
Neoliberalism as an overarching ideology for UK government died with the Brexit referendum in 2016, just as it did in the US with Trump’s election that year. Its last hurrah in the UK was austerity, although whether squeezing the state by reducing the quality of public provision rather than the amount the state does counts as neoliberal is a good topic for discussion . But Johnson’s right wing…
Every July the OBR publishes fiscal projections looking fifty years ahead. Each year the headline is the same. The public finances are on an unsustainable path, and if nothing is done government debt will be at some record level in half a century’s time. It’s a signal for general hand wringing. The first point to make is that this has nothing to do with current government policy. This Telegraph…
In a recent post, where I discussed the Conservative party’s newfound opposition to net zero, I noted that one attraction that switch had is that it would likely attract generous donations from the fossil fuel industry. One legitimate question is whether I could have stopped my post right there. Was it really a surprise that a party of the right should be supporting the interests of a significant…
Let me start by apologising to any regular readers of this blog. None of the arguments in this post are particularly new. But with a new PM and possibly a new Chancellor, and with Andy Burnham committed to high public investment including many more council houses, it seems appropriate to make this argument once again in as clear a way as I can. The UK has for some time had two fiscal rules. One…
As I have argued in previous posts , the rise in the far right is not a result of changes in people’s attitudes. In many ways over the last fifty years people have become more tolerant of minorities and less racist. What has changed is what is tolerated by the political elite. There has always been a minority of people who, other things being equal, would support a party of the far right that…
