Have you got your Brexit specs on? Everyone is talking about whether the Remain parties should form an alliance in the European parliamentary elections. But, hold on, isn’t that how we got here in the first place? Isn’t this just a new version of the ‘EU as a proxy for UK political discontent’? Isn’t this… Read more
European Parliament Elections – The UK Voting Systems
Introduction This is factual article on voting systems. Later posts will examine tactical voting, which from a progressive and pro-EU perspective will depend massively on the stance taken by Labour. The UK Voting Systems Two systems are used in the UK: the D’Hondt in Britain and the Single Transferable Vote System (STV) in Northern Ireland… Read more
Annunziata and other Names
Annunziata Rees-Mogg has made recent headlines recently by declaring for Farage’s new Brexit Party. I must confess that I had not heard of her – the Rees-Moggs are not a family I have the remotest interest in apart from some guilt perhaps that knowing ones enemy is always useful in warfare. Having grown up a… Read more
The Logic of Spend and Tax
To continue on from yesterday’s blog about where people think money comes from and how it is created, now people realise that the era when money rested on the value of gold has long past, so most, these days, seem to consider that money comes from tax. After all everyone ‘knows’ that there is no… Read more
MMT is real gold
The misleading title is because one reader has suggested (thank you, Damien) that I might respond to an ‘Economist’ article on MMT (Modern Monetary Theory). Which seems to go under various headings ‘Magic or logic?’ ‘Nutty or essential?’ depending on which Economist edition you are reading. Remarkably, it summarises MMT fairly well, whilst pointing out… Read more
Poles
The title is purposely ambiguous because I feared this would be a rant about ‘The Poles’ as in Polish people, (one of whom particularly is a friend)! In fact I’d written to my local councillor about telegraph poles – she replied with this succinct title. I discovered that BT is actually allowed to put up… Read more
Collage for Farage
Based on “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” by the Proclaimers. From JOE.co.uk… Read more
The Iron Triangle
There is a very interesting idea from someone who blogs as the Naked Mole Rat entitled Brexit cannot break the Iron Triangle. I confess I’d never heard of the Iron Triangle (although it has a Wikipedia entry) but it seems I’m not alone. I confused it for the old sales concept that a company’s offer… Read more
Less likely to be imprisoned in Victorian times than today
An intriguing but rather depressing item on education and prisoners has appeared….. We mostly probably know that today about half of our prisoners are functionally illiterate. According to this linked ‘Guardian’ article: half of the 85,000 people currently incarcerated have a reading age of 11 or lower – with 20% falling well short of that… Read more
Money is abstract not physical
There is an interesting piece from Joanna Montgomerie of King’s College London, on Storytelling about Debt in which she calls out the: …£1.64 trillion of private debt [86% of GDP]. This enormous stock of debt must be fed a steady stream of present-day income, flowing from households… and she shows that this private debt is almost… Read more
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