And so, at last, members of one of the major manufacturing sectors in the UK – Japanese car makers – backed up by their government, meet with our powerless Prime Minister to publicly express their concern at the direction in which Brexit is heading. In so doing they unambiguously emphasise that should it come to… Read more
Posts by:
Ivan Horrocks
Wake up America! Trumpism and the road to Putin’s ‘managed’ democracy (a warning from history)
We all know by now that Trump and anyone on his ‘team’ – which includes almost every Republican member of Congress – are extremely uncomfortable talking about anything to do with Russia. Indeed, so all encompassing is this phobia that the President still finds it impossible to admit that Russia interfered in the 2016 elections,… Read more
Desperation and shame: Theresa May and the Liar in Chief
So now we know, the details of Donald Trump’s much derided State Visit to the UK are being ‘finalised’ for later in 2018. This after Trump and May had a short meeting at the World Economic Forum in Davos, at which Trump declared the US and UK to be ‘joined at the hip’. We also… Read more
Brexit Tories take another page from the Trumpian-Republican playbook
There can’t be many rational people who don’t see the similarities between the Brexit wing of the Tory Party and the Trumpian version of the Republican Party. There are the similarities between leading figures, Trump and Boris Johnson being the obvious one: apart from the rather silly blond hair styles both are egotists and liars… Read more
One rule for some and another for MPs (the most egregious example ever?)
As most of us are aware, a new claimant on Universal Credit has to wait at least six (6) weeks before their first payment. Given the majority of UC claimants are unlikely to be wealthy, or even able to cope with waiting for well over a month before being paid, the outcome is frequently that… Read more
Cut the crap Mrs May and answer some straightforward questions, like what happens to the 40% of lamb exports to the EU after Brexit?
Another day in Parliament and yet another version of what may or may not happen before and after Brexit from that master of the unanswered/unasked question, our Prime Minister. And as with almost everything May says one comes away more confused than before. What appears clear is that by accident or design (and increasingly it… Read more
Ideology not money is why affordable NHS healthcare is not a proposition
A few days ago Charles Adams and David Laws wrote a lengthy blog for Progressive Pulse in which they demonstrated why any UK government is quite capable of funding a world-leading NHS healthcare system. In so doing Charles and David did what many people do when confronted with the task of dealing with an important… Read more
May the slogan-master: what a dead-end approach to EU negotiation really looks like
One would think that having lost an election that was apparently in the bag through the endless repetition of a banal slogan, amongst other blunders, Prime Minister May would have learnt a valuable lesson. But following on from her lacklustre ‘dynamic’ speech in Florence, and a torrid time at the Conservative Party conference, May was… Read more
For our Prime Minister: a short history lesson on technological change and human progress
Last Friday my fellow Progressive Pulse contributor, Charles Adams, rightly took issue with our Prime Minister’s claim that a free market economy ‘was the greatest agent of collective human progress ever created.’ We are now familiar with May’s ability to spout nonsensical and frequently hollow statements but this was a peach even by May’s standards… Read more
Sources of Power: a brief note (instead of a long blog)
Earlier this week I wrote a lengthy blog which set out the argument that when analysing and seeking to understand power and power relations (and who has it and why) particularly from the perspective of decision/policy making (i.e. who gets what, when and how – which is what public policy essentially boils down to) we… Read more