Introduction The previous blog Covid-19 How is the UK doing? asked the question and sadly came up with the answer that the UK, and in particular England, has had the worst response in Europe. Post-publication a new, interesting, but depressing paper has appeared: Measuring excess mortality: England is the European outlier in the Covid-19 pandemic,… Read more
Category:
Covid-19
Harvesting other people’s debts should not be a business model
Crises tend to reveal unacknowledged truths. In 2008, we learned that the majority of the financial wizards we had been taught to treat with awe for the previous two decades were, in fact, little more than scam artists — and rather clumsy ones, at that. The coronavirus, and resulting lockdowns, is teaching us an even… Read more
PM Cummings in complete control
Michael Gove has told LBC he has ‘on occasion’ driven to check his eyesight, but the Minister said he was ‘not an authority on driving.’ But he doesn’t believe in experts so why on earth does that matter? Perhaps, driving whilst checking your eyesight – it is of course only a mere suggestion – is… Read more
We may be on the money – towards a common outlook
I have been contributing to a ‘Positive Money’ paper on the Covid-19 consequences. I have no idea if it will be accepted but I thought it would be interesting to discover how they are becoming much more ‘government money creation’ friendly! Indeed I think they suggest that they probably always have been (and, actually who… Read more
Lost property: moral compass
I think it appropriate to add this screen shot of a civil service tweet – since. of course, deleted ( I’m told it lasted only ten minutes but got 33,000 retweets) – that went up very soon after Johnson’s lying press conference today, which showed contempt for the rule of law, never mind contempt for… Read more
Bus companies might end up teaching us something…
I am conscious that the live performing arts sector, which is a great export earner for Britain, has, with social distancing, a major difficulty in trying to survive, and that is a sadness for all of us. Government help will certainly be needed before live performances finally become possible. But of course that is not… Read more
Understanding the Right Wing mind – William Hague
Here is yet another article in the ‘Daily Telegraph’ – I know – people will think I read nothing else! Which is probably why I chose – just in case – to add this piece to our series on understanding the Right Wing mind. If Johnson is the after-dinner speaker as Prime Minister, then I… Read more
Rebuilding the tax base – but for fairness not finance
The New Economics Foundation (NEF) has written about rebuilding the tax base – after the pandemic. Here we have, unfortunately, a basically progressive organisation, which thinks we have to renew the tax base, because Covid- 19 suggests we’ve spent it all, and got nothing left. They mention that tax take is likely to be reduced… Read more
Covid-19 How is the UK doing?
Introduction From HMG’s perspective, now that the UK has left the EU, the Covid-19 pandemic provided an opportunity to show the UK’s true genius, unshackled from an allegedly moribund Europe. What better opportunity to showcase the true and exceptional greatness of Great Britain? The UK is world-leading (almost). According to the Global Health Security Index… Read more
Is the country really poorer?
I happened to bump in to George Osborne on a radio programme and there he was opining that “Coronavirus has made the country poorer”. It may well be that some people in it are now poorer, simply because they are getting 80% of their wages or maybe they’ve lost their job and are eking out… Read more