Next week I have to give a short talk on this subject. Well, short is the word because in fact they preferred that I put together this short paper rather than that I yammered on…. so this is what I’ve suggested that people read before we launch into a Zoom discussion… During the current pandemic… Read more
Category:
Covid-19
The money tree is not magic but real
We used to think, with good reason, that globalization had defanged national governments. Presidents cowered before the bond markets. Prime ministers ignored their country’s poor but never Standard & Poor’s. Finance ministers behaved like Goldman Sachs’s knaves and the International Monetary Fund’s satraps. So commences this excellent piece from Yanis Varousakis (well worth reading in… Read more
Repeated UK government failure means the Germans are starting an air bridge…
According to Bloomberg, what Britain did for Berlin, Lufthansa is now doing for Britain, flying in food! And the queue of thousands of truckers in Kent were not fed by any government operation but by meals prepared by Khalsa Aid – a UK based Sikh International humanitarian relief organisation, some of whose members delivered from… Read more
So EU countries have control of their borders after all…
…It’s just that, this time, the UK, still currently an EU member, is the pariah. Of course coming just before Christmas and just before Brexit this (so far) 48 hour embargo by all our nearest neighbours will cause supply chain disruption to any just in time deliveries. And international deliveries are already under threat from… Read more
Loaves and fishes
After Smugg Mogg belittled the efforts of Unicef to feed Britain’s hungry children (one cogent comment I saw was ‘Tough on Unicef but not tough on the causes of Unicef’) it has emerged that their expenditure was in fact £700,000: This is an indictment of not only Mogg himself but also the UK government, who… Read more
The problems of financialised ‘shareholder’ democracy
I’ve just taken part in an Open Democracy webinar on ‘After the Facts?’ – the truth about fake news. The title refers to the book by one of the speakers, Marcus Gilroy Ware, who lectures at the University of the West of England. The other speaker was Ece Temelkuran, who has her own considerable book… Read more
Lack of support for self-isolation is so self defeating
Please just look at the World Health Organisation video rather than the rest of this guff below – it is the only place I can find the actual WHO video: So if, as Dr Maria Van Kerkhove says, asymptomatic transmission is very rare why on earth is the government not bearing down on test, trace… Read more
By Conservative government error or by Conservative government design?
This is the table from the Independent Food Aid Network – the competition to the Trussell Trust, and who, I fear, have even more hard hitting statistics: So all the top three reasons for attending – and overwhelmingly the majority are caused by the delay or lack of benefits. (These percentage proportions are not of… Read more
Review of ‘The Magic Money Forest’
The much hyped – at least by the BBC – ‘Magic Money Forest’ on Radio 4 was much as most of us cynics expected. The presenter originally worked for the HSBC bank as an economist and is now a BBC economics correspondent. So although she mentioned MMT it was first as the ‘Magic Money Tree’… Read more
Social infrastructure is also vital to any recovery plan
This is a letter to the FT from the Progressive Economy Forum (an outfit that our esteemed benefactor, Richard Murphy, has been expelled from – simply because he doesn’t think Quantitative Easing will ever be paid back. Time has actually already told – it’s 12 years and counting that it has not…) UK chancellor Rishi… Read more