I’ve already alluded to some of the current problems faced by local authorities and the budget’s utter failure to address them. But I particularly appreciated this in the Guardian: The government has encouraged councils to quietly come to it for help, rather than unilaterally declare insolvency. Wary perhaps of the alarming optics of a long… Read more
Category:
Inequality
The budget is a disaster for local authorities
This March budget was, I think, as disappointing as feared. What has not been properly pointed out is that Local Government is still to be subject to further financial cuts from Central Government. This is quite amazing as local generally, and Local Government in particular has done so much good in the Covid crisis. Thus… Read more
Richard Horton on Covid-19
I am linking below to an excellent conversation between Aaron Bastani and former editor of the ‘Lancet’, Richard Horton, who famously published two papers from China on what their writers anticipated might become a pandemic way back in mid January 2020. Cannot seem to embed the actual video so if you have a free 38… Read more
BBC Radio misunderstandings about money
I feel pretty proud – I’ve listened to two BBC radio programmes today; one Free Thinking on Coins and The Magic Money on radio 3 and the other on radio 4 on the Covid Hangover. I’m proud because mostly it was an effort to restrain my annoyance – there was very little but conventional economic… Read more
Not in our best interests
This story in the ‘Mirror’ really does go to show that our elected government does not actually have our best interests and more especially, those of our children – our very future – at heart. They were unable – or unwilling – to accept the offer of cheap broadband for children’s learning during the pandemic… Read more
Not meriting the description of democracy…
I thought this piece on charity – a sector so beloved of our government – by Tom Serpell, from Sussex Bylines was very powerfully written (I thought of my own recent piece on the same subject and thought ‘must do better’): … if filling in the holes in the needs of the people is left… Read more
Health is made at home, hospitals are for repairs
Is the wonderful title of an article, concerning his own book, in the ‘New Local’ by Nigel Crisp former CEO of the NHS, and now a crossbench peer. He says: I argue in the book that we need to think about health differently and recognise that health creation plays an important role alongside health services… Read more
Charities are just another unequal tax
When I discovered that last night’s ‘Children in Need’ television programme had been going for forty years it led me to think about charity. This is really a version of the very Victorian concept of ‘the poor will always be with us’ – because after four decades we still have children in need. So foggy… Read more
Is Nye Bevan right?
So the Australia type deal that Britain will flourish under, according to Johnson, is a trade deal that, in fact, Australia is trying to actually improve in the already existing trade talks with the EU, where both sides have agreed that: The discussions confirmed a shared commitment to rules-based trade as well as to helping… Read more
Is rebellion imminent?
This moving piece from Channel 4 news and from a real small employer (rather than a grasping rentier capitalist) correctly explains why so many are completely adrift in the government’s occasional, random and unscientific lockdowns. For sure the science is uncertain – but the money creation to ensure both the lady in the interview and… Read more