Many will know that James Meadway, formerly of the New Economics Foundation, was the economic advisor to John McDonnell, previously shadow chancellor. During his time as advisor there was distinct adversity for people who believed that the government in fact created money. Yet the denial came down broadly to the idea that James Meadway couldn’t… Read more
Category:
Politics
Prepare for waves – of redundancies for sure and in all probability Covid-19
We seem to have voted in a government that thinks its duties include the right to pillage society and its people. The may not be quite as bad as King John but everyone is definitely supposed to be aware that human worth has its market price. The people are all supposed to be prepared to… Read more
Covid-19 Is the UK Response Improving?
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
Eye test in progress…
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
If the rich knew what tax was for they might actually appreciate it…
This shortish piece (below in quotation marks) arrived in my inbox a couple of days ago after somebody had viewed the excellent ‘Money for Nothing’ video. “Three questions: Why doesn’t the Labour Party explicitly adopt this approach [that money is created out of thin air and we spend and tax in fact] to tax and… Read more