Worrying, nay shocking, news has reached me that Brexit might provoke a gin drought. Without a shade of irony ‘Harper’s Wine and Spirit’ reports: “If Britain were to leave the EU without a deal, distillers fear that supplies of juniper and other botanicals such as lemon peel, liquorice, orris root and angelica root would be… Read more
Category:
Society
The essence of our age – Reverse Luddism
There is rather an interesting article in the London ‘Evening Standard’. I know it is now highly suspect as a source – and additionally of course, it is nominally at least, edited by George Osborne. This piece however, is really opinion and I think it is actually opinion worth considering. It certainly has a bearing… Read more
Neoliberalism is driving us nuts
– if we live to realise it at all. Interesting short article in (remarkably) the ‘Telegraph’ from the Health Foundation think tank. People, since 2010 (I wonder what happened then?) have been – and, as far as I can see, this is unique in Europe – been living less long, and so too, are current… Read more
The secrecy of the secret ballot
Having been uneasy at the recent voting identity trials which were completely unjustified by the evidence, I wrote to my MP, taking advantage to raise at the same time the question of a lack of any actual secret ballot – as an identifying number is put on each ballot paper stub. To my surprise he… Read more
Job Guarantee or Income Guarantee – which to prefer?
This is the happiness U shape of life satisfaction, which doesn’t suggest many of us are that happy at all. But it does suggest that we are least happy when we are supposed to be ‘earning’, rather than just ‘kept’. I wonder whether this means that the Job Guarantee (JG) would therefore just be… Read more
Money for nothing is everything
There is an excellent summary in one easy blog on TRUK of Modern Monetary Theory* (MMT), which should more properly be called Modern Monetary Practice or the Modern Monetary System (MMS). As usual, below the article are the comments, many of which are highly critical, usually on the basis that if you are stupid enough… Read more
Windrush convictions
It appears that our new home secretary, Sajid Javid, has yet to get to grips with his new position. He was on yesterday’s Andrew Marr programme suggesting that 32 of those ‘Windrush’ arrivals found by the government to have been wrongly deported were in fact “serious offenders”, so would not be entitled to compensation. Apart… Read more
Are we the Moneytreeists?
Having recently attended an exhibition on suffragettes I was struck by the fact that the name which we all now recognise was, it transpires, coined by none other than the ‘Daily Mail’ as a derogatory term for the suffragists. That set me thinking on what we could call those who understand money is a social… Read more
Even when government borrows money it still creates it
At least that is what I’ve always thought. So it was good that I’ve encountered some systematic reasoning on the subject, (but it’s drawn from diverse twitter replies so cannot be properly linked). When the government “borrows”, they give money to somebody, because they, the government, alone create it, and simply decide that, rather than… Read more
Burning tallies – and what bankers have forgotten
I mentioned the burning down of Parliament in my earlier post on a federal Britain. Famously it took place to general approval of the rubbernecking public. As Thomas Carlyle put it, “A man sorry I did not anywhere see.” I doubt it would be different now – although JMW Turner’s painting would doubtless be replaced… Read more