Articles from blog
The City has been a byword for greed, but even there voices are being raised urging change. Recently, Barry Olliff, head of the City of London Investment Group pointed out how things go wrong. In his view “the relentless focus on personal gain promotes a culture of greed and of excessive risk taking”. He points […]
Amazingly there are still people trying to make political capital out of the financial crash of 2008. Let’s review what really happened. Banks and insurance companies created esoteric packages of debt and bought them from each other. All of a sudden, it became clear that the packages might not be worth much. They contained loans […]
Sometimes, public services do well, sometimes they don’t. But the Tories are so blinkered they cannot accept that public provision can be the best option. They’ve just pushed through legislation banning local authorities from running bus services. Why? Nottingham and Reading have run successful services. Local authorities are struggling to find ways to maintain public […]
Is moving some powers from Brussels to 10 Downing Street really giving us more democracy? Let’s look at the positive trend in our national history. For the last thousand years, the power of monarchs has been reduced. The power of parliament has been enhanced. We all live according to laws, impartially administered. Well, that’s how […]
I applaud the work of dedicated volunteers who staff food banks. But I am ashamed that our country should need such things. In Ryedale, over 1,000 three-day emergency food supplies have been given to local people in 2016-17. The biggest reason for needing food is reported as benefit delay. Universal Credit is being slowly rolled […]
The answer seems to be when it is VAT, according to Tories. And they’re likely to increase it if they get re-elected to government. You’d think that the clue was in the name – Value Added Tax. But I keep hearing claims that the Tories have taken lower paid people out of tax. Well, that […]
I’m so pleased that the Green Party is launching its general election campaign with a call to bridge the divide between young people and older generations. I worry about the prospects for my young teens grandchildren. It’s hard to think of a time when it’s been more difficult to be a young person in Britain, […]
I hear regular comments about charity beginning at home. They often suggest raiding the foreign aid budget for such and such a domestic project that needs cash. The current cry is to support flood victims and build better flood defences. Well, I’m all in favour of helping flood victims and building better defences. We should […]
A lot of people want the NHS to be a public service. I’m one of them. We don’t want it broken down into a whole bunch of private contracts. That costs money, fragments services and diverts attention away from health and towards profits. There is a big benefit from running the NHS as a public […]
Britain’s NHS is a hugely impressive achievement. Some of the founding assumptions may have been naive, but the principles have stood up well. Unfortunately, the NHS is now under threat, its key principles in danger of being abandoned. The NHS does far more than its founders could have contemplated, and its cost has risen substantially. […]
