The Prime Minister does God
17 April 2014David Cameron’s piece in the Church Times says plenty about him and people’s reactions say plenty about them.
The Blog
Use tuition fees to get the skills we need
16 April 2014It is now conventional wisdom that the UK’s recession was exacerbated by the decline of our production base. Too many jobs and too many taxes came from ‘frothy’ industries in services: accountancy, restaurants, communications etc., things that we cannot easily sell abroad to bring money into the country. ‘How do you export a haircut?’ is… [Read More]
Can Ukraine learn from Ulster’s compromises?
15 April 2014I spent last weekend in Newry, a Northern Irish city an hour up the coast from Dublin. I arrived outside the courthouse, whereupon a local cheerfully informed me, “Dissident Republicans still try to blow it up every year or so – it’s a bit of a tradition.”
Viktor Orban wins Hungarian elections as support for far-right party Jobbik increases
11 April 2014Viktor Orbán has won a convincing election victory and will govern for a second term as Hungary’s Prime Minister. His centre-right party Fidesz won 46% with most of the votes counted, but will have 66% of seats in parliament, while the centre-left opposition alliance only managed 25% of the vote. The far-right party Jobbik came… [Read More]
External examiners for police statistics
10 April 2014If one of each police crime-recording team could report to a different force, it would remove any temptation to fiddle.
North-South divide goes deeper still: Northern borrowers will be hit harder by interest rate rise
9 April 2014Six years ago, terrible mortgage lending practices brought Britain’s banks to their knees. Newcastle’s Northern Rock built itself up by offering irresponsible interest-only and 125% mortgages mainly to families in the North, helping them to avoid ‘burdensome’ deposits. After the credit crunch (the financial sector’s realisation of how deep and dangerous these practices had become),… [Read More]
EU paralysis & Ukrainian chaos
8 April 2014Yesterday pro-Russians occupied the Donetsk regional assembly, declared a People’s Republic, announced a referendum on joining Russia then appealed for Russia to invade as a ‘peace keeping force’. Oleksander Turchinov, interim Ukrainian president, says this deliberate ‘second wave’ recreating the ‘Crimean scenario’ to ‘dismember’ Ukraine, was coordinated by Russian special forces.
Savings attract tax relief but lose benefits
3 April 2014The 2014 budget encouraged saving but only for the wealthy.
Change at the helm; Change still needed with the formula
2 April 2014David Nicholson ceases to be Chief Executive of the NHS Commissioning Board, more usually termed NHS England, while calling for a transformation of the service. As Paul Corrigan observed in ‘Inside Commissioning’ it is odd to expect his successor to bring about changes he himself has not achieved in eight years. One aspect that has… [Read More]
100 years later, we will finally be able to expel a rotten Lord
The daily churn of debate in Parliament can amass into a blur over time. The rise and fall of GDP, house prices, the EU, are all issues that come and go while rarely seeming to progress before some other incident diverts the House’s attention. But every now and then, something happens that can conceivably be… [Read More]