Parliament is on holiday, so the media’s keen to seize on any hint of a story. This emerged yesterday: UKIP has unveiled posters for the European Parliamentary elections. Nigel Farage kicks off the campaign proper with a speech in Sheffield at 13:00. The posters’ content is stirring up a storm, as was intended.
David Cameron’s piece in the Church Times says plenty about him and people’s reactions say plenty about them.
It 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]
I 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 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]
If one of each police crime-recording team could report to a different force, it would remove any temptation to fiddle.
Six 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]
Yesterday 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.
The 2014 budget encouraged saving but only for the wealthy.
David 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]