Coppola Comment

In my last post , I debunked the myth of the "reserve pool" of British workers. In this post , I discuss three more labour force myths that refuse to die:  the myth of the "tide of unskilled immigration" the myth of the falling participation rate, and  the myth of the "workless yoof".  There's also an update about my charity walk in the Lake District last Saturday, and a couple of pics.  Read the post here . It's free to read. 

What do you do when your economy is in the doldrums and you need to kickstart growth? Why, you put more people to work, that's what you do. This has been the Tories’ strategy since 2010. The sustained attack on welfare benefits has all been focused on “making work pay” - encouraging, and at the margin forcing, people with illnesses, disabilities and caring responsibilities into paid work.  But there is another way of putting more people to work, and that is to import them. In a new report , the centre-right CPS thinktank says that importing people to kickstart growth has been the unspoken strategy of successive governments since 1997. And it argues that the strategy has manifestly failed.  In my latest Substack piece , I examine the reasons the report advances for this failure, and conclude that the "put more people to work" strategy has not failed. It has in fact compensated to some degree for the catastrophic failure of innovation, capital investment and productivity si...

My latest Coppola Comment post reflects on what we mean by "demons". Are they really the evil spirits of myth? Or are they a metaphor for something else - something all too human, and for many people, all too familiar? I spent last Saturday singing Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius. There’s a famous “Demon’s Chorus” in this piece, which made me think… well, about the demons. I felt sorry for them. Seriously.  In the Dream of Gerontius, demons are an auditory representation of mindless evil and cruelty. The Soul doesn’t hear them until after death, but of course mindless evil and cruelty exist in life too, so they must have been present throughout its earthly life. Perhaps it encountered them a few times but didn’t realise what they were. Or perhaps it never went to places where demons hang out.  Anyway, the Soul is disturbed by the sound. Demons are noisy things. The Soul asks the Angel what the “fierce hubbub” is, and comments that it ought to find it frightening, though fear now...

It’s election season in the U.S., marred only by the minor complication of a criminal trial involving one of the candidates. Trump is on the campaign trail, and he is going big on trade policy. Or rather, trade lunacy. Here’s Gavin Bade at Politico attempting to explain Trump’s trade policy:  Trump is considering a 10 percent universal import tariff, the former administration officials said, and one result of that policy could be to make the dollar weaker relative to other currencies.  This is economic illiteracy of a kind I haven't seen since the heady days of Brexit . Or - more accurately - since the last time one Robert Lightizer was the United States trade representative. He is, once again, setting Trump’s trade agenda. And he appears to be no better informed than he was last time. Why do I say this policy is economically illiterate? Because universal import tariffs don’t weaken the currency relative to the currencies of trade partners and competitors. They are much more...

  My latest post at Substack examines the state of play in Gaza after six months of war. Fair to say, it is truly horrible. But more importantly, there is now overwhelming evidence that Israel has deliberately and systematically violated international humanitarian law. These violations could amount to genocide. On 28th March, the International Court of Justice decided that the situation in Gaza had significantly worsened since its original order in January imposing six "provisional measures" that Israel must take to prevent the situation worsening. The Court imposed, in additional to the original six, a further two measures, specifically requiring Israel to admit sufficient humanitarian aid to ward off famine and prevent its army interfering with the distribution of that aid.  These measures are binding not only on Israel, but on all signatories to the Geneva Convention on Genocide. All Western countries are signatories. So what should they do to force Israel to comply? Read ...

“Over one million people in Gaza are starving,” proclaims a dramatic headline in the Wall Street Journal. Citing a new report from the International Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a partnership of 15 international agencies and non-government organisations, the Journal goes on to say:  More than a million people in the Gaza Strip, around half of the enclave’s population, are experiencing famine-like conditions, according to new estimates by food-insecurity experts who found evidence of widespread starvation and a sharp increase in child mortality in the war-ravaged enclave.  I expected this figure to be disputed. Both sides in this conflict inflate (or deflate) statistics when it suits them, and each side accuses the other of manipulating the numbers. So Israel’s supporters would probably insist that the number was much smaller and Palestinian supporters would claim it was twice as large. But I didn’t expect an argument about what “starvation” meant... To read on, cl...

My post-Budget article for the Radix thinktank considers the future of the State Pension in the light of the Chancellor's changes to National Insurance.  The headline news in the Budget was a 2p cut in the main rate of National Insurance contributions for employed and self-employed people. This was the second such cut, the first being in the Autumn statement. And the Chancellor expressed an intention to go much further. He trailed the idea of abolishing personal National Insurance completely.  These changes will have far-reaching implications for the state pension...  To read the rest of the post, click here .  Related reading: The Fund that isn't a fund