Mr Micawber's lessons for George

By -
My latest post at Pieria looks at the Chancellor's budget and finds it long on tax-cutting promises, short on realistic revenue estimates. What does this mean for his hopes of achieving deficit-reduction happiness? And will something turn up?



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The foolish Samaritan

By -
Someone has just put this comment on my post " The Golden Calf ": Luke 10:30-37 Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him and departed, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road, and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was, and when he saw him, he had compassion. He went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he set him on his own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him.  And the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, ‘Take care of him, and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.’ Which of these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” And Jesu...
Read more

Why the Tories' "put people to work" growth strategy has failed

By -
Image
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...
Read more

WASPI Campaign's legal action is morally wrong

By -
Image
I haven't written a post about WASPI for a very long time. I felt I had said everything I wanted to say, and it had become evident that the WASPI campaign and its offshoots had neither the widespread support nor the legal arguments that they claimed. Labour's proposed £58bn payment to WASPI women contributed to its disastrous defeat at the 2019 General Election. And in 2020, the hardline Back to 60 group's bid to overturn their state pension age rises failed in the Court of Appeal. The Government had no intention of compensating WASPI women for their lost pensions, and there was neither legal nor political means to force it to do so. The campaign seemed, in short, dead in the water.  But it seems it isn't, quite. Some years ago, WASPI campaign received legal advice that a challenge to the legislation would almost certainly fail but that there might be a case for maladministration on the part of the DWP. Women would have to make individual maladministration claims and ...
Read more