Coppola Comment

I have a confession to make. I have been reading the Daily Mail. No, I haven't gone over to the dark side. Rather, I have been true to myself. I have always tried to keep an open mind. And sometimes that means doing something of which my critical self does not approve. Like reading tabloid newspapers. Reading is an important part of my life. I've always needed time to myself, to read and think. Without that space, my mind fogs and I become irritable. I suppose I am a bit introverted, really.  But shutting people out, even temporarily, can be difficult. Frances has her head in a book again? Just shout to get her attention. Works every time. And now that I have become my father's part-time carer, time for reading and thinking is hard to come by. The fog is slowly descending on my mind. I discovered long ago that the easiest way of creating time to read and think is just to disappear for a while. So, over the years, I have collected some favourite boltholes. One of t

I hate the term "neoliberal", but in this piece I am going to use it, simply for want of a better word. Neoliberal economic dogma says that the public sector crowds out the private sector. So the public sector should only step in as a last resort to provide for those that the private sector cannot or will not serve. In recent years, we have interpreted this to mean that the public sector should only provide for the very poorest in our society. If people can afford to pay, the private sector will provide.  Is this true? Well, true believers say it is. So, if an elderly man with a gold-plated defined benefit pension and substantial savings needs sheltered accommodation because he is no longer safe to live on his own, he should have no problem finding it, should he?  I did an internet search for sheltered housing on the Isle of Sheppey, where the elderly man lives. This is what I found: Only one of these enclaves is sheltered housing: the other is accommodati

How effective is monetary policy? Highly effective, according to the Governor of the Bank of England. In a speech earlier this week, Mark Carney robustly defended the Bank of England's record: "Simulations using the Bank’s main forecasting model suggest that the Bank’s monetary policy measures raised the level of GDP by around 8% relative to trend and lowered unemployment by 4 percentage points at their peak. Without this action, real wages would have been 8% lower, or around £2,000 per worker per year, and 1.5 million more people would have been out of work." Well, lots of us might agree that monetary policy did help to offset the damaging effects of bank and household deleveraging in the aftermath of the worst financial crisis since the 1930s. Carney suggested that monetary policy also dampened the effect of premature fiscal consolidation when everyone panicked about government deficits in the wake of the Greek crisis: Fiscal policy quickly came under sev