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Living Standards Declinism & the Primacy of Politics 27 Aug 2013 | 03:12 pm
Hopi Sen is a self declared ‘cost of living sceptic’, by contrast I am something of a ‘cost of living evangelist’. This is an issue I’ve been writing about for several years and which I’ve gone as far...
Quick GDP Reaction 23 Aug 2013 | 02:30 pm
An increase from 0.6% to 0.7% isn’t big news but the composition of that growth looks a little bit better than first thought. Overall this release looks like modest good news. The net trade performan...
Smoke, Mirrors and the Public Sector Equality Duty: The government’s response to CEDAW 22 Aug 2013 | 09:07 pm
Last month the government, having signed up to the UN Convention for the Elimination all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), had to defend its economic and social policy to a panel of gende...
No shale gas price revolution 22 Aug 2013 | 07:14 pm
An oddly wide of the mark intervention in the fracking debate from the chair of the Fuel Poverty Advisory Group, Derek Lickorish. Apparently, “Ministers have a duty to promote the extraction of shale ...
Corporate Governance, Rebalancing & Institutional Reform 22 Aug 2013 | 02:36 pm
Sarah O’Connor has an excellent (and long) Analysis feature in the FT today on the UK’s poor export performance in recent years and the general failure to replace. I highly recommend it. In particul...
The Political Debate on the Economy 21 Aug 2013 | 06:05 pm
I sometimes struggle to make sense of much of the political debate around the economy – ahead of the 2010 election much of the ‘economic debate’ was in reality a debate about the deficit and what comb...
Balcombe’s wake-up call 20 Aug 2013 | 07:25 pm
As Caroline Lucas MP was arrested at the Balcombe fracking site (19 August) she spoke of the “democratic deficit” being so enormous that “people are left with very little option but to take peaceful, ...
The UK’s Economic Car Crash: An Extended Analogy 19 Aug 2013 | 08:29 pm
One of the Government’s key economic messages ahead of the next election looks set to be that ‘voters shouldn’t hand back the keys to the people who crashed the car’. The logic behind this is quite s...
Why the TUC wants an urgent meeting with government on the Lobbying Bill 19 Aug 2013 | 02:14 pm
Proposals in a bill slipped out as Parliament broke for the Summer, and due to be debated as soon as MPs return, will gag the TUC, trade unions and every campaign group in the country in what can only...
The crisis in living standards & how to solve it 14 Aug 2013 | 05:44 pm
The British economy might be recovering but the crisis in living standards sadly shows no signs of abating. As I blogged last week: … the squeeze on living standards has tightened since the end of t...
