Sunny Hundal has decided to close Liberal Conspiracy in its current form. Liberal Conspiracy was undoubtedly one of the big beasts in the forest. If it falls silent then that represents a significant shift in the blogosphere. I’ve been a LibCon reader, and very occasional commenter, for a […]
A paper by Inger Mewburn and Pat Thomson entitled Why do academics blog? An analysis of audiences, purposes and challenges has just appeared online. The paper caught my attention, and not simply because it quotes at length from a post I wrote back at the beginning of the […]
When I first studied macroeconomics the Stagflation era of the 1970s and the death of Keynesianism were still being quite hotly debated. They were still contemporary events. Well, they were contemporary events in the way that the election of Tony Blair is a contemporary event for us today […]
For a long time we have thought of the private rented sector as the most disorganised part of the housing market. Most properties were let by small landlords who owned one or two properties. Very few landlords belonged to any form of trade association, although around half let […]
My post discussing possible housing association futures has just appeared on the HotHouse website. It is a cut down version of Housing associations and the path to 2033, the text to accompany my HotHouse talk, posted here a few days ago.
To be fair to the DWP, ex ante assessment of the impacts of policy change is difficult. Especially when the impacts rely upon behavioural effects that are unknown and unknowable in advance. So when it modelled the savings from the implementation of the so-called bedroom tax it was […]
Labour seem to be getting themselves in a bit of a tangle. Again. Ed Miliband – he of the energy price freeze and the ‘use it or lose it’ approach to development land – claims to be bringing socialism back. The removal of Stephen Twigg and Liam Byrne […]
Reshuffle day is for politics nerds as transfer deadline day is for football supporters. You hope for some big name signings and some surprise moves between big clubs, but most of the activity takes place in the lower divisions. What was the most interesting component of today’s activity? […]
The evolving Miliband-Mail saga is by turns fascinating, troubling and encouraging. The saga is fascinating because it suggests that Miliband is properly getting under the skin of the political right. His Conference speech presented a very diluted form of social democracy. It represented a tentative departure from the […]
On Wednesday I nipped down to Exeter to take part in a HotHouse event, organised by the NHF, to discuss the future of social housing. I gave a 10 minute talk at the beginning, offering some thoughts on where things are heading. On reflection I got a bit […]
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