The Herald carried a post yesterday that justifies a broader audience. Not for the first time this summer the paper has drawn attention to the fact that Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC) have submitted a dossier to the UN’s Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) alleging […]
Last week I found myself discussing – indeed partially defending – economics in the face of somewhat indiscriminate accusations of “neoliberalism”. I have no doubt that some economists – while rarely self-defining as “neoliberal” – find themselves in sympathy with the political project that is usually signified by […]
This blog opened for business five years ago today. The first post was Can the Big Society be anything more than BS?, reblogged from Liberal Democrat Voice. It felt like quite a big step to strike out on my own rather than post occasionally at group sites. The […]
We all know that the talk of compassionate conservatism that characterised the early years of Cameron’s leadership was quietly dropped. When one of your main political strategies is taking money from the poor and disabled – reducing thousands to penury – the whole compassion thing comes across as a bit […]
Here are the five posts on this blog that recorded the most hits between July and September 2015: Why is Owen Jones so annoying? (4th July 2013) Slums as a housing solution (11th Aug) Through a glass, darkly (12th July) Capitalism’s real enemies (22nd Aug) Policy capture, busy […]
An awful lot seems to have happened on the housing policy front this week. Or at least the volume of housing talk has increased considerably. We started the week with Brandon Lewis announcing that the Government wants to see a million new homes by 2020. But the Government […]
There can be little argument that politics just got a whole lot more interesting. While we’ve been discussing – indeed anticipating – a Jeremy Corbyn win in the Labour leadership election for several weeks now, it was all tinged with an air of unreality. Now he’s been elected. […]
It is tempting to think that the UK housing system is uniquely dysfunctional. Policy over so many years has so manifestly failed to get the measure of the problem and failed to take sufficiently radical action that we might be tempted to consider those in charge uniquely inept. […]
At the end of last month Stephen Tall posted an essay entitled A liberal approach to evidence-based policy making on his blog. The essay had originally been submitted for last year’s CentreForum essay competition on The Challenges Facing Contemporary Liberalism but, for whatever reason, hadn’t appeared. I keep […]
Much of the political commentariat is currently obsessed with the soap opera of the Labour leadership election. The peculiar dynamics of the contest itself are fascinating. It is easy to forget how quickly we’ve moved from the prospect of a continuity Blairite Labour party to a party reshaped […]
“The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable”
(JK Galbraith, 1908-2006)
“Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult”
(Samuel Johnson, 1709-94)
“No section of the people has ever been excluded from political power without suffering legislative injustice”
(Millicent Garrett Fawcett, 1847-1929)
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