The UK has helped create the crisis in the Middle East. Do we now have the objectivity to help solve it?
Funding the Future
The UK has helped create the crisis in the Middle East. Do we now have the objectivity to help solve it?
UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, told a UN Security Council meeting yesterday that “hell is breaking loose” in Lebanon. He is right....
 Hell on earth could break out in the Middle East, very soon. It’s time the UK accepted its responsibility for what is happening, and changed tack.
The speech Kier Starmer should have given youtu.be/e3M7WZY53pg?si… The speech Keir Starmer gave to the Labour Party conference on Tuesday was profoundly disappointing, including, I suspect, to most in Labour, if only they were honest about it. So, I decided I should write my own version. This is it, with only slight apologies for it being almost as long as his was.
We really do need a Labour Party, and not the hollowed out wreckage of one that we now have
Funding the Future
We really do need a Labour Party, and not the hollowed out wreckage of one that we now have
There was one moment during yesterday‘s speech by Keir Starmer that I have not mentioned in any of the posts I have published on it, so far. I...
 Starmer might claim that Labour is no longer a party of protest, but only parties of protest have the compassion and desire to create change, which we desperately need. In that case his Labour Party will fail. We need one that will succeed.
Oh dear, Keir I had few hopes for Keir Starmer’s speech at Labour Party conference, and he managed to match none of them. That is how bad it was. Let me run through some of his failings…..
Rachel Reeves really is clueless
Funding the Future
Rachel Reeves really is clueless
Rachel Reeves
 Rachel Reeves' budget speech was a vacuous re-presentation of what she had said during the general election campaign, mixed with arrogant smugness, meaningless rhetoric and a total absence of narrative or ideas. I wish there was something good to note in all this, but before she celebrates being the first woman Chancellor of the Exchequer, shouldn't she prove she is up to the job?
Will Reeves reform HM Revenue & Customs?
Funding the Future
Will Reeves reform HM Revenue & Customs?
Yahoo News appears to be just about the only media with this news story this morning: Tax dodgers will be targeted by Rachel Reeves, who will say ...
 HM Revenue & Customs is a massively underperforming organisation. It fails to collect at least £40 billion of tax owing a year. Spending just £1 billion extra a year on it could massively increase the tax yield in the UK, but it seems that Rachel Reeves is only interested in small changes over many years to come. Why is she, like so many of her predecessors, uninterested in closing the tax gap?
Who and what should Labour tax?
Funding the Future
Who and what should Labour tax?
Labour gave no positive clues on where they might raise revenue during the election campaign. So, what might they do in the October budget? And wha...
 Who and what should Labour tax? Those things that cause harm, those things that create inequality, those things that we should be changing to make sure we have a society in the future. I think that's a basis for taxation that is ethically justifiable, irrespective of the questions about revenue that might or might not arise.
The likelihood that this is a very happy Labour government is very low indeed
Funding the Future
The likelihood that this is a very happy Labour government is very low indeed
The Labour Party conference has begun. It must be agony for those newly promoted to high ministerial posts. Recently granted status as Privy Counci...
 Some new Cabinet ministers might enjoy the humiliation that serving Starmer and Reeves demands that they accept, but I suspect they are a decided minority. How long will it be before open rebellion becomes apparent?
Why can’t Labour do critical thinking?
Funding the Future
Why can’t Labour do critical thinking?
With a Cabinet made up of supposedly highly qualified graduates, all of whom would claim to have a social conscience, you would expect Labour to be...
 With a Cabinet made up of supposedly highly qualified graduates, all of whom would claim to have a social conscience, you would expect Labour to be able to think critically about the solutions required to the problems created by fourteen years of Tory rule. Right now, however, it seems that there is not one critical thinker among the lot of them. No wonder they’re already in such a mess.
When economic misinformation hides economic negligence
Funding the Future
When economic misinformation hides economic negligence
A couple of Tweets from yesterday as I do not have time to elaborate these stories today. The first is glaringly obvious. As a matter of fact, i...
 The UK‘s system of national accounting permits the presentation of entirely incorrect data by the Office for National Statistics that is passed off as correct largely because there is no proper accounting discipline, let alone double entry book-keeping, implicit within it. The resulting misinformation can be readily abused by the government.