Economic growth? Forget it. Politicians in developed countries are still obsessed with growth without realising that growth is history because as our incomes have grown, we consume fewer material items and more services, and the chance of productivity growth in services is limited, even with AI. The question is, when will politics begin to reflect this new reality?
Without a story Labour is going to carry on failing
Funding the Future
Without a story Labour is going to carry on failing
Labour is going to have a relaunch, rehash, restatement of objectives, desperate appeal to the disenchanted, or something else that someone in thei...
 Labour’s relaunch will fail unless it has suddenly found a narrative, the chance of which seems incredibly low.
Do the people who work in the City of London add value? The City of London claims it is the powerhouse of the UK economy. Rachel Reeves has called it our ‘Jewel in the Crown’. But actually, it’s much more like a parasite, extracting value from the rest of the economy to for the advantage of a few at cost to most in this country.
The Single Transferable Party is trying to retain power in Ireland, whatever its people want
Funding the Future
The Single Transferable Party is trying to retain power in Ireland, whatever its people want
As the Guardian notes this morning, there is a general election in Ireland today. As it also notes, Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin are a...
 The Irish political elite are trying to block free choice in their general election today.
Australia goes for country-by-country reporting
Funding the Future
Australia goes for country-by-country reporting
Australia has become the first country in the world to require full public country-by-country reporting. Country-by-country reporting for multin...
 21 years after I created country-by-country reporting for multinational companies as a way of showing how they might be using and abusing tax havens by shifting their profits into those places, Australia is going to require it on public recoird, blazing the trail by doing so.
The government’s latest accounts show its debt’s fallen massively The government’s own accounts, just released, show that its total liabilities owing fell between 2022 and 2023 by £1.5 trillion. They’re now much smaller than the figure the government claims the national debt to be. The whole claim that we’re supposedly burdened by debt is now complete nonsense. When will they admit it?
What is Labour doing?
Funding the Future
What is Labour doing?
There is an article in the Financial Times this morning with the following headline: The government has no time to lose if it wants to reform soci...
 When history comes to appraising Starmer's government, there will be one over-arching theme, and that will be of missed opportunity. Labour’s not doing anything of any use, and worse still, it has no idea about how to change that.
Trump has declared trade war and people in the US are going to suffer badly Trump’s trade wars are going to hike inflation and interest rates in the US and around the world, and won’t boost jobs in the US, or make middle or working class Americans better off. The price of his mayhem is going to be enormous.
The national debt has just fallen by £1.5 trillion
Funding the Future
The national debt has just fallen by £1.5 trillion
There is a very strange feature that, as far as I can see, has not had much attention paid to it so far within the Whole of Government Accounts for...
 According to the government’s own accounts to March 223, which have just been published, the national debt of the UK fell by £1.5 trillion during that year - and is now much lower than the government claims. They claim these accounts are true and fair - so why is it that the government is not shouting about this and saying that the debt obsession is over and that austerity can be consigned to history?
Why have the Tories given up on climate change? Climate change is the biggest challenge we have. It’s bigger than. Any war we’ve ever fought. It’s bigger than any political crisis we’ve ever had. That’s because it’s existential. Now, the Tories are in denial about it and are withdrawing their support from government policy on the issue. Why? What are they playing at?