Funding the Future

Quantitative tightening? No thank you…

The Bank of England is selling about £100 billion a year of government bonds it bought during the Covid crisis back into City financial markets. There’s no need to. It’s making massive losses doing so. But worst of all, that £100 billion is preventing the government from spending on the investment in the real economy we really need. QT has to stop, now. 

Why the Bank of England needs reform

As far as most people know, the job of the Bank of England is to control inflation, which it has proved itself utterly unable to do. Meanwhile its essential roles in money creation, government funding, and bank and financial services regulation are almost all ignored, when they are really important. We need a Bank of England that concentrates on the jobs it needs to do, not the one it can’t do.

Labour isn’t interested in reform

If Labour was really a party interested in reform they would be radically overhauling the UK constitution and the way in which the government is managed. But it isn’t. And as a result, they are sending out the strongest possible signal that nothing is really going to change on their watch.

The speech Keir Starmer should have given

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.

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

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?

Who 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?

Perfection is the enemy of the good

Politics is the art of the possible, and not about the creation of ideal solutions, about which few are likely to agree in any case. It’s important that this is understood, because far too many political debates argue over the pursuit of goals that are unachievable. 

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 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 amongst the lot of them. No wonder they’re already in such a mess.

What is the single transferable party?

The single transferable party describes the system of government that we now have in the UK, where whoever is in power, the policies appear to always be the same. When all that is on offer is austerity, and all that changes is who delivers it, do we really have a democracy any more, or is there just a single transferable party in power?