Funding the Future

Does the NHS need advice from bankers?

Rachel Reeves must think the only job a government has is to balance its books. There can be no other explanation for the insanity of calling in bankers to advise on the NHS.

We need a carbon army

The UK’s domestic properties need transformation if we are to meet out climate targets – and we need a carbon army of trained people to undertake that task.

Trump’s planning to crash the global economy

Trump is planning trade wars and sanctions that are bound to crash the world economy. But what he knows is that the resulting bailout will make the wealthy even more wealthy, yet again. His policy is both mad and entirely rational from his viewpoint.

Politics has to be about care

Democracy is under threat around the world from the politics of hate peddled by the far-right. In political terms, the opposite of hate is care, and the problem is that care’s gone missing in the mainstream political narrative.

The government’s losing nearly £60 billion a year to fraud

 
The government’s own data on fraud suggests it loses £58.8 billion a year, but that’s bound to be understated as there are no systems to detect fraud in two thirds of government activity. What is going on? 

Businesses should maximise happiness, not profit

The whole of the microeconomic theory of business is based on the idea that businesses maximise profit. They don’t, because doing so works for no-one. It’s a route to business failure. It’s maximizing happiness that works.

Government has rotted from the head down

For decades we have suffered ministers who want to hold ministerial office to advance their own careers but not to deliver good government, in which they have no belief. Unsurprisingly, government that’s rotted from the top down is the result of that.

Economic growth? Forget it.

Politicians in developed countries are still obsessed by 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 being to reflect this new reality?

Has the government given up on governing?

The governments accounts are incomplete and out of date and might fairly be described as CRAp – or completely rubbish approximations to the truth – so how can they govern properly?

Is Trump on another planet?

We have only got one planet, and Trump wants to trash it. There are some things we cannot afford in this life. He is one of them.