In Place of Cuts
Tuesday, November 24th, 2009Today sees the publication of one of the most important pieces of work by the centre left over recent years.
In Place of Cuts: Tax reform to build a fairer society was produced by George Irvin, Dave Byrne, Richard Murphy, Howard Reed and Sally Ruane and should mark an important milestone in the re-focussing of Labour’s [...]
More PFI Woes
Monday, January 26th, 2009This blog has been writing on PFi for more than a year now. Last year I reported how brokers were finding it increasingly difficult to stack up any PFI deal worth over £30M. Well, it appears the rest of the media has caught up and this weekend there has been a flurry of activity about [...]
Yes, but …..
Tuesday, October 14th, 2008Brown and Darling have skilfully played their way around the current difficulties. But questions do remain about our medium and long term goals
Labour’s Future Political Economy?
Thursday, October 9th, 2008The financial crisis has exposed the huge distances separating Labour’s loyalists and progressive economists. Understanding economics is crucial to taking progressive politics forward? But are we brave enough to do it?
Treading Water
Tuesday, September 16th, 2008Forget leadership challenges and all of this Whitehall gossip. Government’s real challenge comes in dealing with day-to-day economics, such as the collapse of XL and the dramatically rising costs of fuel. Does this government really have its finger on the economic pulse of the country?
Big Business Turning the Screw
Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008Did you hear the Today programme this morning? There was quite a focus on whether we were in - or - facing a recession of not. The consensus that we were probably not heading for recession although we faced a difficult couple of years.
But it as the contribution of Sir Martn Sorrell that annoyed me. [...]
The Future of PFI?
Thursday, June 19th, 2008Also last week I caught up with a friend of mine who works for one of the global financial institutions. His company are advisers on PFI, they help put together programmes and deals. He was telling me that the turn down in the economy is having quite an impact on PFI. Several big players have [...]
Gods That Failed Web Pages
Tuesday, June 10th, 2008Those of you interested in the ‘God That Failed’ book (see post below) might be interested to know that there is now a website associated with the book.
The Gods That Failed Blog
Here you’ll find reference to recent articles by Elliott and Atkinson that relate to the subject matter of the blog. There’s also a comments [...]
The Budget: Gordon’s Child Poverty Challenge
Thursday, March 13th, 2008Well the Budget was a bit of a non event. A few extra tax raises here or there were to be expected. As for innovation, well this can hardly be called a green budget - I suspect what they’ve done is just trailed a few things to see what the public reaction would be. The [...]
Metronet Goes Down: But What About the Rest?
Wednesday, July 18th, 2007With Metronet going down there will be a lot of people, around the country, quietly worrying about their services.
PFI programmes are monstrously complicated beasts, take a very long time to construct and are still fraught with uncertainty. I’ve been involved in a number of PFI schemes, the first of which started to be constructed almost [...]
