Perhaps the most depressing aspect of the Labour leadership contest is hearing the candidates acquiescing in the myth that Labour in office overspent – and, by implication, accepting the Tory framing that Labour crashed the economy. Of course it is more nuanced than that, but the outcome of the recent election shows that this is […]
Tag Archives: J M Keynes
I have spent some time carefully reading Jon Cruddas and Jonathan Rutherford’s pamphlet One Nation: Labour’s Political Renewal. It aims to give an overarching rationale for the outcome of Labour’s policy review. It is ambitious and in many respects offers a powerful diagnosis of a society that has become disillusioned, impoverished, unequal, unambitious. There are […]
The concept of work is at the heart of contemporary political and economic rhetoric. Slogans about work – about hard-working families, about backing the people who work hard, about being the party of work – pepper political discourse across the political spectrum. But work is in crisis in a way that you would find hard […]
Imagine a political party. Its public face is a single, easily identifiable figure who receives considerable media exposure and is regarded as having a genius for self-promotion, while somehow avoiding the scrutiny that more mainstream politicians face. Despite the fact that our public face is a seasoned and accomplished professional politician, the party seeks to […]
A new report by the Institute of Fiscal Studies, showing that the generation born in the 1960s and 1970s is less well-off than their parents’ generation, is generating a lot of news coverage this morning. Among other things, the study concludes that: the 1960’s and 1970s generation experienced a much slower growth in income between […]
Britain is facing a cost-of-living crisis, one that is driven by falling real pay. There is growing concern, not just about the level of unemployment, but about under-employment; people who are in theory in work but in practice cannot earn enough to make a decent sufficiency. The biggest cohort receiving benefits is people in work; […]
But sadly won’t …. Conference, We meet at a time of unprecedented economic crisis. Six years after the financial crash living standards are in freefall. Real wages continue to fall while the price of essentials soars. Housing has become unaffordable in many parts of our country, especially for the young. The ghost of a recovery […]
During a less than complimentary Twitter exchange yesterday about the qualifications needed to be Chancellor of the Exchequer (with the present incumbent providing the context) I made a serious point about the lack of economics teaching in schools, and rather surprisingly got a negative response; it would just mean pupils learning (I paraphrase) more of […]
Like many others, I’ve found the concept of One Nation Labour elusive. The term is deployed in almost every utterance from senior Labour politicians, but its meaning remains obscure. Like everyone who has studied nineteenth-history politics, I’m familiar with the origin of the phrase One Nation in reference to Tory politics and Disraeli, and it […]
Reading Nick Clegg’s New Year message was a sad and sobering affair (leaving aside any impatience at the growing habit of politicians great and small issuing such messages). It read as really little more than excuse-mongering and post-hoc rationalisation in defence of policies that appear to rub against the natural grain of the Liberal tradition; […]
Notes from a Broken Society 