Since my post Leveson, the Press and Labour there have been further developments. The Prince Harry photos episode was hardly edifying for the press or the Royal Family. That the Sun editor could claim that publishing these photos of a silly over-privileged young man was somehow ‘about the freedom of the press’ should re-inforce my main point. The primary […]
Month: August 2012
Categories
Unemployment and Policy
This post is on 2 pages. Please click on the appropriate page number at bottom of text to navigate. There’s a very interesting take on UK unemployment trends in the July NIESR Review, written by the NIESR director Jonathan Portes. One should perhaps bear in mind that he has previously worked to formulate employment policy […]
This post was published on LabourList on 16th August 2012, under the title ‘Labour must free the Press’. The first instalment of Lord Leveson’s inquiry report into the Culture, Practice and Ethics of the Press is due in the autumn. It’s vital that Labour are ready to argue for a truly free press. We should […]
Tim Worstall v. PositiveMoney I note an interesting little discussion between Tim Worstall and Ralph Musgrave on money creation in the context of the Northern Rock bank crisis of 2007. Essentially Tim was claiming, against the PositiveMoney view, that the failure of the bank was evidence that it was not possible for banks to create […]
“Budget Hero” – Public Media’s Most Despicable Financial Propaganda is the title of a great anti-austerity piece by William K. Black on the New Economic Perspectives site. It appears that some very strange and economically ignorant people have designed an on-line game to demonstrate their destructive view of how the economy works. Bill Black is […]
The riots that engulfed London and other cities in England began one year ago today. Just to hark back to my piece ‘Riots: Looking Deeper’ on this topic last year, written one week after they started. I think it’s fair to say that it was a reasonable analysis. In particular the Independent Panel set up […]
Banking as Fraud I’ve got involved with one or two on-line debates recently in which the issue of money in commercial banking is seen as a fraudulent process by which value is stolen from citizens. Usually the central bank is seen as the government’s enabler in this process, and so to blame for the resultant […]