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Coronavirus Healthcare News Politics

The COVID Inquiry and the Transfer to Care Homes Case

Introduction As the official COVID-19 inquiry gets under way we see some of the core issues resurfacing: Boris Johnson’s dilettante approach to government; the profiteering VIP lane; and Matt Hancock’s purported ‘protective ring around care homes’ that nevertheless failed to prevent tens of thousands of deaths among residents.[1] The latter is perhaps the one issue […]

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Economics Money and Banking

Beyond Bitcoin – Speculation and NFTs

Cryptocurrency – more fiat than ‘Fiat’ I have previously written about Bitcoin, explaining why I don’t believe it has any future as a replacement for so-called ‘fiat’ currencies. There are various reasons I cited for this, the most important being that actual state-backed currencies are not ‘fiat’ at all. They are not given value simply […]

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Economics Healthcare Politics

The ‘Baumol Effect’ and How The Government Cheats Us

The UK’s Public Service Crisis There is a crisis in public services in the UK. This is longstanding but has been cruelly exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. This crisis is affecting education, legal services, social support and social care, but it is most obvious and most disturbing in the provision of healthcare. Emergency services are […]

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Economics Equality Labour Party Politics

The Economics of Starmerism

What do we know about Labour’s economic approach under Keir Starmer? In his Fabian Society pamphlet ‘The Road Ahead’, and in his Labour Conference speech we are beginning to get some clues to the Economics of Starmerism. So can he rise above the prevailing ‘mediamacro’ economic fallacies so dear to the mainstream media and the […]

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Labour Party Philosophy Politics

Is Morality Relevant to Politics?

Chris Clarke and Neal Lawson debate Labour Party ‘populist myths’ in the latest edition of Prospect magazine. These are based on ideas in Clarke’s book ‘The Dark Knight and the Puppet Master’ and include the ‘Dark Knight myth’ of morality in politics where the left are good and its opponents evil. Clarke also introduces a […]

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Labour Party Politics

John Gray on ‘Progressivism’ and Why Labour Lost

I admire John Gray and his somewhat cynical writing on political philosophy. Having heard him speak and briefly spoken to him he is evidently a man of erudition and humanity. But when he writes on ‘Progressivism’ and Labour’s election defeat in his January New Statesman essay ‘Why the left keeps losing’ something seems to have […]

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Coronavirus Healthcare

Coronavirus Update 25/04/2020 – It’s Too Early to Lift Restrictions

As anticipated, the Coronavirus outbreak has definitively entered new phases in both the UK and the US, in the wake of ‘lockdown’ restrictions limiting non-essential production and consumption and encouraging populations to stay at home. These policies are centralised in the UK and State-wide in most of the US. As we can see from Chart […]

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Coronavirus Healthcare News

Coronavirus Update 09/04/2020 – Light at the End of the Tunnel?

It is notable the extent to which the UK and US patterns of Covid-19 growth are now following each other, with similar rates of case growth and of the rise in deaths from the Coronavirus epidemic. (Chart 1)

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Coronavirus Healthcare News Politics

Coronavirus Update 26/03/2020

Whilst both the UK and the US can be said to have been slow in initiating forceful measures to deal with the Coronavirus epidemics in their countries, the UK government under Prime Minister Boris Johnson has now, albeit not always with the necessary clarity, announced shutdowns of most social-mixing in Britain. Only ‘essential workers’ – […]

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Coronavirus Healthcare News

Coronavirus Update 20/03/2020

Current Trends in the UK and the US More or less as I was posting my previous piece, the UK government was publicly rolling back on the idea that the aim of ‘herd immunity’ was the optimal strategy in the face of the Coronavirus epidemic. At the same time it published the scenario modelling of […]