Some are saying they don’t know what Andy Burnham’s big ideas are. They don’t know what he will try to achieve when he becomes prime minister. On GB News earlier this week, Boris Johnson described Burnham as a ‘mascaraed Mancunian mystery’. It is a peculiar concern. Burnham’s ideology seems to me no harder to identify […]
Sven Beckert, a Harvard professor, has written a very long history of capitalism. As its subtitle suggests, ‘Capitalism: A Global History’ covers all of the inhabited world and spans a millennium, starting with 12th-century merchants trading through the port city of Aden. The enterprise is of more than purely historical interest. As Beckert points out, […]
Taxing imports is bad. Tariffs harm the populations that their advocates claim to be helping. This has been well known since at least the early 19th century. But imposing tariffs, especially in the shambolic way Trump did in early April, is even worse than the tariffs themselves. To see why, imagine two American women, each […]
‘Debanking’ entered the popular imagination a year ago when Nigel Farage announced that Coutts had closed his account because its managers disapproved of his political opinions. It soon emerged that Farage was merely a prominent example of something that happens all the time, albeit usually for different reasons. In 2021/22, UK banks closed a total […]
Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, last week announced that he was going to freeze Transport for London (TfL) fares until March 2025. To cover the loss to TfL, he will give them £123m. When I say that Khan will give TfL £123m, I don’t mean it literally, of course. Khan hasn’t got that kind […]
On Wednesday, opposition MPs blamed the Government for increasing mortgage rates. They are right. The Government prevented people from working during the pandemic and paid them with money freshly created by the Bank of England. The money supply increased much faster than economic output. This supercharged inflation, which is now causing interest rates to rise. […]
The idea of a universal basic income (UBI) has gained many supporters over recent decades. Put simply, UBI is an income received by every adult from the government, funded by taxation. You would not need to be unemployed or a single parent or disabled or anything else (hence ‘universal’), and the income would suffice to […]
What’s happened to the police? Why do they dance the macarena and prance around in red high heel shoes when they cannot be bothered to pursue burglars or arrest looters? Why, in other words, are the police doing such a bad job? It’s because society has changed in ways that make their job more difficult. […]
On Sunday, Twitter presented me with a video of Boris Johnson speaking to camera. ‘If we want to achieve a truly representative Parliament’, he said, ‘then we cannot rest until 50% of MPs are women’. The Prime Minister seems to have misunderstood the meaning of ‘representative’ in the context of democracy. Parliament represents voters because […]
Owen Jones used his first Guardian column of the year to complain about the BBC giving airtime to Karol Sikora, the oncologist and medical entrepreneur, on the topic of Covid-19. Jones doesn’t mind that Sikora is not a virologist or epidemiologist. He reassured readers that it is OK in a democracy to hear non-specialists on […]
The Guardian last week decided to tackle one of big questions: what is the value of a human life? The headline of the editorial announced its answer: “people are priceless”. Or, more precisely, the value of people cannot be measured economically. When it comes to the value of life, we have hit “the limits of […]
When a younger woman, my cousin spent much time studying astrology, numerology and palmistry. She wanted to understand what people are like and why. She was especially interested in understanding herself. Several branches of science address these questions: developmental psychology, socio-biology, anthropology and sociology, among others. I pointed this out to my cousin. But she […]
The socialist commentator Owen Jones claims in his Guardian column today that “capitalism was built on the bodies of millions from the very start” and that “the transatlantic slave trade became a pillar of emergent capitalism”. Last week he was even blunter, tweeting that, among other horrors, capitalism caused international slavery. It is a strange idea. […]
Mariana Mazzucato is a professor of economics at University College London. She came to prominence following the publication of her 2013 book, The Entrepreneurial State, in which she argued for a bigger economic role for the state, claiming that politicians and bureaucrats are more innovative than people risking their own money. According to the Financial […]
Jarod Gilbert is a sociology lecturer at the University of Canterbury here in New Zealand. According to the byline of an article he published in a national newspaper last week, he “specialises in research with practical applications”. His latest practical suggestion can be found in the title of his article: “Why climate denial should be […]
Over the next three weeks, New Zealanders will vote in a referendum. Will we change our flag? We face a choice between the flag we have had since 1902 and an alternative chosen in a referendum last year. The significant difference between them is that the proposed new flag replaces the Union Jack with a […]
The just-finished Conservative Party conference was a victory parade for “The Good Right”, as Tim Montgomerie calls it. In an article on this site, he celebrated the contribution of the Minster of Justice, Michael Gove, who drew a distinction between the deserving rich and the undeserving rich. On Mr Montgomerie’s paraphrasing, the deserving rich “work […]
Last week George Osborne reduced tax credits for working parents and increased the minimum wage from £6.50 to £7.20, rising to £9.00 by 2020. Several commentators called the move a masterstroke. It allows Mr Osborne to cut the welfare budget without outraging those devoted to the welfare of the working poor. It may well be […]
