Letters to the Editor – 3rd May 2016



Even before he became Prime Minister in July, Andy Burnham had talked about the country in institutional, positively mechanical ways. He promised to ‘give Britain the circuit-breaker it needs’, and said that his Number 10 North, part of the Office for the Prime Minister and Cabinet based – where else? – in Manchester, would be […]

On September 29, 1976, Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Denis Healey, announced his intention to apply to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a $3.9 billion loan, the largest ever requested. Britain, The Economist announced, was ‘bust’. This was a national humiliation, the crux of a decade of economic turmoil. Britain before 1979 was not […]

Why haven’t we grown in the last decade? We are experiencing the longest spell of workers experiencing no average wage growth in real terms for well over a century – ‘the longest in history since consistent wage records exist, dating back to Victorian times,’ as a paper in the Oxford Review of Economic Policy shows. […]