The Alternative Budget 2025, Part 3: Creating a new fiscal framework
Funding the Future
The Alternative Budget 2025, Part 3: Creating a new fiscal framework
Rachel Reeves will be presenting her Budget on November 26, if the Labour government of which she is a part lasts that long. I will be commenti...
Reeves, and the folly of increasing basic income tax rates
Funding the Future
Reeves, and the folly of increasing basic income tax rates
There is much discussion in the media today about Rachel Reeves and tax rises. Rumour has it that Reeves has decided that cuts to public spendin...
The UK doesn’t lack homes; it lacks affordable ones. Developers won’t build what people can’t buy, and the Treasury won’t fund social housing. Poverty, rent stress, and political anger rise together. The answer is public investment, not market faith. Read on Funding the Future →
Funding the Future
The market is not the solution to our housing problems
The FT is annoying me, again, this morning with an article by someone called Neil Hudson that opens with this: There is a line about the UK proper...
 #HousingCrisis #Economics #UKPolitics
Growth is not coming back — and nor should our democracy depend upon it
Funding the Future
Growth is not coming back
Martin Wolf has (once again) declared in the Financial Times that the fate of democracy rests on economic growth. As he said, in advance of the Bud...
 In an article in the FT yesterday, its long-term columnist, Martin Wolf, suggested we must sacrifice both people and planet to growth to supposedly save democracy. Almost everything he wrote was wrong. It's time to move on from the ideas of neoliberal dinosaurs dedicated to destruction to a politics of care.
The great British energy rip off is now killing our green energy hopes – and the chance of cheaper electricity
Funding the Future
The great British energy rip-off is now killing our green energy hopes – and the chance of cheaper electricity
As the Guardian reported last night: Ministers are considering dropping one of their central green pledges in an effort to keep energy bills down,...
What do you do when the target’s wrong?
Funding the Future
What do you do when the target’s wrong?
As the Guardian noted yesterday: Bank of England rate-setter Catherine Mann has warned there is “very clear upside evidence” that UK ...
 The Bank of England is missing its 2% inflation target, but so what when the target is artificial, meaningless and decidedly harmful? Isn't it time we had better economic policy rather than spending time fretting about missing goals that were set in the 1990s for reasons that no one can now recall, or explain?
We could have avoided a crash
Funding the Future
We could have avoided a crash
This came from an email from The Economist yesterday: Today Gita Gopinath, a former chief economist of the IMF, sounds a warning. In a guest essay...
 Everyone now agrees we are heading for a global financial crash. It's only a matter of when, and not if. And the sad thing is, if only we'd reformed our tax reliefs on pensions and ISAs we might have avoided this disaster that's now in the making.
Inequality is not falling
Funding the Future
Inequality is not falling
The background The claim that inequality is falling is a claim that is often trotted out by right-wing commentators, backed by selective income...
 Right-wing politicians and commentators are claiming that inequality is falling in the UK based on a tiny change in one national statistic, which is itself statistically insignificant. This is not the case in reality. Inequality is rising. In this post, I explain why and what we can and should do about it.
Fascism, Trump, Reform, and the silencing of dissent
Funding the Future
Fascism, Trump, Reform, and the silencing of dissent
Chris Hedges, the noted anti-fascist campaigner in the USA,  has recently pointed out that fascists are unusually candid. They tell you what they ...
 Criticising Trump was deemed to be a terrorist act in the USA last week. Reform is already trying the same approach here - accusing Starmer of inciting terrorism for criticising Farage. In both cases, the direction of travel is the same - and is towards full-on fascism. We should be profoundly worried.
Bond markets do not rule – governments do
Funding the Future
Bond markets do not rule – governments do
James Carville, adviser to Bill Clinton, once said that if there were reincarnation, he would like to come back as the bond market, because then he...
 The FT is demanding that the government bow down to the demands of financial markets that will profoundly harm the well-being of the UK and most people who live in it. In the process, they reveal their lack of economic understanding and their own weak relationship with democracy and the right of elected politicians to govern.