Monthly Archives: March 2008

Last night I heard the Wokingham choral Society sing Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. The highlight was a brilliant rendition of the drinking song of the “Abbot of Cucany”, who boasts that if he drinks with someone all day in the tavern by the evening that person has lost his clothes. The baritone soloist was Grant [...]

Press reports of large salaries paid to senior Council officials, and yesterday’s post on this blog about Chief Executives of Councils, has revealed the strong feeling that Council bureaucracies are out of touch and spending far too much on themselves. We elect Councillors to direct and control these bureaucracies, and are about to see some [...]

Sometimes it is events dear boy that land a Prime Minister in trouble. This week we have seen the PM trying to cement an alliance between the UK and France. Listening carefully to Mr Sarkozy’s agenda it sounded more like the old Scottish-French alliance, as a strong and integrated EU is more SNP than English [...]

Since 1974 we have seen the introduction of the Chief Executive Officer in to the world of local government. They arrived with the hated new counties of Avon and the rest cobbled together out of smaller cities and rural areas with differing senses of loyalty. They were introduced in the naïve belief that they would [...]

Last night I heard a fascinating presentation from the President of Virgin Galactic about their plans to sell people a trip into space on their reusable plane and space ship. They are offering the opportunity to people to become astronauts, seeing the beauty of our planet from space and experiencing weightlessness. The ambition and the [...]

The monthly tea party for academic economists at the Bank of England – the regular meeting which Gordon Brown claimed meant he had “made the Bank of England independent” – looks more and more irrelevant. The other changes Mr Brown made to the Bank, taking crucial powers away, have exposed the Bank to torrid times [...]

Listening to President Sarkozy yesterday was a salutary experience. The setting was both splendid, and redolent of more difficult times in Anglo-French relations. Maybe the organisers had a sense of humour, asking our guest to address us in a room dedicated to British royalty and dominated by the hanging of magnificent tapestries of the battles [...]