Monthly Archives: July 2008

On Tuesday I was sounded out by a senior representative of a continental government over the position the UK will adopt towards EU issues, in the event of a Conservative majority in Parliament after the next election. Given the large number of misunderstandings or wishful thinking on the part of several continental governments, I thought [...]

I always knew the former Chancellor was no good at economics. Whilst most people were busily repeating Labour spin about his genius at running the economy, I was critical of the way he trashed the Bank of England and taxed the pension funds to death at the beginning, disagreed with the huge surge of public [...]

Over the Brown years the Chancellor/PM has applied an iron law to the Opposition – they must speak no tax cuts and no spending increases. If they venture either Labour reserves the right to list the worst kind of spending cuts to “pay” for them, as no “unfunded” spending increases and tax cuts are allowed. [...]

Can the government rescue the mortgage market? This question is being asked today by the government’s own adviser, as if the mortgage market can be sorted out in some kind of a vacuum, detached from the rest of the banking sector. I can understand that the government wants to stabilise house prices, and fancies that [...]

Many Labour MPs have found the answer – windfall taxes. They are proposing a veritable blizzard of these windfall taxes – one for the oil companies, one for the electricity utilities, and yet another for the banks! It leaves the sane asking “What then was the question?” Would windfall taxes bring down inflationary price pressures? [...]

The government has stuck to its idiot view of house prices – it believes they reflect whether enough new houses are being built or not. All the time house prices were rising they told us it was because we were not building enough. They used the rise in prices as an excuse to demand the [...]

Most politicians naturally assume public spending is good and more public spending is better. They implicitly assume that you can buy votes with other people’s money. This belief has underpinned the long upwards movement in public spending of the last hundred years, punctuated only by the odd financial crisis forcing retrenchment (e.g. 1976) or by [...]

When a party is as down and out as Labour is today it is conventional for them to debate whether they should now concentrate on salvaging something by pandering to the core vote, or drive decisively to middle Britain and ignore the many party cries for a more traditional approach. It is only fitting that [...]

In the last three months on this site you have responded most to the following topics: David Davis English Votes for English issues English Democrats The Irish referendum on the EU Inflation The battle of the Somme European army Modernising Conservatism and Anglicanism Motoring taxes MPs pay (Top ten in order of number of responses [...]

Labour’s loss of Glasgow East has come after the start of the long Parliamentary recess. It means John Mason will have to wait eleven weeks before he can take his seat, eleven weeks before he can say anything in Parliament about why he won and why the electors of Glasgow are so fed up with [...]