Monthly Archives: January 2009

It was good that the President admitted the Chief Justice had helped him get the Oath of Office wrong. Admitting mistakes and correcting them is a sensible virtue. The Oath has been retaken. He announced an intention to close Guantanamo within a year. That will be a welcome line under an unfortunate blemish on the [...]

Today the government is sitting on a loss of more than £25 billion on the bank shares, the pound has fallen further, and they announced record breaking levels of public borrowing for the last month’s figures. When will they start to limit the taxpayer risk?

I hear this afternoon that the government has decided to withdraw its proposal to partially exempt MPs from FOI requests concerning expenses. I am very pleased they have seen sense over this. As I have been telling constituents, I do not support such a move.

There is an insatiable demand everywhere I go for comment on what we should do now. I have tried at each step to offer advice on how to start getting out of the very large hole we are in, but the authorities seem very keen on digging it ever deeper. Let me summarise briefly some [...]

I can forgive the President for his stumbles with the Oath of Office. He was nervous, they were not his words, and his staff had failed to place the words on his prompt screen. It is a detail they will doubtless get right the next time he has to reproduce a traditional statement. I do [...]

Today the pound has lost significant ground against the dollar and the yen. The government should see this as a verdict on its approach to the crisis, and take action to instil some confidence in its management of public borrowing.

Yesterday was a disastrous day for the UK. The government had to tell us that its first banking package, amounting to £487 billion of share buying, loans and guarantees, had not done the job. They are now planning another package which includes new loans, new guarantees, the possibility of quantitative easing and an insurance scheme [...]