Monthly Archives: January 2011

                   If you want to manage something, then measure it. We should be hearing monthly on the progress with reducing the growth rate of spending, increasing tax revenues and cutting the deficit, in line with the plans.                  Just to get the ball rolling, I reproduce beneath the Treasury figures for spending (total current) [...]

                     I read that some think I have suggsted in my blog and speech on sovereignty that it is divisible or can be shared. That is not what I said.                     Many purists think sovereignty is like virginity. You either have it or you have lost it. This an unfortunate simile for it, but my [...]

So often we talk on this site about things that could be better managed, or policies which have gone wrong. Yesterday I visited a factory in England which was so well run. So today I want to talk about how well we can make things in Britain, and to ask what was so good about [...]

                I have been making enquiries about the build up of the EU External Action service. In the UK there is a tendency  to play this down, to say that it is limited in scale and will not detract from our own Foreign Office and foreign policy.               According to the EU’s website 1525 staff transferred [...]

                   Today the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank should seek to answer why and how inflation has taken such a hold over the last year. It’s not just a case a few rogue items, or the result of the hike in VAT. Food, alcohol and tobacco, transport and education within the CPI are [...]

Mr Redwood (Wokingham) (Con): The Crown was sovereign once. It is intriguing that we are more than two hours into this debate but so far we have talked only about parliamentary sovereignty, even though the sovereignty technically still belongs to the Crown in Parliament. We all know about the events that took place over several [...]

            Yesterday in the debate on UK Parliamentary sovereignty I asked How does a sovereign lose their sovereignty?             Sovereignty is not the same as power. Confusion over this leads to some of the arguments about the EU. Those who favour a federal state say such a state would be more powerful than the [...]

             Today we will debate Parliamentary sovereignty. In truth, it should be called popular sovereignty. If Parliament can make and unmake laws, raise taxes and spend them without interference from the EU or judges, then the people are sovereign, because they can dismiss the Parliament in elections and influence it between elections through the [...]

                 Today representatives of business will meet the Prime Minister to discuss the government’s growth strategy. The government is keen to stress that it understands the need for growth, to generate the jobs to get people back to work, and to generate all the extra tax revenue they have forecast to pay the big [...]