Monthly Archives: June 2011

             There are two well known ways to end an English drought. The first is to appoint a Minister for drought, or declare an official drought with policies to tackle it.           The second is for twenty four grown men to put on white clothes and for thirteen of them to stride purposefully into the [...]

           I have been hearing on the media that we have just had the hottest April and May for many years, as measured by maximum temperatures. This is a curious way of reporting recent weather. You would have thought they would record average temperatures, as this is a more normal representation of what we experience [...]

  Just when the government is discussing the right mix of public, private and charity sector provision i n health,  fly on the wall spy camera documentaries reveal cases of private sector maltreatment or poor performance. Channel Four does do a similar operation on an NHS hospital and shows some nurses in a bad light, [...]

  It may not feel like it but we are now in the third year of the economic recovery.  The Stock market hit bottom at the end of the first quarter 2009. By 2010 there was  moderate growth, which has continued with the interruption of the last quarter of 2010, variously blamed on the bad [...]

               Most MPs want the Coalition government to be a one term government. Labour wants to replace it, Conservatives want to win a majority next time in their own right.  Some Lib Dems would rather form a Coalition next time with Labour, hoping the numbers would allow them to do so. This makes it [...]

              The Conservative Economic Affairs Committee intends to take up the issues of falling money supply and difficulty in small and medium sized companies getting loans to expand and to finance their businesses.              Various commentators assume monetary policy is loose, owing to low official interest rates. The impact of the quantitative easing is [...]

                  No-one knows just how much a country can borrow before the lenders worry, demanding higher interest rates,  or refuse to lend more. Most people agree there does come a point where a country, like a company or an individual has borrowed too much. Once that is generally the view the options for that [...]