Trade wonk, Brexit bore, globalisation defender, music lover, cricketer, gardener, supporter of mediocre football teams, who knows where the time goes?
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The limits of a UK political system that has refused for ten years to make hard decisions are reached.
There are no easy answers. There is no magic money / growth tree. Leaders are going to have to make choices.
David Henig
NEW: John Healey quits over defence funding. Devastating letter for the government and Keir Starmer: “You have been unable and the Treasury has been unwilling to commit the resources the nation needs to defend the country at this time of rising threats.”
Lewis Goodall
One can also make a case that today is the real end-point of Blairism, the ideology free zone in which everyone could have something because the world economy was so robust. It isn't now, and there's no reason to believe it will be any time soon.
That fatal misunderstanding of this Starmer government - that growth could be magicked up to avoid hard choices.
To be fair, the Conservatives have their own version involving welfare and tax cuts.
Not serious in either case. Some seriously new thinking needed.
And no, there are no easy answers. Not one. Everything will have impacts, will be opposed by many people. And that's as it should be, we need politics as a debate of competing ideologies, not as some mush where everyone says roughly the same and nobody is happy.
The wider Westminster bubble must also take some of the blame for complacency and tolerance of recycled outdated nothings like that vacuous Blair article.
Both right, but this is not just about tax and spend levels, because the demands on countries with much higher taxes are just as intense e.g. France. This is a systemic European problem.
Yes. But does a successor dare do things differently, or do they try to stick with the same basic approaches? bsky.app/profile/drje...
Tear up the superficial papers that passed for economic thinking and start to acknowledge and choose the difficult trade-offs, between regulation and large companies, demographics and growth, and technology versus change-weariness. ecipe.org/publications...
