Lord Skidelsky 

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, made an important point about the importance of thinking about a post-Putin future. I have never thought that Putin either can or deserves to survive this adventure on which he has embarked, but I am interested in what is meant by such phrases as

“withdraw his troops and end this bloodshed now”,

and a remark from the Labour Front Bench about the importance of “winning the war”. What exactly do these things mean? It seems to me that the black box here is Crimea. Is it assumed that winning the war and withdrawing Russian forces means going back to 2014 frontiers and that that is the purpose of winning the war? If that is the case, what legitimacy do the Government expect a post-Putin Government to have in Russia? In

May 25, 2023 ROBERT SKIDELSKY

Amid the growing excitement about generative AI, there are also mounting concerns about its potential contribution to the erosion of civil liberties. The convergence of state intelligence agencies and surveillance capitalism underscores the threat that artificial intelligence poses to the future of democracy.

LONDON – With investors pouring billions of dollars into artificial intelligence-related startups, the generative AI frenzy is beginning to look like a speculative bubble akin to the Dutch tulip mania of the 1630s and the South Sea Bubble of the early eighteenth century. And, much like those episodes, the AI boom appears headed for an inevitable bust. Instead of creating new assets, it threatens to leave behind only mountains of debt.

April 19, 2023, Central European University

LONDON – In Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, scientist Victor Frankenstein famously uses dead body parts to create a hyperintelligent “superhuman” monster that – driven mad by human cruelty and isolation – ultimately turns on its creator. Since its publication in 1818, Shelley’s story of scientific research gone wrong has come to be seen as a metaphor for the danger (and folly) of trying to endow machines with human-like intelligence.

Shelley’s tale has taken on new resonance with the rapid emergence of generative artificial intelligence. On March 22, the Future of Life Institute issued an open letter signed by hundreds of tech leaders, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, calling

Mar 28, 2023 ROBERT SKIDELSKY

Inflation and growth rates are increasingly determined by global events over which national policymakers have no control. Instead of clinging to the illusion that they can control the uncontrollable, governments should use fiscal policy to protect their most vulnerable citizens from disruptive external shocks.

LONDON – In 1969, the British financial journalist Samuel Brittan published a book called Steering the Economy: The Role of the Treasury. At the time, it was still widely assumed that the United Kingdom’s economy was steerable and that the Treasury (which was still in charge of monetary policy) was at the helm.

Back then, the Treasury’s macroeconomic model, which calculated national income as the sum of consumption, investment, and

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in paying tribute to the remarkable maiden speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Moyo. It was very thoughtful and thought provoking, and I very much appreciated her reference to me—she will have a great future here.

The Budget was crafted in the shadow of disruptive world events over which the Chancellor has little or no control, but it is by its effectiveness in tackling or responding to those events that I think this Budget will be judged. The three killer apps—as one might call them—are global finance, technology and geopolitics. The global banking crisis of course caused the depression of 2008-09. The recent collapse of SVB shows, as the noble Lord, Lord Fox, noted in this House on Tuesday, what a huge proportion of our tech industry depends on

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FEBRUARY 17 2023

One year has passed since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and nothing seems to indicate that the flames of war are dying. Why does the war still continue? Why are military tensions rising in the world?

We reject the thesis of a “clash of civilisations”. Rather, we need to recognise that the contradictions in the deregulated global economic system have made geopolitical tensions more acute (Opinion, February 14).

One of the worst faults of the present system is the imbalance in economic relations inherited from the era of free-market globalisation. We refer to international net positions, where the US, the UK and various other western countries have large external debts, while China, other eastern countries, and to some extent Russia are in an

With the world increasingly turning away from economic integration and cooperation, the second wave of globalization is threatening to give way to fragmentation and conflict, as the first wave did in 1914. Averting catastrophe requires developing strong political foundations capable of sustaining a stable international order.

LONDON – Is the world economy globalizing or deglobalizing? The answer would have seemed obvious in 1990. Communism had just collapsed in Central and Eastern Europe. In China, Deng Xiaoping was unleashing capitalist enterprise. And political scientist Francis Fukuyama famously proclaimed the “end of history,” by which he meant the triumph of liberal democracy and free markets.

Years earlier, the British economist Lionel Robbins, a firm believer in free

The UK’s draconian Public Order Bill, which seeks to restrict certain forms of protest used by climate activists, will expand the state’s ability to detain people deemed disruptive and limit the courts’ ability to restrain it. This will align the British legal system with those of authoritarian countries like Russia.

LONDON – In December 1939, police raided the home of George Orwell, seizing his copy of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. In a letter to his publisher after the raid, Orwell wondered whether “ordinary people in countries like England grasp the difference between democracy and despotism well enough to want to defend their liberties.”

Nearly a century later, the United Kingdom’s draconian Public Order Bill, passed by the UK House of Commons last year and now

Sir, Your leading article (“Digital Danger”, Jan 2) warns of the use of Chinese-made surveillance systems to track people in the UK. But neither your editorial nor the surveillance watchdog, Fraser Sampson, seems to have any qualms about British-made equipment being used for the same purpose. In 1786 Jeremy Bentham designed the Panopticon, in which a central prison watchtower could shine a light on all the encircling prison cells without the inmates being able to tell that they were being watched. This, he thought, would motivate them to behave legally. Bentham thought his contrivance was equally applicable to hospitals, schools and factories. In Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, one-way TV systems are installed in every flat. Big Brother would always be watching you.

My Lords, I am grateful, as we all are, to the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, for initiating this debate and for drawing attention to the real danger of nuclear escalation.

I am in profound disagreement with the Government’s policy on Ukraine—I have said it before in this House and I shall say it again. This disagreement can be stated in one sentence: the Government’s policy is a war policy; I support a peace policy. I shall try to justify that.

The then Foreign Secretary, Liz Truss, stated on 27 April:

“We will keep going further and faster to push Russia out of the whole of Ukraine.”

This policy has been repeatedly restated by government spokesmen. It is supported by the Opposition and echoed by the media.

In calling for peace, I may be an isolated voice

My Lords, the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement is designed to reassure the markets of the sustainability of the public finances. That is, the Chancellor accepts as binding the views of the City of London, whether they are right or wrong. It is what the markets think that matters, not how matters really are—a nice intrusion of post-modernist thinking in what is supposed to be the hard science of economic policy-making.

It is pretty obvious why the Government should pay such attention to the financial markets. For decades, the financial sector has propped up the UK’s hollowed-out economy. Financial flows into the City of London allowed the country to neglect production and trade and artificially maintain a higher standard of living than its productive capacity warranted. Now we are

Nov 8, 2022 ROBERT SKIDELSKY and PHILIP PILKINGTON

Decades of deindustrialization have hollowed out the UK economy and made it woefully ill-prepared for wartime disruptions. As the financial speculators who funded its current-account deficits turn against the pound, policymakers should consider Keynesian taxes and increasing public investment.

LONDON – A wartime economy is inherently a shortage economy: because the government needs to direct resources toward manufacturing guns, less butter is produced. Because butter must be rationed to make more guns, a war economy may lead to an inflationary surge that requires policymakers to cut civilian consumption to reduce excess demand.

In his 1940 pamphlet “How to Pay for the War,” John Maynard Keynes famously called for fiscal

ROBERT SKIDELSKY and SIMONE GASPERIN (2021)

Abstract:

This paper upholds the classical Keynesian position that a laissez-faire market economy lacks a spontaneous tendency to full employment. Focusing on the UK case, it argues that monetary policy could not prevent the economic collapse of 2008-9 or achieve full recovery from the Great Recession that followed. The paper then outlines the case for fiscal policy to regain a permanent status of primacy in modern macroeconomic management, beyond the pandemic emergency. It distinguishes between public investment and automatic stabilisers, reducing discretionary actions to a minimum. It presents the case for re-empowering the State’s public investment function and for reforming the system of automatic counter-cyclical stabilisers by

My Lords, it is very cold in this House; I wonder what has happened to the heating. It certainly has a chilling effect on debate.

I am not a lawyer like the noble Lord, Lord Sandhurst, nor a policeman like the noble Lord, Lord Paddick. I am driven to take part in the debate because I have become increasingly concerned at the wide powers of surveillance and control being claimed by Governments in the name of public order and national security—powers that, in their structure though not yet in the scale of their implementation, resemble those in countries such as Russia and China.

I recall that George Orwell wrote in 1939 about

“whether the ordinary people in countries like England grasp the difference between democracy and despotism well enough to want to defend their liberties.

Oct 19, 2022ROBERT SKIDELSKY

Admired in the West but loathed by his countrymen as a harbinger of Russia’s post-Cold War misfortune, Mikhail Gorbachev fully grasped the immense challenges of reforming the ailing Soviet Union. Today’s Russia largely reflects the anti-Western grievances stemming from his failure.

LONDON – Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union’s last leader, was buried last month at the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow next to his wife Raisa and near fellow Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. To no one’s surprise, Russian President Vladimir Putin did not attend the funeral. Novodevichy, after all, is where “unsuccessful” Soviet leaders had been consigned to their final rest.

Putin’s snub reminded me of a conversation I had two decades ago during a midnight stroll through

House of Lords Speech: 10 October 2022

My Lords, the twin problems to which the mini-Budget was addressed were near-zero growth and a relentless rise in prices. I doubt whether it will do very much for the first—certainly not in time to offset the second. In the short run, what we face is not a growth crisis but an inflationary crisis and that, of course, also means a currency crisis.

What was the growth strategy? I think it was based on Reaganomics—the idea that unfunded tax cuts, by incentivising the wealthy to work hard and invest more, would pay for themselves. That was a sort of Laffer curve idea, which was very popular in the 1980s. The British Treasury never bought it; it always thought that tax cuts to encourage the wealthy would need to be complemented by welfare cuts to

Sep 12, 2022 ROBERT SKIDELSKY

Since World War II, Britain’s influence in the world has relied on its “special relationship” with the United States, its position as head of the Commonwealth (the British Empire’s successor), and its position in Europe. The Americans are still there, but Europe isn’t, and now the head of the Commonwealth isn’t, either.

LONDON – Amid the many, and deserved, tributes to Queen Elizabeth II, one aspect of her 70-year reign remained in the background: her role as monarch of 15 realms, including Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. She was also the head of the Commonwealth, a grouping of 56 countries, mainly republics.

This community of independent states, nearly all of them former territories of the British Empire, has been crucial in conserving a

Aug 22, 2022 ROBERT SKIDELSKY

The widening gaps in policy formation nowadays reflect the division of labor and increasing specialization that has taken us from the sixteenth-century ideal of the Renaissance man. And today’s biggest policymaking gap has grown so large that it threatens global catastrophe.

LONDON – Just as the insistent demand for more “transparency” is a sure sign of increasing opacity, the current clamor for “joined-up thinking” indicates that the need for it far outstrips the supply. With its recent report on energy security, the UK House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee has added its voice to the chorus.

The report’s language is restrained, but its message is clear: Without a “joined-up” energy policy, the United Kingdom’s transition to net zero by 2050

Jul 19, 2022 ROBERT SKIDELSKY

Although words like “unprincipled,” “amoral,” and “serial liar” seem to describe the outgoing British prime minister accurately, they accurately describe more successful political leaders as well. To explain Johnson’s fall, we need to consider two factors specific to our times.

LONDON – Nearly all political careers end in failure, but Boris Johnson is the first British prime minister to be toppled for scandalous behavior. That should worry us.

The three most notable downfalls of twentieth-century British leaders were caused by political factors. Neville Chamberlain was undone by his failed appeasement policy. The Suez fiasco forced Anthony Eden to resign in 1957. And Margaret Thatcher fell in 1990 because popular resistance to the poll

Jun 14, 2022 ROBERT SKIDELSKY

The Stalinist retreat from science and logic persisted following the Soviet Union’s collapse and is now the main tendency of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rule. With his faith-based mythology, warping of history, and denial of facts, Putin’s withdrawal from contemporary Europe could not be starker.

LONDON – The Russian writer Pyotr Chaadayev said of his country that “we have never advanced along with other people; we are not related to any of the great human families; we belong neither to the West nor to the East, and we possess the traditions of neither. Placed, as it were, outside of the times,” he wrote, “we have not been affected by the universal education of mankind.”

That was in 1829. The “riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an

After the first world war, workers wanted a peace dividend for their sacrifices. Within three years they got it. Almost every industrialised nation – with the exception of Japan – accepted the newly established International Labour Organization’s call to limit working hours to eight a day and 48 a week. While most developed countries enacted legislation to achieve these aims, Britain, along with the United States and Italy, did so through collective agreements.

Today, the triple crises of Covid, Russia’s war in Ukraine and Brexit will create job-altering shocks. Employers are already implementing remote working. Some workers, perhaps those with comfortable homes, prefer online messaging to water cooler chats and web conference calls to in-person ones. Others, meanwhile, are opting

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To be a realist in international relations is to accept that some states are more sovereign than others. “Strict realism” now requires that Sweden and Finland pause before rushing into NATO’s arms, and that the Alliance take a step back before accepting them.

LONDON – Finland and Sweden have announced that they will apply for NATO membership. But joining the Alliance is more likely to weaken than enhance their security and that of Europe.

Strategic neutrality has preserved Sweden’s independence and freedom from war for 200 years, and Finland’s independence since 1948. Has anything happened to justify ending it?

Swedish and Finnish officials point to two episodes. In December 2021, the Kremlin went from desiring Swedish and Finnish neutrality to, in essence, demanding it,

Clinging to the assumption that only dictatorships start military conflicts, proponents of democratization believed that the global success of their project would usher in a world without war. But this theory lacks a sound foundation and has produced one disaster after another when put into practice.

LONDON – Through persuasion, exhortation, legal processes, economic pressure, and sometimes military force, American foreign policy asserts the United States’ view about how the world should be run. Only two countries in recent history have had such world-transforming ambitions: Britain and the US. In the last 150 years, these are the only two countries whose power – hard and soft, formal and informal – has extended to all parts of the world, allowing them plausibly to aspire to the

My Lords, I find myself in profound disagreement with the Government’s war strategy in Ukraine and, in fact, with almost everything that has been said about Ukraine in this debate. I will try to explain why.

British policy aims for a Russian military defeat, which it will help to bring about by economic sanctions and supplying Ukraine with the necessary means of war. Liz Truss said on 27 April:

“We will keep going further and faster to push Russia out of the whole of Ukraine”.

Simon Jenkins has commented:

“She is clearly revelling in her imagined proxy war on the Russian bear and no one in Whitehall appears able to restrain her.”

I wish her proxy war was only imagined but it is actually happening.

It is an open secret that both France and Germany regard our

Economic Sanctions: A Weapon out of Control?

By

Robert Skidelsky 

Centre For Global Studies, April 2022

Copyright: Centre for Global Studies. 

The Centre for Global Studies is a London-based think-tank that aims to improve public understanding of economics and global policy. The Centre is a registered charity and a company limited by guarantee. It is independent of any political party or group and is financed by voluntary donations and the sale of publications.

Contact: [email protected] 

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Robert Skidelsky is chairman of the Centre for Global Studies. He is a member of the House of Lords. He was Professor of

UKRAINE DIPLOMACY

Sir, In discussing the possible “Finlandisation” of Ukraine, your leading article (“Kyiv’s Cause”, Feb 11) correctly states that it would unacceptable for great powers to enforce such a policy on Ukraine. In his brilliant book The Ambassadors, Sir Robert Cooper explains that Finland’s neutrality was not “enforced” by great powers but was decided by Finland itself, against the wishes of the Soviet Union, which wanted a military alliance. It was the ability of the two Finnish negotiators, Paasikivi and Mannerheim, plus the respect Finland had earned from Stalin by its brave resistance to the Soviet invasion of 1939, which secured more than “nominal” independence in 1948.

The moral of the tale is that it is up to Ukraine to determine the conditions of its

To the Financial Times

Martin Wolf is right to say that Vladimir Putin has ignited an indefensible war against Ukraine. That it is worse than a crime is highlighted by your report on Kharkiv, described as “another Stalingrad”. You do not call Ukrainians your brothers then bomb them into submission. Whatever the war’s immediate results, Putin has ensured that Russia’s western borders become “ungovernable”. This is a dreadful legacy.

However, let’s not lose all sense of history. Russia’s desire to retain both Belarus and Ukraine as buffers between Russia and Nato is understandable: one has only to look at the map to understand why. I have never understood why the West – or Ukraine itself – has refused to give Russia the assurance that there would be no forward deployment of Nato

Lecture and Discussion with Lord Robert Skidelsky

Lord Robert Skidelsky has given a lecture at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (IWM) on Tuesday, 15 March 2022, 18:00 CET in Vienna.

In contemporary discussions about the future of artificial intelligence we often lose our heads. While economists offer bleak predictions of mass job losses and a deepening of already widespread precarity, Silicon Valley utopians insist that new technologies are bringing us ever closer together and will one day deliver us from work, disease and poverty. But when human life is reduced to a set of rational processes waiting to be optimized, we risk losing sight of the irreducible quality of human experience. The talk shed new light on the dream of machinery and the entailed  dichotomy of