Francis Coppola

The Co-Op bank is putting itself up for sale. It announced today that it will offer all of its shares for sale, including the Co-Op Group's 20% stake and the shares currently owned by a consortium of American hedge funds, institutional investors and small investors. The decision follows on from last month's disclosure that it was facing a full-year loss for the third year running and would fail to meet capital requirements set by the Prudential Regulatory Authority (PRA) for some years to...

Today, the Guardian has a report on conditions in the refugee camp at Dunkirk, just up the French coast from the infamous "jungle" at Calais that was cleared at the end of 2016. "Women and children 'endure rape, beatings and abuse' inside Dunkirk's refugee camp" proclaims the headline. This is of course the shiny new refugee camp, supposedly built to international standards, that was opened less than a year ago.It makes harrowing reading. Here is an excerpt: The witness statement from...

The last week has been extraordinary, even by the standards of these extraordinary times. A flurry of Executive Orders from the new President of the United States has thrown the global order into chaos and sparked outrage throughout the world. But he has only done exactly what he said he would do. There is nothing in the Executive Orders signed so far that was not announced during the Presidential campaign, repeatedly and to loud cheers from his many supporters. The President was...

In many eyes, President-elect Trump is a loose cannon. He says things that upset people the world over. Many of them perhaps should not be taken too seriously - after all, he is a showman. But it would be a mistake to dismiss his rhetoric on trade. There, he is in deadly earnest - and it does not bode well either for America or for the world.  Trump's trade agenda was set in Peter Navarro & Wilbur Ross's paper (pdf) of September 2016. Peter Navarro's most famous work is the...

You've probably all noticed that I haven't been writing much lately. Well, not on this site, anyway, though I have been doing rather a lot elsewhere.In the last couple of months, my life has been upended. I suppose I should have seen this coming - the signs have been there for a long time - but the speed at which this has happened has shocked me.At the end of October, my father suffered a fall at his home on Sheppey, where he has lived alone since my mother went into a nursing home in...

What does "discussion" mean?According to the Oxford Dictionary, there are three definitions:the action or process of talking about something in order to reach a decision or to exchange ideas a conversation or debate about a specific topic a detailed treatment of a topic in speech or writing Well, this is a pretty wide brief, isn't it? Lots of opportunity for misunderstanding there.I recently joined a discussion group. There are lots of these on social media, some open, some closed. Some...

2016 has been an extraordinary year. Memorable for so many things: celebrity deaths, the melting of Arctic sea ice, Trump, Brexit, terror attacks in Europe, drownings in the Med, destruction in Syria. The largest movement of people in recorded history. And - perhaps - the overturning of the political & economic paradigm established by Reagan and Thatcher. Are we seeing the end of elites and the triumph of the common man? Was the Brexit vote really the victory of "ordinary people"? Was...

I have a confession to make. I have been reading the Daily Mail.No, I haven't gone over to the dark side. Rather, I have been true to myself. I have always tried to keep an open mind. And sometimes that means doing something of which my critical self does not approve. Like reading tabloid newspapers.Reading is an important part of my life. I've always needed time to myself, to read and think. Without that space, my mind fogs and I become irritable. I suppose I am a bit introverted,...

I hate the term "neoliberal", but in this piece I am going to use it, simply for want of a better word. Neoliberal economic dogma says that the public sector crowds out the private sector. So the public sector should only step in as a last resort to provide for those that the private sector cannot or will not serve. In recent years, we have interpreted this to mean that the public sector should only provide for the very poorest in our society. If people can afford to pay, the private...

How effective is monetary policy?Highly effective, according to the Governor of the Bank of England. In a speech earlier this week, Mark Carney robustly defended the Bank of England's record: "Simulations using the Bank’s main forecasting model suggest that the Bank’s monetary policy measures raised the level of GDP by around 8% relative to trend and lowered unemployment by 4 percentage points at their peak. Without this action, real wages would have been 8% lower, or around £2,000 per...