Tag Archives: British politics

A debate is set by the way it is framed, along with the parties acceptance or rejection of key assumptions of the framework. These initial conditions determine the course of the debate and the likely winner. Accepting the assumptions of conventional political economy as the application of macroeconomics to policy issues all but guarantees defeat in policy debates since it is an uphill fight against entrenched forces to which one has needlessly and foolishly ceded the advantage. Bill...

Regular readers will know that I have been following the path of the British economy post-Referendum in 2016 to see whether the doomsday that the Remainers predicted was likely. It became colloquially known as ‘Project Fear’ as mainstream economists, so-called progressive economists who had their snout in the Labour Party as advisors (and we know where that took the Party), institutions like the Treasury and the Bank of England, all pumped out a sequence of terrible predictions about what...

More UK politics than MMT, but worth reading for Bill's take on British democracy. He also has some interesting words on Edmund Burke and his contemporary applicability.Bill Mitchell – billy blogBritish Labour surrenders to the middle class and big business interestsBill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

"Low-level corruption" at high levels. What is "low-level corruption"? No illegal but unethical owing to conflict of interest and principal-agent problem, the principal being the public and the agent being their representative in government. Craig Murray BlogBought PoliticiansCraig Murray, formerly British ambassador to Uzbekistan and Rector of the University of Dundee

Good one. Worth reading in full. Richard Murphy gives his summary of the state of the his argument with Jonathan Portes and Simon Wren Lewis. Tax Research UKThe political economy of Labour’s fiscal rule Richard Murphy

This week’s theme seems to be the about how the so-called progressive side of the economic and political debate keeps kicking ‘own goals’ (given a lot of this is happening in Britain where they play soccer) or finding creative ways to ‘face plant’ (moving to Europe where there is more snow). Over the other side of the Atlantic, as America approaches its mid-term elections, so-called progressive forces who give solace to the New Democrats, aka Neoliberal Democrats are railing against fiscal...

One of the themes that has emerged in the discussions of the British Labour Party Fiscal Credibility Rule (which should be renamed the Fiscal Incredulous Rule) is when is the right time for a political party to show leadership and start educating the public on new ideas. The Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) project has been, in part, about educating people even if our ideas have been strongly resisted by the mainstream. The mainstream (New Keynesian) paradigm in economics is degenerative...

I am surprised at the hostility that Part 1 in this series created. I have received a lot of E-mails about it, many of which contained just a few words, the most recurring being Turkey! One character obviously needed to improve his/her spelling given that they thought it was appropriate to write along the lines that I should just ‘F*ck off to Terkey’. Apparently Turkey has become the new poster child to ‘prove’ Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) wrong. Good try! I also note the Twitterverse has...

The Centre for European Reform, which must have little to do given the snail pace of so-called ‘reform’ that goes on in Europe, released a report over the weekend (June 23, 2018) – What’s the cost of Brexit so far? – which all the Europhile Remainers found filled their Tweet and other social media void for the day. I would of thought that they would have been happy, given England’s demolition of Panama in the soccer and 5-zip thrashing of Australia in the ODI cricket tournament. But no,...

The British Labour Party is currently leading the Tories in the latest YouGov opinion polls (February 19-20, Tories 40 per cent (and declining), Labour 42 per cent (and rising). They should be further in front, given the disarray of the Conservatives as they try to negotiate within their own party something remotely acceptable about Brexit. When there is this degree of political capital available, in this case for the Labour Party, a party should use it to redefine policy agendas that have...