Tag Archives: Speeches

11th of November 2024 My Lords, there are many things to welcome in this Budget, particularly on the spending side. I am less keen on some of the tax proposals, which seem to be mean-minded and counterproductive, such as the tax on knowledge. The spending commitments are important because they reverse the disastrous policy of austerity, which has brought our public services and infrastructure close to collapse. Even the IMF, originally a champion of austerity, admitted that it had...

21st of October 2024 I am so happy to have been asked to contribute to this round table in honour of David. We were close friends for over fifty years. All who knew him well could sense the extraordinary unity between his life and work. His life bore testimony to his ideals. There were no obvious tensions, loose pieces. I want to capture something of what we got from him because his thinking remains an indispensable fount of wisdom in an increasingly deranged world. Let me start...

Below is my speech on Ukraine in the House of Lords on the 25th of October. Unfortunately, time constraints forced me to leave out two bits of my argument which I will put in brackets in the text. “My Lords, I am usually put last on the speakers’ list in any debate on this topic, but I treat that as a badge of honour. I welcome the opportunity we have been given to take note. I have been taking note of the Government’s position on Ukraine for over two years now. It is unchanging: the...

“My Lords, in taking part in this debate, I must declare an interest: recently, I was a victim of the committee chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller. Although this is not the kind of interest a Member is normally obliged to declare, I believe that my personal experience has given me a certain insight into the way the system works, which may be of public interest. I welcome the committee’s aim to shorten and clarify the code and guide wherever possible—they require...

“”My Lords, I was not on the committee and therefore would like to allow myself a few mild criticisms of a very thought-provoking report. I will touch on three aspects of its central problem: “Who watches the watchdogs?” First, a bit of history might be helpful. In its present form, this challenge was created by the Thatcher reforms of the 1980s, which produced a new dividing line between the state and the private sector. Previously,  the Government owned the public utilities and...

[unable to retrieve full-text content]A lecture for Kadir Has University, Department of Economics, Istanbul. Image by Lynn Greyling from Pixabay The post Back from Post-Modernity: The Coming New Economic Order first appeared on Michael Hudson.

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...

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...

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...

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...