Tag Archives: UK 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...

How things are changing. After the British election in December, the policy terrain in the UK has shifted such that the Tories are now being lectured to about the dangers of a stimulus package, while British Labour seems to be promoting leadership candidates that mostly were part of the problem that led to their failure. In the latter context, we are seeing King or, should I say Queen makers, who I would have thought were unelectable trying to influence the leadership choice. And former...

Sustainable cost accounting and the political necessity of addressing reality.Tax Research UKBusiness has to change its accounting for the climate crisis and Mark Carney needs to go further than he’s suggesting is necessaryLabour needs to drop the Green Industrial Revolution: we need a Green New Deal, and they’re nothing like the same thingRichard Murphy | Professor of Practice in International Political Economy at City University, London; Director of Tax Research UK; non-executive...

The Brexit issue in Britain has been marked by many different estimates of GDP (income) loss arising from different configurations of the Brexit. The media is flush with lurid headlines about the catastrophe awaiting Britain. As regular readers will appreciate, I am not convinced by any of those predictions. But as I said the day after the Referendum in this blog post – Why the Leave victory is a great outcome (June 27, 2016) – that when I tweeted it was a ‘great outcome’ I didn’t say that...

I have regularly noted how the UK Guardian, the so-called newspaper for progressives as opposed to The Times, which serves the Tories, has been a primary media instrument for propagating neo-liberal economic myths. It has also been part of Project Fear, which the Remainers thought would see the June 2016 Referendum resolved in their favour, and have ever since been moaning about the need for another vote – you know, democracy as long as it delivers what you want. But when the Tories...

"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

Jeremy Corbyn represents the only realistic chance the people of England and Wales have been given in decades, to escape from the neo-liberal economics that have impoverished vast swathes of the population. But he leads a parliamentary party which is almost entirely comprised of hardline neo-liberal adherents.The majority of the parliamentary Labour party are the people who brought in academy schools, high student tuition fees, PFI, who introduced more privatisation into the health service...

The week before last, Thomas Fazi and I had a response to a recent British attack on Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) published in The Tribune magazine (June 5, 2019) – For MMT. In effect, there were two quite separate topics that needed to be discussed: (a) the misrepresentation of MMT; and (b) the issues pertaining to British Labour Party policy proposals. The article we were responding to – Against MMT – written by a former Labour Party advisor, was not really about MMT at all, as you will...

In Part I, I considered an Australian-based attack on MMT from a Labour Party stooge. In this Part, I shift to Britain to address the recent article by a Northern Labour MP – Jonathan Reynolds – who is apparently, if his arrogance is to be believed, the Labour Party spokesperson on matters economic. For the title of his recent article (June 4, 2019) was – Why Labour doesn’t support Modern Monetary Theory – which begs the question as to who actually doesn’t support MMT – all of Labour?...

I have read the articles that The Economist published on Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) in the current edition of the liberal-leaning magazine (hereand there). I am not happy with the reporting, which includes false statements in general and also misrepresentations of what MMT is.... The Economist just put the UK debate on progressive economic policy on a slippery slope, claiming that a particular school of economics science constitutes “doctrine” and then misrepresenting that school’s...