Tag Archives: UK

So the UK Supreme Court (a bench of 11 judges) has delivered its judgment. Unaninmously. The prorogation of Parliament, based on the unlawful advice of Prime Minister Johnson, even if in form an act of the Queen, was null and void and of no effect.A couple of weeks ago, I concluded my post on The Rogue Prorogation and the English-Scottish judicial divide with these words:Whether the (UK) Supreme Court will be willing to go quite as far in making inferences of fact so...

The following article and interview with PRIME’s director written by Hettie O’Brien, appeared in the New Statesman on 24th September, 2019. Please note the error at the end of the piece: Since the Paris Climate Agreement three years ago, J.P. Morgan Chase have reportedly lent $196 billion, not $1.96 billion to fossil fuel industries, oil, coal and gas. The figure is drawn from the Rainforest Action Network’s 2018 Report, Banking on Climate Change.Eleven years ago, a group...

As the pressures and contradictions of no-deal Brexit threaten the unity of the United Kingdom, further fissures are to be seen through the prisms of judical reasoning, in which English and Scottish judges view and interpet the world in utterly divergent ways.The English High Court (which included the Lord Chief Justice and...

 By Sue Konzelmann, John Weeks and Marc Fovargue-Davies ‘Rethinking Britain: Policy Ideas for the Many’ is a publication of Policy Press (19 September 2019), in partnership with PRIME and the Progressive Economic Forum (PEF).  Price £14.99, pre-orders £11.99 via Bristol University Press website. It is edited by Sue Konzelmann, Susan Himmelweit,...

I keep reading ridiculous articles about Brexit in the UK Guardian. The latest was comparing it to pre-WWI Britain and suggesting there were no signs of a “Damascene moment remainers hoped for”. I thought that reference was apposite – given the reference invokes St Paul’s conversion after he was struck blind. Good analogy – blind and remainer. The Brexit imbroglio is all the more puzzling because it seems to be a massive mismatch of scale – a currency-issuing nation and an organisation with...

As Mr Johnson takes over as Leader of the Conservative Hard Brexit Cult, and by virtue thereof as Prime Minister, it is timely to take a quick look at what his economic and fiscal policy options are - at least in the lead up to DD-Day (Do or Die) on 31st October. It’s equally important to take stock of Mr Hammond’s record as...

I’ve just been updating our data for GDP per head of population (from the OECD database plus adding the ONS estimate for 2018) and noticed a startling fact. The age of austerity, starting with the 2010 Coalition government, and on to the Cameron / May governments, has to date been the worst since records began for annual change in GDP per head . The average increase in GDP per head of population, from 2010 to 2018, inclusive is lower than the decade 2000 to 2009, i.e. the...

The Berlaymont building, Brussels HQ of the European Commission, refracted. Image copyright Jeremy Smith This article is cross-posted from Open Democracy, first published 17th January 2019. It follows up his earlier article from December, “Labour's Brexit trilemma: in search of the least bad...

What Private Eye has failed to investigate is how Chernukhin has been able to import and invest a fortune in the UK, with the imprimatur of the British Government, financial regulators, and banks – a fortune whose origin when he was a state official in Moscow Chernukhin declines to explain.... On the say-so of Kasyanov and Kudrin, Chernukhin supervised VEB’s takeover of most Russian pension fund contributions; management of Soviet-era debts owed to Moscow by states like Czechoslovakia and...

This is an extract from a chapter in Economics For the Many (Verso, 2018) edited by Rt. Hon. John McDonnell MP.  The chapter was written in August, 2017. If we are to secure a sustainable, stable and liveable future for the people of Britain, then implementation of the Green New Deal will be vital. Not just for the sake of the ecosystem, but also for the sake of rebuilding a stable, sustainable economy. The era of procrastination, of half measures, of soothing and baffling...