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The point Andrew Neil makes here about the British police going from being the most respected in the world to one of the most despised in less than one lifetime is an important & profound one. There was nothing automatic about this. We did it to ourselves.

In prospect: endless administrative bureaucracy, endless tinkering, endless arbitrariness. There are alternatives. Here's a short version of one of them, from 7 years back. As in the 1970s, "Recovery requires a sea change in Britain's political economy." gypoliticaleconomy.blog/2018/05/05/the…

Two thoughts: 1. Sycophancy is not necessarily a good look with many voters. Some LAB voters might prefer someone more akin to a 'national shop steward' when dealing with foreign governments. 2. Easy to see why those tax reductions might be popular, including among LDem voters.

There is a continuing failure in these discourses to distinguish clearly between growth of GDP and productivity growth, which is what matters for average living standards.

On a longer horizon it is GDP per head where the UK (and Canada) are outliers with zero compound growth since the start of 2022. Whilst the economic contribution of each cohort of inward migration grows over time, it is this type of data that drove this week's announced UK

“The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.” (Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money) spectator.co.uk/article/keir-s…

Maybe, but maybe not. Stark trade-offs are often created by bad policy frameworks, and migration policy is a case in point. A hard cap on the issuance of rights to reside in the UK would, coupled with tradability of those rights, allow those who want to spend time working or

In a world in which they were less constrained in their operation, differently located airports would compete more intensely to provide better services to their users (passengers and airlines). Better service would attract more business and more revenues for their owners

In ancient time, when I was a kid I was taught that inflation was a *persistent or sustained* tendency for prices to rise in aggregate. It's the consequence of a persistent/sustained state of excess demand for goods and services. Other things equal, the effects of one-off shocks

It's in her own hands. There's a large, unsatisfied public demand for a new sense of direction, backed by a credible policy strategy to effect the turnaround (akin to the 'sea change in Britain's political economy' that Conservative strategists put on Thatcher's table in 1977).

Further evidence in support of the Buffet view: once upon a time at a board meeting, I asked the finance director of a major utility what he estimated to be their cost of capital. Answer back was a percentage to two decimal places. Knew immediately that that could only come from

These internal Labour arguments will be blown out of the water when Gilts impose reality

Only to add that Henderson arrived at that insight by studying the use of economics in government (precisely the area of human activity where DIY is likely to be most damaging). Plus ca change?

FAO HM Treasury, maybe?

That’s the dream, though it can be noted that increasing the growth rate is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for reducing the debt to GDP ratio.

In the voluminous research literature on the political economy of regulation, an early, stand-out paper (1971) is 'Taxation by Regulation', by Richard Posner (link to the abstract below). Things have moved on quite a bit since then and the phenomenon is now universal, not just a

Other than for terrorists, this is the starkest indictment I've ever read from Andrew Neil, whom I tend to think of as one of the few surviving 'friends of the Scottish Enlightenment', but it's hard to think of evidence that would serve to provide a basis for even a partial rebuttal.