This post was composed jointly with the Rev Peter Ould, who blogs at www.peter-ould.net The incoming Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, faces three great issues of church politics: whether, and if so how, to maintain the Anglican Communion internationally; whether, and if so how, to maintain unity in the Church in England, and whether the […]
The target measure of inflation, CPI, rose from 2.2% to 2.7% this month, well above the 2.4% expected. As recently as August the Bank of England's inflation report expected inflation at about 2% by now. Back in February the inflation report expected inflation by now to be well below 2%. With recent rises in energy and […]
One of the most important constitutional disputes is that between the Jeffersonian (or "Democrat") and Burkean conceptions of democracy. For a Jeffersonian Democrat the people are sovereign and the task of democracy is to reflect the popular will in action. Elected representatives take on board the instructions of their electors and act as delegates, implementing […]
Bruce Anderson tells us that Labour is now the party focused on power, whilst the Conservative Party has degenerated into a debating society for intellectuals. But precisely the opposite is true: the Conservative Party has failed to win four General Elections in a row precisely by and because of ignoring its intellectuals. In the mid-1990s […]
One of the worst strategic errors made by Cameron and Hague in 2009 came in the immediate aftermath of the decision not to hold an ex-post referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. It was correct not to hold such a referendum, but only if the policy were going to be to seek an early and specific […]
Michael Heseltine was, after Mandelson, Blair, and Portillo (in that order) my fourth favourite politician of the past two decades. It was therefore great to see Hezza (sorry – Lord Hezza) engaged with the political debate again yesterday, in defence of his “No Stone Unturned” report on growth — though at 233 pages and 89 […]
The New Statesman recently declared: "The inflation hawks were wrong." ConservativeHome's The Deep End tried to excuse them, declaring: "The inflation hawks were wrong, but for the right reasons". But they didn't need any excusing, because they weren't wrong. What are they accused of being wrong about? George Eaton in the New Statesman quotes Andrew Sentance […]
Any good Conservative recognises a bias towards the status quo; one should need more reason to change things than to keep them the same. This natural, healthy tendency has been seen in the results of referendum around the world, on all kinds of topics. We saw it in the UK in the AV referendum. We […]
That's the trouble with hoping for the messiah for a long time – when people say he's turned up you condemn them for blasphemy. I've written a number of blogs and newspaper articles recently, noting that with the advent of the EU Federation a referendum on Britain's EU "membership" is inevitable and that even were such a […]
Since Jeremy Hunt's comments just before Party Conference, abortion has been back in the news. When abortion is discussed, there are three issues that seem regularly to be raised by those describing themselves as "pro-choice" that seem to me deeply confused, and which I'd like to address here. These are: The notion that anti-abortionists should […]
One of the strongest arguments the SNP has for its Scottish independence proposals seems, oddly, to have passed it by so far, namely that it would establish an independent Scotland as a neo-Hayekian Utopia. For the SNP's current position (as far as anyone can grasp it) is that Scotland would continue to use Sterling even […]
By 2005, Conservatives were broadly agreed that if we were to win we needed to appeal to a set of voters variously described as "paternalists", "Blairites", or "progressives". There were subtle-but-important nuances in analysis implied by which of those names on preferred, but for our purposes here we can think of them all as referring to […]
Chart: Correlation between changes in government deficit and changes in exchange rate (click to enlarge) Source: Europe Economics analysis on Federal Reserve and IMF data NB Left-hand axis is percentage movement in the currencies’ exchange rates versus the Deutschemark, from the year indicated to the next year, relative to the average movement in exchange rates […]
There's been much discussion recently, amongst finance journalists, about whether the employment data suggests that the economy has turned and perhaps the GDP figures are wrong. Obviously that's a possibility. But there are much less hopeful interpretations available. Suppose we are in an economy in which there are old-fashioned technologies (like CDs and physical shops) […]
Over the weekend, Ed Miliband has threatened that if banks do not themselves choose to separate their retail and investment arms then Labour will legislate to force this upon them. That would be a mistake. Advocates of separating the retail and investment activities of banks reason along some combination of the following lines: Governments will have to bail […]