The latest estimate for Britain’s GDP growth in the 3rd quarter of 2012 left the initial estimate unchanged with growth of 1% in the quarter. Boosted by a series of special factors to do with the prior Jubilee holiday, the Olympics and other events, most forecasts suggest that this will give way to much slower growth […]
Posts under ‘Infrastructure’
Tories are for everybody: including victims of further £10bn cuts?
Oct 11th, 2012 by Michael Meacher.It takes some gall to say, as Cameron has today,’Tories are for everybody’, or for Osborne to say, as he did on Monday, ‘We’re not going to get through this as a country if we divide, denounce and demonise’, and then deliberately impose a further £10 benefit cuts on some of the poorest in society.
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Why the economic case for a third runway at Heathrow still won’t fly
Sep 6th, 2012 by Ann Pettifor.UK aviation makes up greater share of UK contribution to climate change than elsewhere. The world’s climate is changing rapidly (despite the army of powerful self-interested deniers), and we are experiencing more and more extreme weather events. Ironically, on the day the aviation industry launched a sophisticated, co-ordinated lobbying campaign for a third runway, scientists announced a record Arctic […]
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What we can learn from the Olympics – the benefits of state intervention
Aug 13th, 2012 by Michael Meacher.After an unexpectedly brilliant Olympics – 29 golds and 65 medals, unprecedented for more than a century since 1908 – pleading questions are being asked whether it will bring about a transformation of Britain. It will not. It has certainly provided an enormous morale boost for the national psyche and made a naturally self-deprecating and […]
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Rebuilding Rail: a blueprint for rail industry reform
Jul 26th, 2012 by Mick Whelan.The Rebuilding Rail report was commissioned by rail unions ASLEF, RMT, TSSA and UNITE in order to examine how a better structure for the railway could be created in order to deliver better value for taxpayers or passengers. It calls for a complete overhaul of our fragmented, franchised network, putting rail back into the hands […]
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Labour still not rising to the challenge over HSBC, Barclays, G4S, FTT
Jul 24th, 2012 by Michael Meacher.As the disasters one after another, all interconnected via the underlying neoliberal ideology, betoken a real fin de siecle, Labour is still failing to shoot into a wide open goal. As HSBC is exposed sitting atop a mountain of corruption which bears comparison with the utterly discredited (and destroyed) BCCI, where is Labour calling for […]
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Energy supply is national security issue, not for flogging off to China
Jul 23rd, 2012 by Michael Meacher.Cameron has often said Britain is open for business. What it seems he meant was Britain is open for sale. There is no other country in the world which would throw open its strategic industrial sectors to a foreign power. That is exactly what the Tories are now proposing to do with handing over the building and […]
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Cut through the spin and Government is presiding over the death of social housing
Jun 14th, 2012 by Michael Meacher.In November last year Cameron, unveiling his master plan to get everyone a mortgage and boost the housing market, proclaimed with gusto: “You always remember the moment, if you’ve done it, when you get the key to your first flat. It’s a magic moment. It’s a moment I want everyone in this country to have, […]
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The rising cost of a stamp is the price of choosing market failure
Mar 28th, 2012 by Jon Lansman.Universal postal delivery is a natural monopoly. Encouraging competition, even without requiring a universal service, has eventually led all competitors to invest in parallel delivery mechanisms, covering households as well as businesses as internet shopping continually grows. There are precious few benefits for consumers — just more and more missed deliveries while they’re out at […]
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Beware the small print in the budget
Mar 20th, 2012 by Michael Meacher.We shall be regaled by Osborne yet again tomorrow that this is a budget for growth, with all the paraphernalia of the right-wing media’s propaganda inflating the message for all they’re worth. It is typical of Whitehall and the most slippery of politicians to magnify out of all proportion a theme for which there is […]
