Once the surprise and the shock of Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader had sunk in, many (including me) became impatient for policy initiatives and membership involvement in policy formation to come to the fore. Clearly cutting through media hostility is a major task but I find it difficult to see that more could not […]
Posts under ‘Public Spending’
World finance ministers complacent at threat of a synchronised downturn
Mar 11th, 2016 by Ann Pettifor.“For the proposition that supply creates its own demand, I shall substitute the proposition that expenditure creates its own income” (JM Keynes Collected Writings, Volume XXIX, p81) G20 Finance Ministers met in Huangzhou, China recently and refused appeals from both the IMF and the OECD for “urgent collective policy action” that focussed “fiscal policies on investment-led […]
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How we are punished for not responding to George’s not-so marvellous medicine
Mar 6th, 2016 by Sian Errington.In February, the Guardian revealed that from a £300 million ‘relief fund’ to help local councils struggling with the scale of funding cuts demanded of them 83% of the funds will go to Conservative run councils. The five most deprived local authorities in the country – Middlesbrough, Liverpool, Manchester, Knowsley and Hull – are also […]
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Healthcare US style… or how neoliberalism really works
Feb 29th, 2016 by Richard Falk.Richard Falk is retired and lives in Santa Barbara, Califormnia Along with several million, I suffer from the eye disease known as glaucoma. It can be managed, rather than cured, by taking eye drops several times a day. Based on the advice of my doctor, I rely on Azopt and Lumigen, two drugs produced by […]
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No hiding place for Osborne
Jan 30th, 2016 by Matt Willgress.As George Osborne gets his excuses in early for the troubles to come, now is the time to expose the failures of ideologically driven austerity, writes Matt Willgress of the Labour Assembly Against Austerity The British mainstream media is now so clearly biased in favour of the ruling party it can sometimes seem as if […]
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The last chance to save student grants
Jan 19th, 2016 by Newsdesk.Labour is holding a debate and a vote on the floor of the House of Commons this afternoon, to challenge the government decision to scrap student maintenance grants. The government are planning to scrap maintenance grants for students from poorer backgrounds, replacing them with additional loans. This change would mean that the poorest 40% of students going […]
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Bring a new politics into local democracy
Dec 21st, 2015 by Newsdesk.The following statement has been issued by the Labour Representation Committee On the basis of a hasty and highly selective reading of the letter sent to Labour councils by Jeremy Corbyn, together with John McDonnell and Jon Trickett, some right-wingers are claiming that the leadership has endorsed their existing strategy towards implementing the cuts. Likewise some […]
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Thatcher: should we pay out all that money for Trident?
Dec 9th, 2015 by Ann Pettifor.There is a fascinating review by David Runciman in the LRB of Charles Moore’s: Margaret Thatcher: The Authorised Biography, Volume ll Everything She Wants. In it Runciman recites the tale of Mrs T, the Labour leader Neil Kinnock’s support for nuclear disarmament, and President Reagan’s sudden conversion (in 1986) to nuclear disarmament. It turns out that […]
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Osborne gambles on a windfall – something you can’t do on a zero hour contract
Nov 26th, 2015 by Phil Burton-Cartledge.In war, there’s only a short amount of time your weaponry has an edge over the enemy. Labour has spent the last couple of months shelling the Tory trenches with the party working tax credit shells. This week, the new ‘police funding’ gun has been pressed into service. Both pasted the Tory position to the point […]
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Alternative Autumn statements: continued Tory failure versus Corbynomics
Nov 25th, 2015 by Michael Burke.Having spectacularly failed in his stated goal of eliminating the deficit in the last parliament, George Osborne is repeating his experiment in this one. Both the June 2010 and 2015 Budgets proposed ‘fiscal tightening’ of £37 billion. In the first of these Budgets the main method was cuts in public spending. In the second it […]
