Posts by WH
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Labour held 349 seats going into the 2010 election. They currently hold 262.
UK Labour was just a few weeks away from an historic pasting. This feels like what happened with Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
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Strange times. At one point in late April the Tories enjoyed a 20% lead in the polls. The Government and its august leader were on the march. Should we attribute the final result to a disastrous May?
The whole thing is some kind of sick joke. It's enough to make you nostalgic for Andrea Leadsom, Salmond and Sturgeon and Boaty McBoatface.
When I lived in Islington, it took a week or so to get an appointment with an NHS GP. When I lived in Tower Hamlets, it sometimes took more than four.
And why did six hate seven? Because seven eight nine.
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There are three things I know about New Jersey: Paul Krugman, Bruce Springsteen and Randell Mills' Brilliant Light Power.
This is BLP's May 2017 update. Mills recently had a paper accepted for publication in Plasma Science and Technology and he has another pending.
If Mills is right he'll change the world.
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Thank you for writing this. Good covfefe.
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While I don't overlook their mistakes, I respect what Tony Blair and Gordon Brown achieved and make time for what they have to say. I doubt Corbyn can attract enough swing and 'centrist' support to be a threat to the Conservatives, but he's Labour's leader fair and square.
Don't underestimate the extent to which support for Brexit is a proxy for attitudes toward immigration. The 2013 British Attitudes Survey found that 77% of Britons favour reducing immigration and 56% favour reducing it 'a lot'.
The Liberal Democrats fell into the junior coalition partner trap in the 2010 term and it will be interesting to see how they perform in the upcoming campaign.
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Hard News: Mike Moore: A pretty ordinary…, in reply to Jim Cathcart,
The best way of helping ordinary people avoid debt is to allow them to earn a good income while keeping their expenses low. The housing and rental shortage - a product of many years of governmental inaction - has forced many to take on additional debt and has lowered discretionary incomes.
Most countries use a combination of fiscal and monetary policies and Keynesian principles are are generally considered to work. That said, you're right to insist that we shouldn't address our long term economic problems with only demand management strategies and ad hoc measures.
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I've really enjoyed the RNZ series and I'm looking forward to the rest of the interviews.
I took Palmer to be saying that while many of the '80s reforms were worthwhile (the floating of the dollar, the abolition of import licensing, the Public Finance Act, the Reserve Bank Act, Palmer's own State Owned Enterprises Act, the Constitution Act) he thought the change that dislocated workers, farmers and protected industries was too rapid and that privatisation in particular was a mistake. I can understand that point of view.
Moore paints with a broader brush and I have less of a sense of what he favours and what he now regrets. Perhaps he just knows how controversial the full Douglas prescription really still is.
That's an interesting discussion about Japan. I'd just add that Japan suffered one of the biggest asset price and property busts in history in 1990. It's not easy to recover from economic trauma of that magnitude and I'd be slow to accept that its experience is evidence against orthodox monetary and fiscal policies.
Suffice to say that it's generally a mistake to expose an economy to significant asset price and housing market inflation...
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Hard News: Behind those Herald…, in reply to Moz,
I don’t think that would make anywhere near as much difference as the next suggestion: stop non-citizens or non-residents buying real estate.
A friend of a relative recently showed a group of non-resident investors 32 residential properties in and around Hamilton.
The group purchased 28 of the properties before flying home.
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Hard News: The next four years, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
I've read that traditional news outlets are experimenting as they explore the digital frontier but that does sound a little extreme.
Did you know that Christian Dior consulted the tarot before each show?
This is an interview with Florence Welch.
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The Atlantic's Peter Beinart has an article about religion and politics after the culture wars here. He writes:
The alt-right is ultra-conservatism for a more secular age. Its leaders like Christendom, an old-fashioned word for the West. But they’re suspicious of Christianity itself, because it crosses boundaries of blood and soil. As a college student, the alt-right leader Richard Spencer was deeply influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche, who famously hated Christianity. Radix, the journal Spencer founded, publishes articles with titles like “Why I Am a Pagan.”
Radix is a white nationalist publication you might prefer to simply avoid.
Alright, that's probably just about enough.
