Most politicians like to claim to be “pragmatic” these days. The latest is Jeremy Corbyn, who now claims his economic program is “just pragmatic”.

George Osborne likewise claims he is only being pragmatic about the public finances, getting the deficit and debt under control, whilst actually his clear, but unstated, aim is to permanently reduce the size of government.

New Labour always claimed to be being merely “pragmatic” when it claimed that people didn’t care who provided public services, but for some reason kept coming down on the side of outsourcing to private providers. Or that liberalizing labor markets was just a pragmatic reaction to globalization. In reality Brown and Blair, but especially the latter, were more liberal democrats than social democrats – favoring market or market-like solutions whenever possible.

Now Jeremy Corbyn seems to be attempting to soften his image by claiming to be merely “pragmatic” in his economic policies – whilst in practice favoring old-fashioned statist public ownership and planning as the preferred solution. Which prompted me into thinking about this universal appeal to ‘pragmatism’ and where it comes from? Continue reading “Jeremy Corbyn, George Osborne and co: ‘Pragmatism’ and the Art of Indirect Strategy?” →

Reading Jeremy Corbyn’s “The Economy in 2020” you could be forgiven for thinking the UK has no real public finance problem.

Using figures drawn from a report from Richard Murphy, a tax campaigner, Corbyn alleges that we have about £120bn in uncollected taxes in the UK – which is the equivalent of roughly 20% of the UK tax collection. If these figures are correct, and all this tax could be collected, Britain wouldn’t really have a fiscal problem. The annual deficit is only about two-thirds of £120bn. So if these figures were credible it ‘solves’ the problem ‘at a stroke’ (to repeat a historic phrase). Continue reading “Playing Fantasy Fiscal Policy: Jeremy Corbyn’s Tax “Policy”” →

Public Finance 04-06-2004

From time to time, evidence of invisible people and invisible jobs appear on the government’s radar screen: when the Census didn’t make sense, when cockle-pickers died in Morecambe Bay. But no concerted effort has been made to find out the true extent of the shadow economy.

In the 1993 film, A Perfect World (Eastwood 1993), Clint Eastwood plays a Texas Ranger pursuing an escaped convict (played by Kevin Costner) in the 1960s. But for me the real star of this film was a shiny, new, gadget-laden Airstream trailer brought into the chase by the FBI. It had wondrous things such as radio phones and faxes and was clearly going to enable the Feds to catch the fugitive. But then all sorts of things go wrong and it finally crashes because it’s not really suitable for ‘real world’ use.

[NB – not an image from the film, just an Airstream]

Continue reading “The Invisible Hand’s Shadow (conference) (originally published in 2004)” →

The sudden collapse of the high-profile (tho rather small) Kids Company charity has been getting lots of headlines.

A quick look at its history and its published accounts suggests this is a pretty classic example of an entrepreneurial and charismatic ‘Leader’ coming up with a good idea – let’s call it ‘the Project’ – which initially works really well on a small scale. (For a critique of the ‘strong leader’ myth see ‘A Mayor for all Seasons‘ and ‘The Myth of the Strong Leader‘)

This seems to be what happened with Kids Co and Camila Batmanghelidjh. A charismatic individual comes up with a new model for helping seriously challenged kids that succeeds where traditional social services and charities have not. It works well on a small scale, but as soon as it starts to grow the problems set in. Continue reading “Kids Company: a classic tale of start-up failure and the problems of the ‘strong leader’?” →

The general consensus is this is a “big” Budget with lots in it. It is, but unfortunately most commentators are missing the really big picture.

To be able to grasp what lies behind George Osborne’s ‘Summer Budget’ 2015 you need to remember just two numbers: 43 and 36.

Continue reading “43 and 36 – Locking in the Smaller State: George Osborne’s ‘Summer Budget’” →

I just heard Mr. George Osborne once again peddling his line that the documents revealed by his former Treasury buddy Danny Alexander were in fact “commissioned by the Chief Secretary himself”. This make it sound like Alexander was actually responsible for the proposals for draconian welfare cuts which he says came from Tories. It has worked enough to be repeated by plenty of journalists. Continue reading “Danny Alexander, George Osborne and who ‘commissioned’ welfare cuts proposals – an object lesson in how to be economical with the actualité” →

The media is rife with speculation about who will do deals with whom after May 7^th and what the possibilities are. What is obvious is that most of them are working on old assumptions about how Governments are formed which predate the Fixed Term Parliament Act 2011 (FTPA), which has fundamentally changed the way these things work.
Continue reading “Who Governs Britain After May 7th?” →

The SNP are claiming they can ‘block Labour budgets’, ‘end austerity’ and ‘stop Trident’. Their problem however is simple – most of what they say is based on assuming that Westminster works the same way as Holyrood does for budgeting – and it doesn’t. There are huge ‘constitutional’ and practical obstacles to implementing the sort of radical challenges to Government tax and spend decisions that the SNP and others seem to be mooting. The first set of problems is that in the Westminster parliament only the Government can propose taxation or spending measures. These can be defeated, or amended, but only by cutting spending or lowering or removing taxes – not by increasing either. Continue reading “Could the SNP block a Labour Budget? No.” →

Government departments wasted at least £60,000 over the past three years making 59,874 calls to 118 Directory Enquiry numbers, when you can get the same service online for free. I know it’s not much, but it does seem fairly ridiculous for civil servants to be using an expensive service (over a pound a time) when you can get the same thing for free. The BBC’s ‘You and Yours’ consumer programme found this out through a series of FOI request – the full table of results are below (published with their permission). The research was done by reporter Adrian Bradley @adebradley). I appeared on the show to discuss with presenter Winifred Robinson (@wrobinson101) why this might be happening…..(it’ll be on the BBC iPlayer shortly). Continue reading “Government Efficiency? Calling 118 Directory services when you can get the same service for free” →