[…] $2.07 at its peak in 2007). A strong pound is bad for the British manufacturing economy, making exports expensive and competing imports cheap. But Blair (and Chancellor Brown) didn’t care about manufacturing – or simply didn’t understand the impact the value of sterling had on it – or both. After all, we had the […]
[PDF file]: […] and interests are not beneficial and are opposed to the armed forces. The unit is well placed to do this because its members are civilians.”’ When Gordon Brown dips into the bullshit basket he calls for some global action which he knows will never take place but which he thinks sounds impressive. His latest […]
[PDF file]: […] Halifax, Foreign Secretary; Reginald Dorman-Smith, Minister of Agriculture; David Margesson, Secretary of State for War; Lord Simon, Lord Chancellor; Sir Kingsley Wood, Chancellor of the Exchequer; Ernest Brown, Minister of Labour; William Morrison, Postmaster-General; and Lord Caldecote, Lord Chancellor.3 Among those not explicitly branded as guilty, but still retained, was Lord Reith, known for […]
[PDF file]: […] the world does not include political approval or disapproval. NuLab didn’t understand this. Their initial posture towards the City was fear mixed with buttkissing. As chancellor, Gordon Brown may have famously not worn the expected dinner suit for his address at the annual meeting of the City bigwigs, but as his central policy that […]
[PDF file]: […] 10 See for example 11 Not that this makes a change from NuLab. See James Chapman, ‘Meet Labour’s City cronies: The roll call of bankers rewarded by Brown and Blair’, The Daily Mail 12 February 2009. These are detailed in James Lyons, ‘NHS reform leaves Tory backers with links to private healthcare firms set […]
[…] took office in 1974. That narrative says that Labour politicians don’t understand the economy and can’t be trusted with it. This narrative had such power over Gordon Brown and Tony Blair that they spent the period in opposition from 199497 endlessly endorsing it and promising not to challenge its perceived prescriptions. When he was […]
[PDF file]: […] topics such as foreign or social policy – or else they swallowed whole the current orthodoxy since they had no capacity to take an independent view. Gordon Brown fell into this latter category – Tony Blair the former. John Smith had only a rudimentary knowledge of economics, but was a little more confident on […]
[PDF file]: […] reckless sex life.) 1 Simon Freeman & Barrie Penrose, Rinkagate: The Rise and Fall of Jeremy Thorpe (London: Bloomsbury, 1996) 2 Michael Bloch, Jeremy Thorpe (London: Little, Brown, 2014) There’s also a lot of material that he has left out. Let’s take but one example, that of Jack Straw, former president of the National […]
[PDF file]: […] by Epstein, launched his One Laptop per Child project in 2005. Addressing education and literacy in the non-developed world, and endorsed by many politicians (including notably, Gordon Brown), it ended in 2014 without coming anywhere near meeting its objectives. Similarly, a Global Hackathon involving Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Microsoft and many others, to ‘solve’ the […]
