Poor people waste their money away on takeaways, beauty salons, cafes and dog grooming. The idea of feckless poor people frittering away their meagre incomes is well engrained in our culture. Normally accompanied by calls to make benefits less generous. or conditionality more stringent. Stupid, feckless, and untrustworthy. Mostly it is Conservative politicians and similarly… Read More I want to live like Common People | Spend my money on takeaways, beauty salons and dog grooming

I wrote this before Gary Lineker, David Attenborough and the crazy events of the last 24 hours, but it seems more relevant now, not less. In an email to thousands of Tory supporters this week Suella Braverman blamed “an activist blob of leftwing lawyers, civil servants and the Labour party” for the government’s failure to… Read More Is Britain run by a liberal conspiracy? | What do Conservatives want to conserve?

This weekend is the 5th anniversary of this blog. I started writing it shortly after the Brexit vote. At the time I was running a business on a industrial estate outside Durham, after a long career working in the public sector. I planned to use the blog to write about why the economy looks very… Read More 6 Years of Blogging | Greatest Hits

The 30th January this year was the 75th anniversary of the assainsation of Mohandas “Mahatma” Ghandi. He was shot dead by Nathuram Godse, a right wing Hindu nationalist. Ghandi was a Hindu and made no secret of it, dressing in the saffron robes and shaven head of a Hindu holy man. However Ghandi’s vision was… Read More Ghandi and Modi | Lost Legacy

Always different, always the same

This week Nicola Sturgeon resigned. Only a few weeks ago she was casting herself as the power broker holding the balance of power after next election. Many people have told me they think the SNP will be weaker because Sturgeon has left.   Personally I think that Sturgeon is leaving because the SNP are in… Read More Like a Sturgeon | The decline of the SNP

This week marks 3 years since Boris’ Brexit deal came into affect. On January 31 three years ago, then-PM Boris Johnson led the country out of the EU after decades of membership and years of campaigning, mainly from the right of British politics. The Brexit deal that we ended up with was much harder than… Read More So this is Brexit | And what have we done?

No, of course it’s not. But that didn’t stop the Mail and other papers from making this their lead story this week, knocking financial scandals with Nadim Zahawi and Boris Johnson off the front page temporarily. The story in the Mail comes from a report published by Civitas, a right wing organisation based at 55… Read More More than half of people in Britain claim more in benefits than they contribute in tax | Is this true?

30 days has September, April, June and November, all the rest have 31 except February which has 28 days clear and January which goes on for half the year