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