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 different when viewed from outside Whitehall, in particular there are assumptions about how businesses and the labour market operate that are common in policy terms across different Governments which don’t really hold true in the real world.
I also wanted to cover Brexit, which at the time I thought would take a couple of years to arrive at a pragmatic compromise. It never occurred to me that we would spend 6 years beating up our own economy with no aim or purpose in sight.
One of the challenges of writing a blog is getting the balance between subjects I am interested in, and subjects readers are interested in. I occasionally write about India for example, which I am still on Overseas Citizen, and which gets a lot fewer readers than anything else I publish. The quizzes were initially introduced to try and draw viewers to the blog so I could keep on writing about unpopular subjects while keeping traffic to the blog. The quizzes took on a life of their own, and I love creating them.
Along the way lockdown happened, and I started writing more, and I found that I enjoyed writing a lot more than I expected.
I think we are living through an unprecedented time in the UK economically and politically, and that the UK will be very different in a few years time. I am still optimistic, and I think that we will be in a better place than we are now, but it might take us a few years to recover.
Some time this year this blog will get it’s 40,000th visitor, which is a lot more than I ever expected. Thanks to everyone for reading!
So for those who missed them these are the most popular articles I have published: