Author Archives: David Boyle

You can’t use the phrase ‘perfect storm’ these days.  It is a cliché. But how do you express, with sufficient clarity, the phenomenon of a financial tsunami and a financial hurricane happening at the same time?
 
Because we need to start asking how we might cope if the very worst happens – as well it might – and both the US government and key European nations default on their burgeoning debts at the same time?
 
The euro has been rescued by the latest bail-out, but an American default would unravel that and cause a second banking crisis, far more …

The avalanche of cuts that are due to be announced later this month could decide the fate of the government, perhaps even of the country. Most Liberal Democrats I know are extremely nervous about, and they are right to be.

But beyond the arguments about the deficit and the national debt, there are other reasons why some cuts – the right cuts – might be a welcome opportunity. I believe this, I suppose, because of William Cobbett.

Cobbett was the great radical campaigner, as much of an influence on the future Liberal Party as Cobden or Bright, and he used …

Imagine, for a moment, that the terrifying secrets of nuclear fission did not wait until the wartime dash for knowledge under Robert Oppenheimer. Let’s imagine, instead, that the basis for nuclear energy was developed closer to Einstein’s breakthrough, maybe just before the Great Depression.

Ask yourself, what would the Chamberlain government have done with nuclear energy in the weeks after the outbreak of war, expecting at any time the drone of Nazi bombers? It doesn’t take much imagination. They would have abandoned such tempting and potentially devastating targets, just as they abandoned BBC television because its transmissions could guide bombers.

So how are we to understand the Brown government’s determination to press ahead with a vastly expensive investment in nuclear energy, with all the concomitant transport of plutonium and nuclear waste, at a time when we are supposed to be facing an unprecedented external threat? Are we really facing such a terrorist threat after all? Or is modern government hopelessly in thrall to departmental divisions, to the extent that one department deals with risks and another deals with something else entirely?