Author Archives: John Cole

Lib Dems should call out the emperor for having no clothes

By John Cole | Thu 27th October 2022 - 4:29 pm

At his first PMQs Sunak twice attempted to wrong-foot Sir Keir Starmer by accusing him of being insufficiently supportive of the 2016 referendum vote to leave the EU.

Unlike Mrs May and Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak was a Brexiter from the start. His performance at PMQs indicated that he remains a Leaver and is bullishly unrepentant. I think this provides the Liberal Democrat parliamentary team with a wonderful line of attack.

We now have a shedload of evidence that Brexit is having an adverse impact in all sorts of areas. Only last week the Financial Times issued an excellent video that catalogued the damage that Brexit is causing.

Additionally, we may note that that the YouGov polling tracker of how voters view Brexit showed on 19 October 54% as “wrong to leave” and only 34% as “right”. Dissatisfaction with Brexit has become palpable.

Posted in Op-eds | Tagged brexit and rishi sunak | 14 Comments

Opinion: What moves me to go to Glasgow? Challenging Osborne’s Plan A

By John Cole | Sat 24th August 2013 - 10:30 am

I used to teach economics and in my retirement I have had the opportunity to follow closely the macro events of the last five years. The overwhelming weight of evidence is that the Osborne Plan A (expansionary fiscal consolidation) has been a disaster. Any objective analysis leads to this compelling conclusion – and Liberal Democrats should give up being “uberloyal” to the leadership and act in a dispassionate and evidence-informed manner.

You don’t have to take just my word for it. I can highly recommend Paul Krugman’s book End This Depression Now! and Mark Blyth’s recent publication Austerity – …