Tag Archives: reinventing the state

Daily View 2×2: 3 April 2020

It’s Friday, it’s five to five half-past seven, and it’s time once again for…

2 big stories

Yesterday, Matt Hancock announced that he was writing off £13.4 billion worth of NHS debt – on the face of it a thoroughly good thing. Of course, you find yourself wondering how it could have repaid that debt anyway, and the problem of the legacy of PFI remains a shadow over the finances of our healthcare, but it will obviously help to ease the burden on day to day finances in our hospitals.

Ten million Americans have applied for unemployment benefits in the …

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Opinion: The importance of social liberalism

The debate regarding the importance and roles of ‘social’ and ‘economic’ liberalism can, on occasion, be misrepresented. Whether deliberate or incidental the relationship between the two philosophies can sometimes be presented as discrete, zero-sum options. I believe they should be considered as dialectic.

In The Orange Book, a publication that is almost Frankensteinian in how it’s perceived and what it actually contains, David Laws offers definitions for social and economic liberalism, that broadly serve well in discussion, they are:

    economic liberalism: ‘the belief in the value of free trade, open competition, market mechanisms, and the effectiveness of the

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Jonathan Fryer’s Diary of a Euro-candidate

Saturday
Most of the day is spent at the Keynes Forum Policy Conference at LSE, at which one of the sessions is specifically about the European elections, or at least the interlinked campaign themes of the economy and the environment. Both Sharon Bowles (South East) and Fiona Hall (North East) are MEPs who know their briefs intimately, which is reassuring and underlines the value of electing people willing to specialise in specific fields. But through conversations during coffee breaks it becomes clear to me that local activists are really thirsting for simply-worded, bite-sized Euro-items they can just slot into their Focuses. …

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Recent Comments

  • Tristan Ward
    “Let’s start by arguing that the economic benefits of the Single Market far exceed having to accept freedom of movement into the UK, and take it from there....
  • Chloe
    'Needless to say the poorest in British society paid the price for this' I remember canvassing , the poorer the area the less interested they were. Membership ...
  • GWYN WILLIAMS
    A balanced and fair assessment of the Senedd campaign. Unlike in Scotland, Wales has not as yet polarised into for and against Independence camps. The Welsh Lib...
  • Jana
    The logic of this article is that we should be rejoining the Single Market. That is different from signing up to complete political Union by joining the EU. ...
  • Pawel Urbanski
    Good piece, Tom. I would just split it into two things 1/ The principle: someone living off their assets should not pay less tax than someone living off a wage...