Tag Archives: reinventing the state

Mark Valladares

Daily View 2×2: 3 April 2020

By Mark Valladares | Fri 3rd April 2020 - 7:30 am

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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Posted in Daily View | Also tagged , and | 31 Comments
Samuel Barratt

Opinion: The importance of social liberalism

By Samuel Barratt | Tue 22nd November 2011 - 9:55 am

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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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged , and | 38 Comments
Jonathan Fryer

Jonathan Fryer’s Diary of a Euro-candidate

By Jonathan Fryer | Tue 3rd February 2009 - 10:04 am

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

  • Chris Webb
    Welcome Cody; “wetter than a Dogger Bank trawler” they said, not realising that even by then such craft were rarities. I left once they failed for a second ...
  • Mick Taylor
    Referenda/Referendums?? How typical of LibDems to argue about semantics rather than the substantive point....
  • Mick Taylor
    @Andrew Tampion. As the current UK constitution (unwritten) stands, then yes. You can't have one rule for things you like and another for things you don't like....
  • Andrew Tampion
    "We elect MPs to make decisions for us. If a future government gets elected on a platform to join the EU, then consent would be there. We didn’t need a refere...
  • Jonathan Parry
    This is an interesting article. One Nation Toryism never got going until the demise of the Liberals in the 1920s (Disraeli certainly never practised it). To t...