Blogs

I had just finished reading the wonderful second volume of Alan Johnson's autobiography, Please Mr Postman, when an advert popped up on the computer for a company called Doddle. Doddle joins Yodel and Whistl, other delivery companies with babyish names, which are...

Sometimes a good idea turns round and bites you on the ankle. The Chancellor might be thinking this about the Office for Budget Responsibility which he set up in 2010 to provide an independent overview of the public finances . After the 2008 financial disaster these...

I can't now find the interview I heard today on the BBC about the prospects of deflation in the euro-zone.  I have a feeling it was Gillian Tett.  But whoever it was talked about the underlying psychology of deflation. She put it down to apathy.  People have to break...

The NHS and the Government.  Could the NHS end up in a few years time being a franchise,’inadequately overseeing a fragmented and largely privatised service’? Rather in the style of a chain of chicken shops or cosmetic companies? A new report –The Wrong Medicine. A...

Is anyone surprised by the news that Royal Mail profits have fallen by 21 percent in the first half of this year? Before we start to dissect the scandal of RM recent history we have to remember that it is still a very profitable company and its shares are still...

Something is in the air.  Change doesn't happen very often, but now it is hard to find anyone who doesn't subscribe to the following premises: 1. The UK is too centralised and power needs to be handed back to cities. 2. The mainstream economy appears to be devoted to...

  Here’s a sandwich story with a very messy filling… On Monday The Daily Mail, which as we know can't see a bacon buttie without spotting the politics within, devoted its front page to the fact that no one in the UK wanted to make sandwiches any more. Greencore ...

Its hard to work up much enthusiasm for the latest banking reform announcement- and knowing that the banks are already warning of the usual huge costs, worse outcomes, mayhem if it goes ahead, does not mean that we should automatically be on the opposite side to them...

This is today's edited post- I wrote a much more anodyne version yesterday, before I read the detail of the Ritzy Cinema workers battle with their owners, mega cinema chain Cineworld..... The other night I went to our local Odeon to see the excellent A Much Wanted...