I had to laugh at the news from the housing market this week. Property sales have been sluggish this spring, and the reason? The weather has been too warm. This is amusing because of course the economy declined to grow at the end of last year because the weather was too cold. Anyway, apparently the [...]
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Book review: Ecological Debt, by Andrew Simms
Ecological Debt has been on my reading list for ages, but I won a copy recently from nef on Twitter and read it last week. It’s an unusually wide-ranging book, from a writer who understands that climate change, debt, resource depletion, development and lifestyle are all intricately bound together. To do justice to one issue, [...]
The other electoral reform debate: prisoner’s votes
Britain is the only country in Western Europe with a blanket ban on allowing prisoners to vote. Yesterday MPs voted to maintain the ban – but is there a single good reason to ban prisoners from exercising their democratic rights?
End Tax Haven Secrecy
End Tax Haven Secrecy is a brand new campaign that launched this week. It’s an alliance that includes Christian Aid, Oxfam, ActionAid, and The Tax Justic Network, and the campaign is geared up to get action on tax havens on the agenda at the G20 gathering in Cannes in November. French president Nicolas Sarkozy will [...]
Is Egypt a victim of its economic policy?
As you will know if you’ve been watching the news recently, Egypt has hit a crisis point. Protestors are in the streets, calling for the government to step down. Hosni Mubarak has been president of the country for 30 years, and refusing to see himself as the problem, he has sacked his government and promised [...]
Parliamentary report: Fuel rationing may be necessary by 2020
This morning the All Party Parliamentary Group on Peak Oil are launching their new report, with a warning that Britain needs to prepare for a future of constrained energy supplies. The report outlines a strategy for dealing with energy shortages, through Tradeable Energy Quotas (TEQs). I wasn’t able to make the launch, but I have [...]
Sponsor a tax evasion billboard
Did you see the tax dodger ads in the papers this week? On the day that VAT went up, campaign group 38 Degrees placed ads in several major newspapers. The ads showed chancellor George Osborne as the ‘artful dodger’ out of Oliver Twist, and calls for a focus on tax evasion instead of VAT. Despite [...]
From Poverty to Power, by Duncan Green
I regularly drop in on Duncan Green’s From Poverty to Power blog, so the book has been on my reading list for a little while now. Green is head of research at Oxfam, and the book is a kind of development reader, a broad attempt to envision approaches that work. From Poverty to Power is [...]
The ten most resilient and least resilient places in Britain
The BBC is running a story today describing which ten places in Britain are most resilient to the budget cuts, and which are the most vulnerable. The study was run by Experian and measures 33 different resilience variables, such as level of wages and skills, crime, house prices, number of benefit claimants, business startup and [...]
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