A post-mortem of pandemic-era lockdowns expose a dangerous disregard for scepticism
Like most people, the revelations from the leaked WhatsApps of government ministers during the pandemic have left me with a mixture of emotions. At one level, they reveal how difficult it is to make decisions amidst considerable uncertainty. It is always easy, after the event, to point to mistakes and say they could have been […]
Our regulators are too close to those they should be regulating – and this is a problem
Late last week, news slipped out that the Treasury had asked Parliament to authorise up to £200bn to cover losses from the Bank of England’s quantitative easing (QE) scheme. To help the economy get over the financial crisis of the late 2000s, the government agreed to cover any losses the Bank made on bonds bought […]
Sports clubs defy the normal rules of markets and won’t bend to a football watchdog
As a native of the town of Rochdale, I follow the fortunes of Rochdale Association Football Club. I am indeed, albeit in a modest way, a shareholder. This investment is unlikely to finance my old age. The team currently sits bottom of the entire Football League, 92nd out of 92 clubs and at risk of […]
The race for AI-powered search engines is a long war and ChatGPT could easily lose
The AI chatbot ChatGPT has taken the world by storm – and for once, the hyperbole is justified. Tens of millions, perhaps hundreds, of people across the world who never previously engaged with artificial intelligence are referring to the tool as if it were an old friend which they had known forever. Naturally, such an […]
Poor educational outcomes for today’s children could create a future wave of crime
During the pandemic, those most at risk of illness were the elderly and the vulnerable. But it was Britain’s youngest who felt the development and social impacts the most. The full scale of the problem is still slowly unravelling. As children started at school, we heard horror stories of kids arriving not yet toilet-trained or […]
Even in the middle of the war, we need to plan how to rebuild – and fund – Ukraine
The war in Ukraine is approaching its one year anniversary, and even now, there is little sense of when it will finish or how it will end. But minds are already beginning to turn to the question of the post-war reconstruction of the country. The same thing happened in Britain during the Second World War. […]
Rishi Sunak’s strategy of quiet governance won’t deliver an election victory
One of the prayers in the 1662 Anglican Prayer Book entreats that we be “godly and quietly governed”. In other words, government should not just be reasonable and morally upright, there should also not be too much of it. Rishi Sunak appears to have taken this to heart, or at least the “quiet” bit, given […]
A miniscule bit of growth last November is unlikely to save us from a recession this year
In November last year, the economy grew by 0.1 per cent, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) last week. The news, in the midst of many a miserable headline, was greeted with great excitement. Most City economists had predicted a fall by around 0.2 per cent. Cue animated performances on the TV news […]
Sunak is right. If more Brits could do maths our economy might just start growing again
According to Rishi Sunak, everyone up to the age of 18 should be learning maths. It was an idea widely disparaged when the prime minister laid out his plans for the year ahead. But it is essential at all levels of society. It was during the pandemic that we saw the importance of having a […]
China’s zero-Covid policy must be a cautionary tale for the UK
As we greet the new year with the hope of more serene times ahead, some might do it with a measure of doubt and trepidation for a variety of reasons, one of them being the government’s decision to resurrect Covid-19 restrictions. Admittedly, it is in a very limited form and only affects arrivals from China. For […]
