My colleague at MBS, Michael Pryce, sends this: On 10 May 2012 Defence Secretary Phillip Hammond announces that the UK will revert to plans to buy the jump jet version of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, to save billions of pounds in potential costs.

Let’s start by saying I have been through the ‘Developed Vetting’ (DV) process. I can’t tell you why, because then I’d have to kill you (a joke, of course).

The BBC’s Nick Robinson has it almost right when he says there are two ways of judging these elections – through the prism of the last three decades of British politics with its long-lived single party governments (Tories 1979-97; Labour 97-2010) or through the prism of 1970s one-term Governments. In the 1979-2010 period incumbent governments […]

I heard yet again today someone using the Queen’s Jubilee Gambit to explain that next quarter (Q2 2012) may see even more sluggish growth in the economy or even that wonder “negative growth”. This is based on comments made by the Governor of the Bank of England a few weeks ago:

Aditya Chakrabortty has suggested (in a Guardian column) that British “publicly funded” social scientists have failed to step into the breach as neo-classical economic orthodoxy so spectacularly failed over the 2007-2009 financial crisis and it’s on-going consequences. Read my analysis over on my new ‘Homo Janus’ blog here.

So, Britain is officially in a ”double-dip” recession, just. In reality this is both more and less serious than it sounds. It is more serious because we are still a good 4% of GDP lower than we were at the start of the financial crisis in 2007. And that is probably between 10% or more […]

When Tory MP Nadine Dorries described her Prime Minister and Chancellor as ”two arrogant posh boys” it prompted me to start thinking about my own experiences of class in British society over the past half century. My conclusion – there is, still, a ”class ceiling” in British society. True, it is weaker than it once […]

I have been predicting for ages that some of the current (and previous) Government’s reforms like NHS Foundation Trusts, Academies and ‘Free Schools’, and the soon to be Community Commissioning Groups, will undermine financial control and audit in these publicly funded agencies. In June 2010, for example, I wrote that “Many of the much derided […]

This week saw an extraordinary outburst from the most recently retired Head of the Civil Service, Lord Gus O’Donnell. He said, on the BBC, “”When governments go through difficult patches you are looking for who you can blame. The issue comes up of ‘well, let’s try and blame the Civil Service’. It does not usually […]

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