Mick Foster's Blog

The question in the title was prompted by the apparent indifference of Western Governments to the appalling plight of people living in Gaza, and the grotesquely different values placed on human life depending on nationality, religion and ethnicity.

My May 2003 article on how to assess the case for overseas aid1 developed some criteria for analysing the circumstances in which it was reasonable for a Government to tax its own citizens in order to benefit non- citizens. In addition to some rathe...

The stated aim of the Government is to boost economic growth through investment while maintaining a sound economy by bearing down on other forms of spending to keep within fiscal rules. This is intended to allow us to grow out of our difficulties by generating enough income to gradually reduce the debt burden and generate the revenue to improve living standards in the medium term.
The assumption is that higher economic growth requires a tight focus on higher investment including public investmen...

The Guardian leader on 30 th January rightly says that Ms Reeves approach lacks ‘compassion or moral purpose.’ This is because it confuses means with ends. GDP growth only matters if it makes life better- a point also made by the heckler quoted by Aditya Chakraborti’s piece in the same edition (‘That’s your bloody GDP. Not ours.’)

The short term goals of Labour economic policy should be to improve the living standards of those who are struggling, and to rebuild our public services. The medium...

I am organising a gig and jam to raise some money for the Oxfam Gaza appeal and for Doctors Without Borders work in Palestine. It isn’t much, but I feel like I should do something. You don’t need to come to the gig to donate, though it would be great if you do. The link to the JustGiving page is below

https://www.justgiving.com/team/musicforgaza?utm_medium=proxy_team&utm_content=team%2Fmusicforgaza&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=pfp-share

We in the West are hyper sensitive to anti- semitism, and rightly so. However, we have been blind to the often fatal consequences of the long standing and widespread racism of Israeli Jews towards Arabs.
The most recent and shocking manifestation of this is the confirmed slaughter of over 23000 Palestinians in Gaza, with a further 7000 missing presumed dead. This is before counting the additional deaths that will occur due to disease, hunger, and the wanton destruction of health facilities. The ...

In 1997, the Blair/Brown Government famously committed to stick to the spending limits set out by the preceding Tory Government- the aim being to reassure markets and media that Labour could be trusted with the public finances. Keir Starmer has done something similar, refusing to rule out a Labour government keeping to planned Tory cuts to public spending. However, the 1997 context was very different.

In 2024, the UK is in a far worse state than in 1997. After 14 years of Tory rule, we h...

At 8.7%p.a., inflation in the UK is higher than in other high income countries. It is driving a steep decline in living standards, a further decline in public services, and continued increases in already high levels of inequality. It is these consequences of inflation that need to be addressed. It is therefore strange that the only tools being used to tackle the problem are measures that will only have an impact on inflation by making each of these more fundamental problems worse.

Inflation ...

The conservatives won a 66 seat majority in 2019, but less than 30 % of the electorate voted for them. They received just 44% of the votes of the two thirds of us who bothered to vote.

This is not unusual. Since 1945, not a single Government in the UK has taken power with a majority of the votes cast, and none has had the votes of more than 40% of the electorate. Ironically the party that came closest was Labour in 1951, when they received the votes of 40 % of the electorate and 49% of those ...

A 2015 post on this blog looked at economic performance under Labour and Tory Governments and concluded that there wasn’t much difference overall, but that Labour distributed the gains of economic growth more equitably and was a better custodian of public services. This post provides a partial update focusing on economic growth.

I compared UK economic growth with the average of all of the wealthy countries that are members of the OECD using data on the World Bank web site accessed on 11th March ...

This post roughly costs some policy alternatives to the Sunak/Hunt strategy.  It supplements my previous post that examined the implications of the Chancellor’s autumn statement. That included some suggestions for an alternative strategy. This post tries to put some rough numbers on their potential impact, looking specifically at:-

A closer relationship with the EU, broadly equivalent to re-joining the single market.A set of tax changes along the lines proposed by TaxJustice.UK.

The ...