Polly Toynbee’s written a strong piece in the Guardian this morning, clearly inspired by her (reasonable) reaction to the royal wedding. She concluded: Few yet realise the scale of the conservative revolution in progress. Professors Peter Taylor-Gooby and Gerry Stoker have just revealed that by 2013 public spending will be a lower proportion of GDP in Britain than
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Look at this graph: Growth in Total Health Expenditure Per Capita, U.S. and Selected Countries, 1970-2008 Look who is at the bottom of this pile: the UK. I picked up the graph from Mother Jones in the USA and as they note: The chart [actually] comes from the Kaiser Family Foundation, and it shows the growth
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Whilst lots got excited by the royal weeding more than 50 Facebook pages were shut down against their owners will. The full list is here. So much for freedom of speech in this country. Do you note any right wing ones in there? It was no doubt ‘a good day to do it’. It’s a
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The FT’s reporting free banking is getting harder to find. Bonuses cost a lot, you know. And you’re paying for them.

The Wall Street Journal has reported: The Obama administration is lobbying European allies to adopt anticorruption laws that require energy companies to disclose payments to foreign governments, officials said. The effort builds on White House support for a controversial U.S. law that compels companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges to disclose payments overseas for the
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Martin Wolf in the FT, today: To eliminate the fiscal deficit, without another recession, prolonged economic weakness, or both, the UK must generate a surge in net exports and in corporate investment. To my amazement, conventional forecasters believe such huge shifts are even probable. Yes, they are possible. But why would one expect an investment
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The FT has reported: At the end of last year, the health department asked hospitals to make efficiency savings of 4 per cent a year as the first step towards £20bn of productivity improvements. But Monitor, the foundation trust regulator, calculates that hospitals must make savings of 6-7 per cent a year to be certain
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The House of Commons library has issued a new briefing sheet on VAT abuse involving the Channel Islands. It’s available here. The main point is that it has cost the UK Exchequer (who are bound to have undervalued this sum) at least £475 million over the last four years. Now what could that have been
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