Now I’m not an economist by trade nor training but in this day and age of Google and Wikipedia, educating yourself is far easier than it ever has been before.
The odds are that we’ll have a hung parliament in a few months. Despite the tempting mental image that this conjures in light of the expenses and other MP scandals of late, this is not a good thing.
There’s a good chance that the UK would lose its triple-A credit rating because investors would more than likely view a fragmented government as being unable to form a concerted and focused effort to get the country’s finances back on track and thus making it more expensive for the country to borrow money. As has happened in recessions of the past the feared double dip looms large. Whatever happens in the election, I think that a rise to 20% VAT is inevitable this year and despite being kept at a historical low of 0.5% once more, interest rates will obviously rise again.
While greater than expected, a 0.3% rise in the economy is still little more a statistical anomaly when taken in the bigger context rather than any concrete indication that the worst is behind us. The spin that we’re out of the woods is just that.
I don’t want to spread fear but it certainly does look like the UK is in a heap of trouble and many people far more versed in this kind of thing think that we’re in for a long Kondratiev winter and choosing when to start the serious and inescapable cut backs will make a massive difference to the outcome.
Published on
November 13, 2009 in
Politics.
The Glasgow North East by-election results were announced today and they totally defeated a prediction I made in the wake of the furore surrounding the results of the European elections a few months ago.
Such was the public outrage, I reasoned with a good amount of confidence that the next election would see a surge in the voter turnout. Instead, only 33% of people bothered themselves to mark their ballot paper. A record low. The BNP finished fourth and trailed the Conservatives by just 0.3% or 62 votes.
A staggering 41% of 16-25 year olds believe that immigration is not good for the country and these are exactly the views that the BNP are pushing. A separate poll shows that 22% would seriously consider voting BNP in the next election.
The more credible political parties clearly need to stop simply dismissing the BNP and answer the concerns that the populace so obviously have. The recent appearance of Nick Griffin on Question Time was never going to be an ordinary broadcast. Eight million people – that’s quadruple the amount of regular viewers – were attracted to the circus. I have no idea of the BNPs proposals on education, taxation or healthcare but these were obviously never going to be addressed.
Either radical reform is needed where either casting your vote is as made easy as voting for your favourite contestant on a Saturday night talent TV show or, preferably, people are educated to start to care once again about who is running the country and their neighbourhood.
Published on
August 4, 2009 in
Politics.
A few days ago Harriet Harman hit the headlines with a ridiculously sexist statement that I actually found offensive. Fraser Spiers summed it up brilliantly on Twitter. There would be outrage had she said the same about another demographic, homosexuals for instance.
I’m fed up of “positive discrimination”, “representative targets” and the days of the ideal job candidate being a black transsexual ginger lesbian in a wheelchair. Surely the best qualified person should get a position regardless of race, gender, disability or sexual orientation?
One trillion has 12 zeroes. This was the headline dollar figure which was agreed at the London G20 summit last week in an attempt to tackle the global economic crisis.
It’s kind of hard to wrap your mind around such an astronomical figure which the BBC has also picked up on. I tweeted a few things I’d either found or fathomed about this at the time but in case you missed them, or aren’t following me yet, I’ve gathered them together in one place.
From XKCD
Published on
January 20, 2009 in
Politics.
Finally, Obama is president. The whole day long event is very different to the behind-closed-doors affair that goes on at Buckingham Palace here in the UK.
While some were plotting to take advantage I was watching the inauguration on Hulu having rearranged my application windows in order to carry on working hard (or hardly working) thanks to my secondary monitor being incapacitated. Other people were sat having coffee and watching things live on their iPhone thanks to the newly released Ustream application. The BBC traffic was up over 20% and CNN Live collapsed temporarily under the strain but that’s hardly surprising when you see the numbers. Akami was allegedly pushing out over 2Tbps at one point.
Maybe it was just me but John Williams’ new composition Air and Simple Gifts sounded suspiciously like Lord of the Dance in places. The captioning system had a bit of a fail moment, describing ‘Cheese and applause’ as Obama emerged from the Capitol building.
Obamas address itself was not without a small factual mistake and there was also a bit of a mix-up in taking the oath of office1 but on the whole it was a great example of a fantastic orator at work (despite his failure to mention a banana). Even I was finding hard to be a cynic. I thought it was a great speech – worthy of Jed Bartlet or David Palmer. I especially liked the part which stated that science would be restored to its rightful place.
Not everyone was as impressed though. One of my colleagues paraphrased the speech as he could hear it from across the room as:
Rhetoric rhetoric, Pander-to-the-masses. Dynamic statement dynamic statement, dynamic statement, righteous affirmation wait for applause.
Wordle tag clouds of this and previous inaugural speeches soon appeared. Video of Presidential inaugurations dating back over 100 years had also been tracked down.
It seems that some people have had trouble spelling Barack Obama. Some pranksters in San Francisco didn’t seem to have this problem though when Bush Street was temporarily renamed Obama Street. Not being able to spell his name isn’t too bad – several months ago DMX (the rapper) apparently had never even heard of him.
The rumours I heard in a couple of places of CNN creating a Photosynth of todays events were thankfully true. If you have Silverlight installed2 then check it out.
1 I did wonder if GWB took the “oaf of office” instead.
2 It is actually worth installing it just for this.
