Few pundits in the southern shires, where productivity can compare to Canada or Sweden, realise that much of the north is now poorer than parts of the old iron curtain
eg Sheffield 12% lower GDP per head than Czech republic; rest of South Yorkshire nearly 28% lower
May 12, 2022 • 14 tweets • 7 min read
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Brexit: the reckoning
17 months into Britain’s brave new trading world, the hard facts are arriving
I've trawled through the data & studies: here’s what I found in a 5-minute read
Lab’s English gains look modest, but only as the baseline was spring 2018, when politics was still in the shadow of T May’s crash & burn election the previous June
Labour sunk a long way after that — and now it’s recovered
But even more important is WHERE it’s recovered
Jan 14, 2022 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
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It's one of those moments in politics where it helps to consult the rules
If you do, it seems obvious that the PM is in greater and more imminent peril than most of the coverage suggests
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In a very British fashion, the crucial rules here are, as the @instituteforgov states in this authoritative note "not published in the public domain"
The pillars of the old economics—laissez-faire, “fiscal discipline,” firm separation of Treasuries & central banks—wobbled in crash & crumbled with Covid
None of the first few approved vaccines emerged from Big Pharma’s vaunted in-house programmes
Pfizer partnered with the small German firm BioNTech, AstraZeneca took on Oxford’s near-complete ChadOx vaccine, and Moderna is a medium-sized biotech company
Mar 26, 2021 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
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A year of lockdown and the anatomy of a constitutional catastrophe by the ONLY man to have followed every legal twist & turn ... @AdamWagner1
At 1PM today it will be a year since the arrival of the most extraordinary sweeping restrictions on freedom in the long history of England
That sacrifice may have been necessary
Not so the way it was done: ministerial fiat with parliament and all process disdained
Mar 25, 2021 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
Very sad to hear of the death of Martin Woollacott — a legendary writer I often sat right next to at the Gdn
He picked arguments, sometimes with me, but he was knowledgeable, fundamentally warm & could turn a phrase like no-one else i knew
theguardian.com/media/2021/mar…
Hearing he was ill, I rang him a week ago, and he was 100% himself: grumbling about small changes in the print Gdn, grumbling about himself being an "old boy" for grumbling about it, and joshing about colleagues with better "chat-up" lines than he could ever manage!
We spend too much time on here trading grim statistics about how awful everything is — my colleague David McAllister has produced an arresting study in a seemingly small change which opens up huge questions for the future of capitalism
Jan 7, 2021 • 13 tweets • 5 min read
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Trump is today disowned as an aberration
In truth he is the culmination of how the US Right has been going for years
Not only is the Channel an important physical barrier "against" immigrants, it's also a Big Psychological Deal ...
Invasions—real and imagined—loom large from the Norman consequent to Nigel Farage's rhetoric
Oct 2, 2020 • 10 tweets • 4 min read
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We asked the great economic historian, @B_Eichengreen to offer a long view on the burgeoning debts of Covid-19, and ask us if he could see any way out ...
As UK public debt hits £2 trillion for the first time, and bust through the 100% GDP ratio, @RishiSunak might hope to find historian inspiration in figures like the Duke of Wellington (whose debts were just as heavy after Waterloo) and Churchill (ditto after WWII)
