At first sight, long-term swings in individual seats in Australian elections are a definite niche interest, one for the real trainspotter. But during a visit to Sydney University’s Complex Systems Institute, I noticed a fascinating piece in The Australian newspaper. The Australian Labor Party had a good
Read more →Archive for the Politics Category
Theresa May has finally announced her resignation. How can we capture the flavour of her tenure in office? This can be found in the dry and measured content of the Economic and Fiscal Outlook from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). The OBR stated in its latest
Read more →The surprise of the week was the re-election of the centre-right Coalition government in the Australian General Election. The Labor opposition had led every major opinion poll for the past two years. But Scott Morrison of the Coalition is still Prime Minister – and it is his
Read more →One of the most dispiriting aspects of the Labour Party conference, which ended last week, is how deeply conservative the political left has become. Its remedies for Britain’s problems look to the past and not the future. Far from embracing new technology, the left is hostile to
Read more →Are members of the Labour Party frontbench experts in doublethink? The concept was invented by George Orwell for his novel 1984, written in the 1940s as a critique of the Soviet Union. Masters of doublethink can hold, for purposes of political expediency, two opposing opinions at the
Read more →Paul Ormerod, Alison Wolf, and Adam Tooze join Prospect Editor Tom Clark to discuss whether it’s a good thing that so many people go to university; why trust in experts has fallen so low; and how, 10 years on from the banking crisis, a new system of regulation has been
Read more →The income tax system in the UK is highly progressive. Not many people know that, to use a catch phrase attributed, rightly or wrongly, to the great actor Michael Caine. The top one per cent of earners contribute 27 per cent of all income tax receipts. To
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