Subterms
The European Union’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, gave a stark warning recently about the lack of progress in the post-Brexit negotiations with the United Kingdom. But now, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has come back to work after his battle with COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. The Brexit Transition Period Will Be […] More
The catalog of omissions in the British government’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic is well known. The decision to lock down was taken far too late in the day. Scientists have been too slow to criticize one another and too sure of their assumptions and methods. Shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE) are killing nurses, […] More
“Can we please go back to talking about Brexit?” For the past few weeks, I got used to seeing this message on Twitter at least once a day, breaking the monopoly of news about the novel coronavirus. For some, it was a joke, half-nostalgically taking us back to the days when we couldn’t wait for Brexit to be over and the […] More
Just days after replacing Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the UK’s Labour Party, Sir Keir Starmer finds himself confronted with the task of dealing with an alarming report leaked to the media this week. The 860-page document reveals the depth of factionalism within the party and the very real impact it may have had on […] More
Like many of the leaders of developed nations, Boris Johnson has been struggling to assert his leadership role in the thankless combat against the current scourge of humanity: a particularly aggressive infectious disease that has now landed even the prime minister himself in hospital. Boris has welcomed on the scene a knight of the realm, […] More
In 1978-79, the United Kingdom experienced the winter of discontent. Trade unions around the country went on strike. On January 22, 1979, the UK experienced the largest strike action since the General Strike of 1926. Even gravediggers and waste collectors joined in, leaving corpses and rubbish piling up. A bitterly cold winter with blizzards and heavy […] More
On March 9, I wrote that the British government is not just failing to safeguard its people, but is willing to trade lives for economic stability and an air of normality. Since then, the number of reported infections and deaths has risen to 5,863 and 289 respectively at the time of writing, and the government […] More
The Guardian’s columnist Will Hutton, a declared Keynesian, has expressed his astonishment at the Tory government suddenly abandoning its economic orthodoxy as the appropriate response to the coronavirus pandemic. His readers certainly remember the “Cameron-Osborne austerity” of only a few years ago, when Conservative economists, as they have done for decades, insisted that austerity was […] More
