“Free markets and “free trade” = elite propaganda”

Note: I wrote this long eassay  in 2005. The financial crash and recession since provide added grist to my arguments as the rich get richer, most people get steadily poorer, public provision shrinks and the inequality between people swells. The lessons of economic history tell this story: a strong domestic economy is necessary for sustained economic [...]

The credit crunch: an effect not a cause

Robert Henderson  How did we get  into this economic hole? What we are experiencing is a direct consequence of the dominant economic ideology of the age, laissez faire, an ideology which underpins the general political ideology of political elites in the West, the form of liberal internationalism we call globalism. This neo-Liberal mentality has brought [...]

The globalist lies about the British Labour market

Robert Henderson One of the great lies of the modern liberal is that in developed countries such as Britain unskilled  and low skilled jobs are a rapidly shrinking commodity.  Daniel Knowles of the Daily Telegraph  was at it  on 17 November with Our greatest social problem: there are no jobs left for the dim (http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielknowles/100118217/our-greatest-social-problem-there-are-no-jobs-left-for-the-dim/).  He [...]

Housing and the Coalition’s dirty secret

Robert Henderson There is a dirty secret which none of the mainstream parties is willing to publicly reveal: those who are owner-occupiers with mortgages are being heavily subsidised at the expense of those who live in private rented accommodation. This is being done by  the supposedly independent Monetary Policy Committee (MPC)  of the Bank of [...]

The Great Charity Scam

Most people when faced with the word charity attached to an institution are inclined to be well disposed to the organisation regardless of what the charity is supposed to do.  If it is a popular area of work, such as medical research or the provision of services to disabled children, rationality goes out of the [...]

Robotics and the real (sorry, Karl, you got it wrong) final crisis of capitalism

Robert Henderson Humans and Robots Robotics is advancing rapidly. Probably within the lifetime of most people now living – and conceivably within the next ten years – there will be general purpose robots (GPRs) capable of doing the vast majority of the work now undertaken by human beings. When that happens international free trade and [...]

If we leave the EU we mustn’t be another Norway

Amongst those who want the UK to leave the EU there are those who say “Look at Norway, we can have the same arrangement with the EU as they do, a simple free  trading agreement”.  This is profoundly wrong.  The European Economic Area (EEA)  countries  of which Norway is one have to take on most [...]

Japan and The Big Society

The response of   Japan to the triple  disaster of a massive  earthquake, gigantic  tsunami and nuclear  power failure  has been surprising. One of the most advanced industrialised states  and the third largest economy in the world has struggled desperately to deal with what is admittedly a dramatic and unusually devastating multiple disaster .  Not only [...]

Film reviews – Inside Job

Documentary Director Charles Ferguson Narrator Matt Damon Released 2010 Run time 1 hour 48 minutes http://www.sonyclassics.com/insidejob/site/#/cast The last time I felt so angry coming out of a cinema was after a viewing of  The Smartest Guys In the Room, the story of the Enron scandal.   In the case of the Inside Job,  it was not [...]

Universal distraction

When was the last time that your politicians concentrated seriously  on British domestic issues?  Unable to recall? I’m not surprised because increasingly British politicians spend  their time involved with matters foreign.  This is partly because the ever more comprehensive media coverage of world events drives politicians to at least express opinions on every catastrophe, natural or [...]