Cornish nationalists are reported to be preparing a legal challenge to the UK government’s decision to refuse the people of Cornwall national minority status. The Campaign of course has no view on the subject, but there is an important economic issue here.

Speaking at the Labour Party conference, Gordon Brown claimed that they did fix the roof while the sun was shining. Obviously they didn’t make much of a job of it. We in the Campaign know they used faulty materials out of choice.

The Guardian, reporting on the Labour Party conference with opens today, writes… “Gordon Brown yesterday pinned hopes of reviving his premiership on a package of measures designed to tackle the economic crisis, including a drive for tighter international controls of the global money markets and a crackdown on the culture of irresponsible City bonuses. However, the prime minister also...

There is still a belief in the possibility of a Labour win. A few policy changes will suffice. Peter Tatchell has a programme which he outlines in The Guardian, that he thinks would do the trick. A few of the suggestions have a certain merit, others are worse than useless. Labour’s problem, the Conservative’s problem, the LibDem’s problem, Britain’s problem, is that they...

The party conference season started with the Liberal Democrats at Bournemouth. Does the party matter anyway? Where is it going? What kind of a party should it aspire to be? European-style social democrats? This implies the adoption of a blend of socialist and market policies informed by – what? Keynesian economics? Green economics? Free market economics? Raw pragamatism? Making it up as they...

The difficulties of achieving profound political changes are discussed in a recent article by Johann Lindvall, Samuel Finer Post-Doctoral Fellow in Comparative Government at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Lincoln College. It is titled The Politics of Purpose. There is good advice here. LVT advocacy needs to take account of the distinction...

Without new ideas, the Conservatives are doomed, says John Kampfner in the Daily Telegraph today. At the heart of the problem, he says, is that the centre-Left is running out of ideas. The policy wonks’ cupboard is bare. The underlying problem is that economic theory stopped developing in the 1880s, when it had reached the point where the privileges of powerful vested interests would have...

An article in the Sunday Telegraph accuses Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Chancellor Darling of reverting to a default Keynesian option. One of the commentators says that he does not recall an economist who forecast the bust. Regular visitors to this site will know, of course, that as long ago as 2005, Fred Harrison, wrote a book called “Boom Bust: House Prices, Banking and the Depression...

Following Labour’s defeat at the Glasgow East by-election, there is naturally talk about whether to replace him. The problem for the party is that nothing any government can do will prevent the coming recession, and Labour is bound to get the blame. Now it is not exactly true to say that they caused the present economic problems. What they are to blame for is never having put in place the...

Labour’s loss of Glasgow East to the SNP should surely be seen as marking the end of the New Labour project? It is probably too late for the party to save itself before the next election. Even if Brown was replaced, the party has become too homogeneous to give room for another way of thinking to emerge. It will need to be out of office for at least a decade for that to happen. What happens...