In my last post I berated those in the media who hyped the threat of right wing populism represented by the votes won by Farage’s Reform party when the main story was the defeat of a right wing populist Conservative government. In this short post I want to look at what I believe are two additional myths about politics on the right in the UK. The first myth is that a consequence of the election is that the Conservative party will be forced to come to some kind of agreement with Farage. Perhaps some kind of merger of the two parties, or instead allowing Farage to become a Conservative pa ..read more

  If Labour are bound to win this week, is there any point to tactical voting? Some on the left have suggested voting for a more progressive candidate who has no hope of winning, even if this might contribute to electing a Conservative MP. The rationale is to ‘send a message to Labour’. The current Labour leadership have treated some on the left of the party very badly, and the anger at that is justified. However I remain at a loss to see quite how a few extra percentage points for left wing candidates will influence those running Labour, when they have just won a landslide victory so soo ..read more

  Discussion of taxation in the UK is bedevilled by two problems: one familiar and one less obvious. The familiar one is to imagine the level of taxation is separate from the level of public services and welfare. Most voters and much of the media understand the two are connected, which is why the Tory attack on Labour’s ‘tax bombshell’ is so misplaced. A majority want public services to improve, and know that requires higher taxes [1], so all the Conservatives are doing is reminding voters that Labour is more likely of the two parties to improve public services. Yet this familiar point g ..read more

During this election period there has been plenty of analysis that looks at how the economy has performed since 2010 (the IFS here for example). All show the UK performing very badly indeed. But how much is that down to macroeconomic policy mistakes, and how much is due to factors outside the government’s control? I will attempt to answer that question in this post, and try to be as conservative as possible. I will begin with austerity, because it’s a calculation I have already done. The table below is taken from this post. The first row comes from an analysis done by the OBR (Chart E on ..read more

  I didn’t write about the election last week because I didn’t think there was anything of interest to say that I haven’t already said. At the moment at least the Conservatives are saying anything that might shore up its elderly core vote, however silly, unfunded or poorly thought through those proposals may be. But two recent articles in the Guardian about voting strategy are sufficiently interesting to write about. I have always advocated tactical voting under the UK’s FPTP system, because I view voting in an instrumental way (how can I achieve some end) rather than an expressive way ..read more

  Already bored with the election? Here is a bit of economic history instead. To many readers of this blog, 1979-83 will seem like ancient history. To some of us, it was part of our formative history as adults. I joined the Treasury as an economist in 1974, straight after finishing my undergraduate degree. At the time a career in public service rather than academia via a PhD seemed much more interesting and useful. In 1979 the Treasury generously sent me to do a masters degree, on the condition that I worked at least another two years at HMT. While I was doing the masters Mrs Thatcher ..read more

  I have written a couple of posts recently where Quantitative Easing (QE) has played an important role. Here, for example, is a post about why QE could end up putting a large hole in the public finances, and how this could be avoided. I also wrote recently about how QE shows us that the government can easily finance its deficits by creating money rather than selling debt, if it chose to do so. This second post illustrates why QE is qualitatively important. One of the first posts I wrote over a decade ago involved a similar theme. QE showed us why a key idea behind austerity, that we had ..read more

  A new CPS report 'Taking Back Control’, co-written by the relatively sensible and numerate among Conservative MPs Neil O’Brien, proposes a national commitment to return net migration to the historical norm of the tens of thousands. The last government to do such a thing was of course the Cameron coalition, and their failure to meet these targets was a key factor behind the rise of UKIP and Brexit. Others are more qualified to discuss the report in detail. Instead I want to set it within a much broader political economy framework, mainly focused on the UK but with references to the US w ..read more

  There was a point on the BBC’s Question Time last week where the Minister for Policing Chris Philip, who was until recently an immigration minister, asked whether the Congo is a different country from Rwanda. It was sufficiently embarrassing that even the Mail reported it as such, and described the audience gasping and laughing in front of the camera. This may be an extreme example, but it is increasingly difficult for most people, including much of the mainstream media, to take our current government and the Conservative party seriously. There comes a point for any government that has ..read more

The RSS feed URL you're currently using https://follow.it/mainlymacro will stop working shortly. Please add /rss at the and of the URL, so that the URL will be https://follow.it/mainlymacro/rss ..read more