Economic justice campaigner. Visiting Professor of Accounting, Sheffield University Management School. Chartered accountant. Co-founder of the Green New Deal.
One of the questions in a rather dull edition of Question Time last night was, “How can we have confidence in the running of our country?” A number of aspects of this question were interesting, with the most significant being that it was asked. The BBC do appear to be permitting a more subversive form […]
I have been asked on here if I have ever looked at the benefits of freeports. The honest answer is no, but that is because I have never been able to find any such benefits. I have, however, looked at the massive downsides to this idea that both Sunak and Truss support. It is important […]
Rishi Sunk has said that this year’s public sector pay awards have been agreed in full but with no new or additional funding to cover them. There is literally no economic sense in this whatsoever. Pay rises of around 6 per cent for education and health have been announced – with there being no room […]
I have been suggesting that interest rate rises are fuelling inflation. I have created a model of a company that is largely service-based to explore my suggestion. Using that model I show that it is more likely that interest than wages push up prices. This is the starting point for this model: The figures are […]
I had a quick check of some key food prices on international markets as a result of comments left on another piece I wrote this morning with regard to inflation. This data comes from Trading Economics: The chart is of US wheat prices. I stress that I do know that we use little US wheat, but wheat […]
The Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill received its third reading in the House of Lords on May 9 and is now in the final stages – consideration of amendments – before royal assent. The Trade Union Congress estimates about 5.5 million public sector workers will lose the right to strike as a result of this bill. They […]
As the Office for National Statistics has noted on 19 April 2023: The Consumer Prices Index (CPI) rose by 10.1 per cent in the 12 months to March 2023, down from 10.4 per cent in February. On a monthly basis, CPI rose by 0.8 per cent in March 2023, compared with a rise of 1.1 per cent […]
I posted this tweet April 2 in response to what I consider to be the openly racist comments from the Home Secretary on child grooming yesterday: The deeply-political claims Suella Braverman made are summarised in the video in this tweet: In summary, Braverman’s argument is that there are grooming gangs; they are mainly Asian; they […]
Andrew Bailey, the Governor of the Bank of England, gave another of his excruciating speeches on economics yesterday. You only had to read it to know how far adrift from reality he is. Start with this: Monetary policy, in other words, works through the management of aggregate demand in the economy. Simply put, when inflation is too high, we increase […]
It was not a good weekend for English politics. There was a neo-fascist, racist inspired riot near Liverpool. The Mail blamed the headteacher who was murdered recently, along with her daughter, for her own death because she had overshadowed her husband’s achievements. Meanwhile, Lee Anderson, the former Labour councillor who had been Tory MP for […]
We face the biggest group of strikes in recent history today. That is not surprising. A belligerent and out-of-touch government is deliberately trying to crush the living standards of public sector workers when paying up makes total sense. Richard Murphy debunks the ‘no money’ myth that government would have us all believe. The government says […]
Richard Murphy has never been enamoured by corruption. His dislike of everything to do with it motivated the work he did on tax havens and the abuses that they permit. He has little more liking of corruption within government either. And it seems like we are plagued with it, again. For those old enough to […]
Those of us who fought hard against the Health and Social Care Act of 2012 (and I did, most especially on Twitter) always knew the danger within that Act. Clause 1 said: But then this was added: That section changed the whole focus of the NHS. The Secretary of State might still be responsible to […]
The most difficult thing about writing about economics at the moment is working out why it is that those who are in charge of our economy think that anything that they are doing makes any sense any more. As most economists would agree, when faced with a recession and the likelihood of rapidly falling inflation […]
I had a long discussion with a radio producer on what I thought was wrong with the Autumn Statement. We discussed the numbers but what I said is most important is not what was said, but what was not. That’s where the frightening bits are. It was a very long time ago that I realised […]
Jeremy Hunt is saying we cannot max out the national credit card this morning. This is total nonsense. There is no national credit card. Instead it’s the job of government to make the money we use. And since it can always make that money, it can never max out on credit. Hunt wants you to […]
The shape of Trussonomics is becoming clearer. Assuming she survives in office, which given how unpopular she already is with her own MPs might be an optimistic forecast, what is the future going to hold, and what might it mean for the 99 per cent of use who aren’t bankers? Richard Murphy explains. Unless you […]
Prof Danny Blanchflower and I issued a press release yesterday calling for radical reform of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee (BoE MPC). We think this is really important to protect people from economic harm in the recession to come. The MPC has set BoE interest rates and made all the vital decisions on […]
Yesterday [6 September 2022] was bad. It was, in fact, very, very bad. If Johnson was a disaster, Truss has set out to be worse. Richard Murphy very much doubts that any prime minister has set out to create so many conflicts from the outset of their premiership in the way that Truss has. The […]
What Emily Maitlis seemed to me to be saying in her Edinburgh lecture was that there are truths that need to be told that can be stated as facts without requiring rebuttal. A short thread to discuss this….. There is, for example, a phenomenon called climate change. No broadcaster need balance that opinion with the […]
I am fed up with Tory attacks on lawyers who defend people against injustice, discrimination, abuse and deportation using the laws parliament has created when they say nothing about those right-wing lawyers who spend their time attacking almost everything of value. This cover from The Mail today is typical of the attacks on lawyers. In […]
Danny Blanchflower had a longish discussion pn August 17 in which we agreed that the inflation that is dominating economic discussion about our economy at present is a passing phase. That does not mean it is not important. Far from it, in fact. But what it does mean is that when discussing inflation we have […]
The Tory leadership election is offering the party faithful an image of a land about to flow with milk and honey, so good are the prospects arising from the so far unspecified benefits of Brexit. The reality is about as far from that is it can be. In reality, this morning we have news of […]
How many people lived in fear in the summer of 1914, dreading what might happen? Come to that, what about 1939? People must have known that they were living on a precipice then, just as we are now. A disaster is about to happen, but there seems to be denial all around. The disaster that […]
I watched the Tory leadership debate on Monday 25 July. I almost wish I had not. It was unedifying, and the BBC questioners failed to ask questions on Brexit, Rwanda and Northern Ireland but did allow far too much time on earrings, suits and the imagined failings of education in Leeds in the 1990s, which […]
Editor: The media and government bandy big numbers around and make some of us a bit blithe about the scale. Given the eye-watering sums being lost, squandered or directed to mates and donors, it’s important to get our heads round millions, billions and trillions! I find it helps to think of it like this: 1 […]
There are any number of ways of seeing the photograph’s issued yesterday of the party Boris Johnson attended on 13 November 2020. Denis Swayne MP managed to call it a work event yesterday, which was no excuse. No doubt Grant Shapps will destroy any remaining credibility he has by telling the morning media round some […]
It seems almost certain that the government will announce legislation to abandon the Brexit Northern Ireland protocol in the next few days. No coherent lawyer I have yet noted has suggested that this is anything but a breach of international law. The Attorney General has suggested parliament is supreme in the UK and can as […]
Susanna Reid interviewed Boris Johnson on ITV yesterday morning. He had no answers to her questions on the recession we are now facing, but there are plenty available. The most telling question Reid asked was about what he would do to help a pensioner whose fuel bills appeared to have increased fivefold, swamping any increase […]
That we face a risk of fascism taking hold in the UK, with democracy failing as a consequence, is something I have recognised as a very real risk for longer than most when writing my blog. The risk has come from a Tory party determined to hold power in the interest of the narrow clientele […]