So I read Tim “Not the Doctor” Shipman’s All Out War instabook on the referendum campaign and after. Shipman argues strongly for the continued importance of the old 90s Tory Eurosceptics in the whole thing – this is partly a consequence of his method, writing down stuff MPs tell him, but I think also a…
Read More #AllOutWar: One, We’re Agin ItReading the Institute for Government’s report on Universal Credit, I was struck by two related things. First of all, the project was powered forward by people who didn’t bear any responsibility for its implementation. Whenever it ran into people who needed to care about how it would work, it hit opposition. Lord Freud’s original skunkworks…
Read More Universal Credit: the history of an IT project failureI wrote this for Politico Europe, but they weren’t interested after much editing about. Apparently there were too many charts. A clear statement about migration, says Theresa May of the vote for Brexit. The last thing you’ll find in the data is clarity. Or migration. There has been a wealth of efforts to understand Brexit…
Read More A clear statement about migrationEveryone is talking about the Tory election spending thing. Apparently, there are MPs who fear they might go to jail. The latest break involves letters sent out over David Cameron’s signature, which may count against the local spending limit because they addressed the reader as living in the constituency in question. But that wasn’t the…
Read More Tory election spending and the #codgerbonds. Can you help?Back in 2011 the government had been proposing to spend £190 million on a flood defence scheme for Leeds. Instead, they cancelled the scheme and only did £50m worth of the work. The scheme was based on a hypothetical worst-case flooding scenario. In 2011, the economic losses from such a flood were estimated at £500…
Read More Sound financeSo I got an answer to my FOI request! On the 12th of June, National Savings and Investments disclosed some e-mail regarding the Tories’ fake government mailshot. You can get the dump at the link, and read the related meta here. My original blog posts are here and here. The upshot, as usual with these…
Read More These 9 Government E-Mails I Just Got Disclosed Show Just What a Dick George Osborne Really IsSo I was all sarcastic about Iain Martin pretending Peter Lilley foresaw the great financial crisis back in 1997. And then I found out from a comment on Simon Wren-Lewis’s blog that Lilley actually claims this himself. ” …..I was shadow Chancellor when the Bill that became the Bank of England Act 1998 was introduced.…
Read More that was meant to be satireRemember that time the Conservative Party wrote to pensioners spruiking the 4% codger bonds and pretending to be an official communication from the Government? Sure ya do because I blogged it. Back then, either Rowena Mason or Patrick Wintour got the following response from a nameless “Treasury aide”, i.e. one of Osborne’s spads aka @ToryTreasury,…
Read More No, the Treasury did not “check it was FCA-compliant”So I done an economics over at the Fistful, swinging off a a data at JW Mason’s. Meanwhile, is there anyone in this list who isn’t an embarrassment? Some journo should obviously ring them all up and ask if they will confirm they are domiciled in the UK for tax purposes, but to be honest,…
Read More AFOE post, and that #businessletterSo, to summarise this post a bit, here are some insights: 1) The Curzon Foundation website has been up since February 2010. The various Curzon companies have existed for the same period of time, one succeeding the other as they successively failed to file accounts and got struck off. It looks very much like each…
Read More 10 insights on the Biryani Project