The end of the self-defeating miners’ strike in 1985 led to the somewhat fundamentalist right wing government imposing severe restrictions on the unions’ rights to engage in industrial action. Despite the 13 years of Labour rule, those restrictions were never undone. So it remains extremely difficult, within the law, for the union movement to mount [...]

In a recent article in The New York Review of Books, Michael Tomasky suggested the lack of any alternative big theme gave the free marketeers a head start in shaping and continuing to dominate the United States economy. The free market big theme may have been planted by Adam Smith, but it developed on the [...]

The forthcoming Oslo conference of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and International Labour Organisation (ILO) is to discuss ways of dealing with unemployment arising from the 2007-8 credit crunch. As noted elsewhere on this site, the question is one of emphasis between, on the one hand, repaying the public indebtedness which was rashly incurred [...]

The Anglo-Saxon model of corporate governance, granting total supremacy to shareholder interests, still dominates most free market economies. Through charitable (ie tax allowable) think tank propaganda and lobbying, shareholder supremacy is continuing to make progress where it is not already total, such as in Germany and Japan. In those countries there is great pressure to [...]

Economists, by whom we are all ruled (to quote Keynes), are themselves ruled by abstract theory, rather than by observation of anything which actually exists in the real world. They tend to focus on dichotomies defined by ideal types, such as socialism and capitalism, both easy to describe in their pure forms but non-existent in [...]