The general election campaign is entering its final stages. On Friday, the two main party leaders, Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn, will for the second time this week go head-to-head in a televised stand-off. People will write angry things on the internet. Mrs May will say “strong and stable”. The nation will engage soberly with serious matters of policy.
And they’re off. Theresa May has officially notified Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, that Britain is leaving the European Union.
In keeping with his “Spreadsheet Phil” persona, Philip Hammond’s Budget today was mostly boring. Many of the announcements had been expected, due to a tightly controlled drip-feed to the media over the last week or so.
Correctly predicting what’s going to be in the Budget is akin to completing the football pools or picking the lottery numbers, given the variables and levers that a Chancellor has to pull at any one time.
There was much focus on the Supreme Court last week, where judges upheld a ruling that MPs must be given a vote on Britain leaving the European Union. The result was that parliament remains sovereign.
In the last fortnight, two very different party conferences have occurred; Labour’s in Liverpool and the Conservative’s in Birmingham. For the most part, Conservative attendees – finding themselves in a majority government, with an exit from the EU in the offing and a Prime Minister channelling a bit of their heroine, Mrs Thatcher – were by far the happier.
George Orwell famously wrote that in a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. Except, of course, he never wrote anything of the sort.
Search for Brexit on Google and you can expect 165,000,000 (and counting) hits in just 0.33 seconds which is some achievement for a term that was first coined in June 2012, according to the online MacMillan Dictionary…
In 1966 James Brown sang that this is a man’s world, but it would be nothing without a woman or a girl. Fast forward 50 years and we have 21 female leaders in charge across the world, either as President or Prime Minister of their countries, including German chancellor Angela Merkel, Erna Solberg of Norway…