debating progressive politics in Europe and beyond
The Greek tragedy is reaching a tipping point. Yesterday, we published an open letter written by a group of economists making the case for a European solution. After the Berlin meeting, it has become clear that Angela Merkel intends to stick to her position and won’t be pushed into quick action. Given the dramatic pace [...]
Open letter coordinated by the European Trade Union Institute For weeks the attention of the financial markets, media commentators and policymakers has been on the Greek crisis. Yet it has rumbled on. The Greek population is being asked to make painful cuts which will only depress incomes, output and employment further, even as interest rates [...]
The financial world has been rocked – just as it appeared to be recovering its poise – by the news that the US financial market regulator, the SEC, has accused Goldman Sachs, the most masterful of Wall Street’s masters of the universe, of fraud. Investigations into Goldman are being launched in Britain, Germany and other [...]
UNICEF UK’s vision is a world in which every child’s rights are fully realised. So, as the UK General Election, due to take place on May 6th, draws nearer, we are calling on politicians to pledge their support for children’s rights and policies which help to ensure these rights are fully realised. It is reassuring [...]
The following questions were hotly debated in last year’s European Council meetings: How much financial assistance should Europe deliver in the run up to Copenhagen? In which time-frame, and under which conditions? With the financial and economic crisis in the back of everyone’s minds, none of the 27 heads of state and government attending last [...]
Can social democracy hold the tiger of capitalism in check or is global capital now too liquid for any social democracy to control? Is the carefully managed European balance between people and capital becoming unsustainable and should we be looking for alternative, more humane, economic strategies? Capitalism has brought many benefits to western Europe and [...]
One of the most promising developments in these otherwise challenged and war-ridden times, is the new wealth of data on the material effects of human wealth-inequalities.[1. See for example Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: why more equal societies almost always do better (Penguin 2009).] Inequality is no longer “just” a moral issue; [...]
Unveiling his party’s 2010 general election manifesto, David Cameron, the leader of the British Conservative Party last week put forward his idea of the ‘big society’. What Cameron branded as the modern Conservative approach deliberately distances itself from the Thatcherite mantra of individualism and emphasises the capacity of local communities to be empowered to manage [...]
As the parties revealed their manifestos last week, there was an unseemly battle over who first introduced the living wage. David Cameron (wrongly) claimed that the living wage was a Conservative policy brought in by Mayor Boris Johnson. This prompted former Labour Mayor Ken Livingstone to remind Mr. Cameron that it was his administration that [...]
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