Plus: Treasury and Work & Pensions lessons. Greenlighters v the rest. Remembering Attlee’s surplus. And: the key question now is “how”, not “what”.
The reason we will get away with it again, as we did in the banking crash, is that there is so much deflation around, inflation is not a problem.
Many of these matters can only be made on the basis of imperfect information. The advantage of the elected official making the ultimate decision is one of accountability.
It froze up during Brexit stasis, thawed when Boris Johnson won his majority – and is closing down again as the coronavirus advances.
Given that older generations will be most affected by an outbreak, we must encourage young people to volunteer their help.
There were plenty of Yes Minister routines and scripts to live through then as now. Much of the system did not like the privatisation programme.
It is straining to be bigger and better, and see further, faster. But the lesson of the story is that it can’t see everywhere at once.
There will be some bruised personalities on the backbenches who will need careful managing over the next few months, and I hear that Spencer is already on the job.
Let Sunak and Dowden join Jenrick at the top table. And that should be about it. If the Coronavirus takes off, Ministerial changes will be the least of our worries.
Would the Government have the bottle for planning, childcare and police overhauls – and will Downing Street sign up to this plan anyway?
Measuring people’s incomes needs to be part of measuring progress – but we need to be careful, because different measures give different results.
This new government seems to want to concentrate its energies on giving Britain a cutting edge. Will it succeed where others have failed?
In government under Cameron, Francis Maude and his SpAds helped to make a difference. Time to call in Baroness Finn to hold a review.
The scale of his domestic ambitions and the legacy of the Iraq War suggest that his ambitions will be limited – for the moment at least.
Talk of more competition can be naïve if the choice simply amounts to either buying from a national monopoly or making an off-the-shelf purchase from the USA.