Frank's Blog

Does the Government have much of an idea the outcome of spending 40% of the national income? Well the answer is not very much, sadly. Graham Allen, the Nottingham Member, brought together a small group in the cabinet office today. There we met Steve Aos, who runs for Washington State, USA, a research unit that tries to answer the question of how to spend public money to best effect. It was an impressive display. I could not but help wondering whether we were not missing the obvious....

The debate over the Wirral Council's Strategic Asset Review has been backward looking. I much prefer to look to the future to see how common services might best be provided. The Government is committed to a programme called "Building Schools for the Future". The aim is that every secondary school will either be rebuilt or significantly repaired and brought up to standard over fifteen investment waves. We will be getting our share of this programme in Birkenhead and I am anxious that the...

Our economic policy makers are clearly suffering from a form of psychological hysteresis. This wonderful word, hysteresis, re-emerged after the early Geoffery Howe budgets had send the economy into a nose-spin, during which a third of our manufacturing industry was wiped out. Somebody clever thought up using the word hysteresis to describe a market economy where its decline has been so severe that any normal propensity to rebuild for recovery became paralysed. In such circumstances only a...

There will be no end to the economic crisis until the Government acts decisively to restore confidence in our banking system. Our policy of throwing money at the banks clearly has not worked. The root of the evil lies in those toxic assets into which the banking elite so greedily bought. So I come back to a topic I keep banging on about. How the Government deals with the Lloyd's Banking Group crisis, which is largely of its own making, will dominate, no doubt, today's headlines. But the big

The National Statistician, Karen Dunnell, has every right to feel sore this morning. Without exception the Establishment has been encouraging her to develop the independence of her office. In a democracy this can only be good. One suspected all along that there were a number of weasel voices joining in the general cry who were probably none too keen on her efforts to give substance for an independent national source of statistical data. She now knows who her friends really are. When I...