Frank’s Blog

(this blog initially appeared on the Guardian’s Comment is Free site) At least its timing has not deserted the government. With unemployment surging through the 2m barrier today, perhaps heading for 3m, ministers were able to get their Welfare Reform bill out of the Commons on Tuesday before the Grim Reaper published his figures. I spoke in total opposition to the bill. The bill was designed for the land of the never-ending boom. We are now stuck in the quagmire of recession. The…

Today’s headlines scream abuse with one accord at the latest bailed-out company insisting on paying grotesque bonuses. The Financial Times is the most reserved with “Outrage at $165,000,000 AIG Bonus Payments” adding that the Obama Administration expresses its anger. So things are slightly different in the United States. The new Government is prepared to condemn such outrageous behaviour from financial institutions which have got us into this mess, after being bailed out at huge expense to…

How do we prevent vulnerable children being killed by toerags passing off as parents, or, as likely, by the mother’s latest boyfriend? That is a question to which Lord Laming has again given his judgement. Way back, David Hunt and I went to the then Health Secretary about Wirral’s chaotic children’s department. I asked the Minister whether our children’s department was the worst in the country. The expression of the face of Lord Laming, then the Government’s Chief Social Work advisor,…

The Bank of England, it is reported, has every reason to be pleased with the initial market reaction to its printing money policy. The newly-printed money process began last Thursday. The bank seems to have three options on how to spend its new money. What appears to have happened from last Thursday on is for the bank to buy its own existing debt. By stepping in with unprecedented amounts of new money, the Government’s aim was to push up the price of its own debt. The hope was that…

James Purnell, Work and Pensions Secretary, is being increasingly forced to look as though he is Old Mother Hubbard going to the cupboard and finding it bare. His latest initiative to help unemployed professional workers find work is well meaning but pretty fatuous. For the next month, professionals who sign on will get one-to-one meetings with a personal advisor; attend group sessions for similarly jobless people at new style “job clubs”, be given help to brush up their job-hunting skills…