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Author: David Herdson

Looking on the bright side: another decade of austerity. At best

Looking on the bright side: another decade of austerity. At best

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The economic damage from Covid-19 will likely be worse than the 2008 Financial Crisis This is Year Zero. We are at the cusp of the Before and the After. Covid-19, and the policy responses to it, are changing the world in a way that will affect it for decades and to put it bluntly, it doesn’t look good. Economies are delicate things. Analysts and commentators get excited about changes in growth figures or unemployment rates of 0.1% – one part…

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Trump’s inadequate response to Covid-19 will doom his presidency

Trump’s inadequate response to Covid-19 will doom his presidency

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All the options are bad and Trump is running scared of them In some ways the world is very fortunate. It may not feel like it at the moment, never mind in a few months or – if we’re lucky – weeks, but pandemics are an inevitable if rare occurrence of nature and the best we can do is ride out the storm with good judgement and timely action. There is probably no other country on Earth that was as…

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David Herdson’s tip for Dem running mate: Julian Castro at 25/1

David Herdson’s tip for Dem running mate: Julian Castro at 25/1

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Predicting running-mates is notoriously difficult but he ticks the right boxes US Vice Presidents have four main jobs. Firstly, once elected, they are the president’s most senior dogsbody; picking up the jobs that the president might do were he interested or have time, but where is doesn’t or hasn’t. Usually that means attending state funerals but for the moment it also appears to encompass praying for salvation against pandemics. Secondly if necessary – and it might well be next year…

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Labour must get over its myth of 2017 if it is to win again

Labour must get over its myth of 2017 if it is to win again

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A well-timed aberration is still an aberration Keir Starmer looks well set to win Labour’s leadership election in April. After securing comfortable leads among MPs, CLPs and affiliate organisations in the previous rounds, YouGov reported this week that he holds a 22% lead over Rebecca Long-Bailey, and is more likely than not to win on the first round. If he does, it will be in no small part down to the last set of rule changes which at the time…

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Early voting and a split field mean Sanders should be clear odds-on for the Dem nomination

Early voting and a split field mean Sanders should be clear odds-on for the Dem nomination

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Only a health scare is likely to stop him now Inevitably, all eyes on the race for the Democrat nomination are trained today on Nevada, which today becomes the third state to vote in the contest. Except it doesn’t. There’s still far too much attention paid in the media to ‘election day’ itself, which is now a highly misleading concept. Early voting has transformed how elections are conducted by both the public and political parties / candidates, (both here and…

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Number 10’s power-grab is sowing the seeds of its own failure

Number 10’s power-grab is sowing the seeds of its own failure

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Cummings cannot re-engineer government while ignoring the human aspect Political power is notoriously nebulous. Like fairies, or the value of fiat money, if enough people belief in it, that in itself is enough to call it into being – just as the lack of belief is enough to destroy it. What then gives Boris Johnson the ability to accrete to himself and his advisors in Number Ten powers that no other prime minister has enjoyed? It’s not the size of…

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Public standards mean nothing if the public won’t own them

Public standards mean nothing if the public won’t own them

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Trump’s failed impeachment is a reflection of the nation’s civil standards Why is Mike Pence not now the President of the United States? The immediate answer is, of course, that there weren’t 67 members of the Senate willing to vote to convict him of the charges brought by the House. But to get to the deeper answers we have to ask: why not? It was not for lack of evidence – though of course the Republican senators went out of…

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Sanders’ odds are far too short for Iowa: no-one should be odds-on

Sanders’ odds are far too short for Iowa: no-one should be odds-on

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Four or five in the frame and a chaotic process makes it far too hard to call The Iowa caucus is one of those things that no-one in their right mind would invent if it didn’t already exist. As a democratic process, it flouts goodness knows how many rules of good practice, from high barriers to participation to non-secret voting to a lack of consistent process. However, it’s possible to get too precious about process. The caucus does exist and…

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