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For a number of decades our economy has failed to work for ordinary citizens. Stagnant wages have been combined with underemployment and rising costs of basic goods like healthcare, education and housing. At the same time, a small minority of the population make obscene profits, while in the background we continue to hurtle headlong into an environmental emergency. However, despite there being no shortage of anger and anti-elite sentiment expressed in what is often referred to as the ‘culture wars’, no significant challenge to the dominant economic model has broken into the mainstream. The pound and the fury argues that behind this failure of imagination are a set of taken-for-granted myths about how the economy works – myths that stifle debate and block change. The book analyses these myths, explores their origin, how they circulate and how they might be dispelled at a time when, away from the public gaze, economic theory is opening up new possibilities of economic action. Possibilities that, as we emerge from the chaos of Covid-19, could lead to the radical structural changes we desperately need.
important stimulus to the emergence and growth of the UK software industry, this trajectory of growth has had its limits. Firms are constrained both by the growth of demand and by the lack of marketing skills that might re-invent market boundaries so necessary for the development of software products. The absence of a large commodity software market has meant a less radical impact of the software industry upon industrial growth in the UK economy. Thus, in this chapter, we describe the evolution of an industry driven by the need for outsourcing and limited by the
those that actually struck deals (stock jobbers). This greatly liberalised trading practice and strengthened both London’s role as a global financial capital and the City of London’s dominant position in the UK economy. Finally, 1986 also saw the Building Societies Act, which paved the way for the demutualisation of many building societies as they transformed into jointstock companies in which former members of the mutual organisation became corporate shareholders. In this way the two largest UK building societies became the new banks, Abbey National and Halifax
avoided, it was almost business as usual. No political, economic or intellectual paradigm shift emerged. And, arguably, the UK economy has been floundering ever since. The real question driving this chapter is why did nothing really change? What accounted for ‘the strange non-death of neoliberalism’ and everything associated with an economy driven by financial markets, internationalization and debt? 1 One part of the answer supplied here is that much of the result came down to the technocrats in
the Exchequer and successive chancellors have reshaped the UK economy from a nation that secures economic advantage through foreign exploitation, to a country that attempts to profit by selling its assets, services and people to others. How did this come about? As this chapter explains, following the dismantling of state economic management and controls in the early Thatcher years, the Treasury strongly embraced the older free-trade Gladstonian philosophy that had once served the empire-based model of the British economy so well. Similarly
The Treasury is one of Britain’s oldest, most powerful and secretive institutions. But all too frequently it has escaped public scrutiny when it comes to investigating the ups and downs of the UK economy. More often, it is depicted as a saviour, repeatedly rescuing the nation’s finances from the hands of posturing Prime Ministers, powerful special interests, and the combustions of world financial markets. It is a bedrock of government stability in times of crisis.
However, there is another side to the story. The Exchequer, more than any other institution, has shaped modern Britain’s economic system. In between the highs there have been many lows, from botched privatizations to dubious private finance initiatives, from failing to spot the great financial crisis to contributing to ever-growing regional imbalances and economic inequalities.
Davis’s book goes behind the scenes to offer an inside history of the Treasury, in the words of the chancellors, officials and civil servants themselves. It shows the failings as well as the successes, the personalities and the thinking which have shaped Britain’s economy since the 1970s. Based on interviews with over fifty key figures from the last five decades of Treasury life, it offers a fascinating, alternative insight on how and why the UK economy came to function as it does today, and why a paradigm shift and institutional rethink is long overdue.
The chapter revisits the merger to form the new University in 2004, focusing on expectations, including rebalancing of the UK economy, and how these were embedded in the design of the University. Themes include the evolution of the campus through to the departure from the former UMIST campus, parallel changes in academic structures with large interdisciplinary schools consolidating from an initial twenty-three to the current nine, key events such as the Nobel Prizes for the isolation of graphene, and the challenge of the pandemic. It concludes with an outlook for ID Manchester as the city’s focal innovation district, reflecting many of the same ambitions that underpinned the historic foundation of the universities.
UK’s population density varies widely, as one might expect, but on average it was 255 people per km 2 in 2018. The UK economy is open, with a ratio of trade to gross domestic product of 61% in 2019, and is one of the world’s most financialised economies. The Irish economy, however, is one of the most open in the world, with a ratio of trade to gross domestic product of 210
The well-being of Europe’s citizens depends less on individual consumption and more on their social consumption of essential goods and services – from water and retail banking to schools and care homes – in what we call the foundational economy. Individual consumption depends on market income, while foundational consumption depends on social infrastructure and delivery systems of networks and branches, which are neither created nor renewed automatically, even as incomes increase. This historically created foundational economy has been wrecked in the last generation by privatisation, outsourcing, franchising and the widespread penetration of opportunistic and predatory business models. The distinctive, primary role of public policy should therefore be to secure the supply of basic services for all citizens (not a quantum of economic growth and jobs). Reconstructing the foundational has to start with a vision of citizenship that identifies foundational entitlements as the conditions for dignified human development, and likewise has to depend on treating the business enterprises central to the foundational economy as juridical persons with claims to entitlements but also with responsibilities and duties. If the aim is citizen well-being and flourishing for the many not the few, then European politics at regional, national and EU level needs to be refocused on foundational consumption and securing universal minimum access and quality. If/when government is unresponsive, the impetus for change has to come from engaging citizens locally and regionally in actions which break with the top down politics of ‘vote for us and we will do this for you’.
Delving into a hitherto unexplored aspect of Irish art history, Painting Dublin, 1886–1949 examines the depiction of Dublin by artists from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Artists’ representations of the city have long been markers of civic pride and identity, yet in Ireland, such artworks have been overlooked in favour of the rural and pastoral, falling outside of the dominant disciplinary narratives of nationalism or modernism. Framed by the shift from city of empire to capital of an independent republic, this book chiefly examines artworks by of Walter Frederick Osborne (1857–1903), Rose Mary Barton (1856–1929), Jack Butler Yeats (1871–1957), Harry Aaron Kernoff (1900–74), Estella Frances Solomons (1882–1968), and Flora Hippisley Mitchell (1890–1973), encompassing a variety of urban views and artistic themes. While Dublin is renowned for its representation in literature, this book will demonstrate how the city was also the subject of a range of visual depictions, including those in painting and print. Focusing on the images created by these artists as they navigated the city’s streets, this book offers a vivid visualisation of Dublin and its inhabitants, challenging a reengagement with Ireland’s art history through the prism of the city and urban life.