The international aid community was sent into conniptions this week as reports from the UN High Level Panel meeting in New York to decide on a framework to succeed the Millennium Development Goals indicated that no target for the eradication of absolute poverty (those living on less than...

OK, don't freak out about what comes next. The growing environmental crisis, and especially those determined to do nothing about it, or even outright deny it, is in economic terms the modern equivalent of slavery. Before you report me to the Daily Mail, do hear me out, and please note...

"And thus I clothe my naked villainy
With odd old ends stolen out of holy writ;
And seem a saint, when most I play the devil."
Richard III

The nation sighs with relief. After flirting with a triple-dip recession the British economy has experienced 0.3% growth in...

We are led to believe that these are conservative times, but the Conservative Party have not won a plurality of the vote in over twenty years. For a quarter-century their leaders have faced wars of attrition, of one sort or another. This is a worse run of results for the...

I wrote recently on these pages about the Conservative part of this Government, and how its opponents seem to have misdiagnosed its driving ideology (if the collection of grievances and resentments that make up modern Conservatism can be described as 'ideology') as one of deliberate immiseration of the...

Black Monday arrived on April 1. Given this Government's record for public relations, it is no surprise that the massive wave of austerity kicked in on April Fool's Day and over the Easter weekend, a holiday rich in the symbolism of the salvation of man from his basest instincts. Cameron's...

If this isn't a depression, what would one look like? The economic recovery following the crisis of 2007/08 has been the slowest for a century, slower even than from the Great Depression. Only the post-WWI recession of 1920-1924 saw a steeper decline in output, and even then there was a...

This weekend, in an act of fraternal solidarity for which he will receive no credit, Tony Blair wrote in support of David Cameron's commitment to African development and in particular the 43-year-old pledge to devote 0.7% of national income to the aid budget.

Blair should...

I recently wrote on this site that, in reference to the recently published photos of the Duchess of Cambridge, pregnant and on holiday, that '...our morbid fascination with this bizarre, ordinary family invests them with a sort of inverted dignity just by them doing and saying nothing of real consequence.'...

God forbid we should be twenty years without a rebellion says Thomas Jefferson. Who would have imagined that after two and a half centuries of Anglo-Saxon religious non-conformism, and a period of technical and social innovation that would seed an industrial revolution and the world's greatest empire, a flattering and...

If the Great Recession has proved one thing it is that there are few economic responses that both left and right can agree upon, or even really agree upon even among themselves. If there was a manual it would be followed. With hindsight we know all there is to know...

An opportunity exists in the next two years to build on one of the most successful development projects, not to mention political projects, of all time: the Millennium Development Goals. But hard-won progress can easily be squandered, because the Goals are in danger of death by a thousand cuts.

In physics, the observer effect is when the act of measuring something alters the trajectory of the phenomenon being measured. For the Millennium Development Goals, a set of eight targets for global development agreed by 189 nations to be met by 2015, the observer effect was a very positive one...

The Schumacher Institute completed a pilot of its SocialCapitalist project in Spring 2012. The SocialCapitalist project is based on the idea that during an economic downturn it is not just financial capital that is destroyed. Growing problems such as unemployment and personal debt means that social capital, the bonds between...

The Great Recession has resulted in a political sea-change in Britain, with a Conservative-Liberal government replacing a Labour one. Just as with 9/11, the Great Recession has sucked the political oxygen from the atmosphere so that other issues not only struggle for attention, but get framed solely through the prism...

Nothing in the course of the August riots sum up the situation like the impromptu interview recorded on a London street by a frustrated BBC reporter. Speaking with a group of young people on bikes, bandanas covering their faces, the reporter struggles to control his anger. 'Why are you doing...