Thoughts on the toxic combination of the violence and denial of empire — I wrote recently about why I can’t teach economics anymore. One reason is it ignores the British Empire. In this article I look at how. Let’s start at the beginning. If you study economics you might start with the CORE economics curriculum and it’s first chapter — ‘The Capitalist Revolution’…

No. Well, not first glance. Writing from the UK here, if you look at the latest government data they put the value of all our defence exports at £7.9 billion in 2020. Now, £7.9 billion sounds like a lot, and it is. But compare it to our biggest exports. In…

(Spoilers — no). First of all, I want to say, I don’t like the question in the title. Really, I wanted to call it, ‘Why do people keep telling me foreign investors own all of London’. But that seemed like a weird title. But I do keep being told one…

What the latest data can tell us (and what it cannot). If you want to know who the most indebted countries in the world are, there is some new data from the International Monetary Fund which might help. (It might not help, but I’ll come to that later). The database…

Some thoughts on Santa, Capitalism and the stories we tell our kids — People sometimes think I’m anti-Capitalist. I find it hard to explain why I’m not. But, as we are leaving Christmas behind us, I’ll give it a go. …

If you don’t, and you are British, you probably should. — This is the first post in a series where I am sharing a walking tour I used to do about the British Empire. This is stop 1 of 8. You can read why I accidentally started doing them here ). I would start my walking tour of the British Empire…

I tried to find out what went wrong in City during the financial crisis of 2008. I found things started going wrong quite a lot longer ago. — I walked into the history of the British Empire. Literally. Let me explain. I started doing tours around the City of London. The tours I were leading weren’t supposed to be about the Empire. But this was the story that shouted out at me from every street corner. …

It’s like Eat Out to Help out. It stimulates the economy. Just not the part of the economy anyone really wants us to look at. — I’ve tried to explain Quantitative Easing before. The essence of it is simple. In short it’s a way of stimulating the economy, a bit like Eat out to Help Out did for a month in August in the UK. …

I found something simple hiding behind it’s complexity — I never used to know what Quantitative Easing was. I’d heard people say it was something along the lines of bailing out the banks. I remember feeling some comfort at having someone to point at, to blame. There was just this background feeling that it didn’t quite seem to make…