Yesterday, Experian reported on the impact of that on the north east where 43 per cent of jobs are in the public sector. In Tees Valley, three council areas – Middlesbrough, Redcar and Hartlepool – all have very low resilience because they only have industries vulnerable to damage and closure, skill levels too low for easy transfer to other occupations, ageing populations and a weak enterprise culture.
Further evidence, if any were needed, that the North-South divide is real and threatening to get wider came today with research for BBC Regions showing a map of economic resilience across England, compiled as part of the Corporation’s Spending Review season.
This week the ‘End Legal Loan Sharking’ campaign working with Lisa Nandy, newly elected Labour MP for Wigan, have tabled an early day motion to bring attention to the issue of legal loan sharking and put pressure on the government to act.
Here at Left Foot Forward, we have taken David Miliband’s green proposals and compared them to statements from the Coalition and also from the other Labour front runner, his brother Ed.
There are innumerable claims from the Coalition government and its supporters that the source of the public sector deficit is Labour’s over-spending. But one graph, on the Treasury’s own website, demonstrates that assertion is untrue.
Carbon emissions in the United Kingdom have increased since 1980, if “embedded” emissions are taken into account. Professor Robert Watson, the Government’s chief environmental scientist has called for more openness in the publishing of statistics, which can be misleading.
The main economic debate in the UK still centres on whether the economy is strong enough to stand the strain that will be placed on it by George Osborne’s fiscal consolidation plans.
Representatives from around 40 governments meet today in Geneva to consolidate on the discussions held at Copenhagen last year, ahead of November’s Cancun UN Climate Change Conference.
The Guardian today splashed with the news that the man the paper describes as “the world’s most high profile climate change sceptic,” Bjørn Lomborg, has u-turned and described global warming as “undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world today” and called for tens of billions to be spent tackling the problem.
On holiday in Tuscany. His decision to fly by EasyJet last week, eschewing even priority boarding, strikes notable tones of austerity. This is in sharp contrast to his time spent on a Russian oligarch’s yacht in the summer of 2008…
