They always have to go one better, don’t they? The week Europe tries to recreate the Big Bang, America decides to kick off the Big Crunch. In the eye of the storm stands US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson: perhaps the world’s most powerful man, at least for this week. The kind of financial titan we’d [...]

Filed under: gambling, jonathanbirch, labour, ukpolitics, uspolitics on September 16th, 2008 | No Comments »

Remember September, when Northern Rock nearly collapsed? Savers withdrew around £2bn in savings, prompting the government to guarantee customers’ money up to a total of £100 000 per person. Estimates at the time suggested the taxpayer was crediting Northern Rock to the tune of about £20bn. But Northern Rock (naturally) lends out far more than [...]

Filed under: gambling, gordonbrown, jonathanbirch, labour, ukpolitics on December 24th, 2007 | 1 Comment »

Having spent a great deal of time (probably not enough) subsidised by the British taxpayer looking back over the history of 20th century Britain and trying to get some of it to stick in my mind, I feel that it might be worth speculating about the views of historians on the Blair governments. I’m sure [...]

Filed under: constitution, foreignpolicy, gambling, gordonbrown, history, tonyblair, ukpolitics on May 5th, 2007 | 2 Comments »

She is the unlucky minister who gets the job of defending the governments stance on gambling which consists of licensing 90 new casinos in the last two years, with 10 supercasinos in the pipeline, according to a recently leaked document.
There are certain arguments in favour of liberalising gambling. While it is certainly addictive (Mark Griffiths, [...]

Filed under: gambling, labour, society on January 28th, 2007 | 1 Comment »