Crisis

If you think your bills are bad now, just wait

Forgive the doom-mongering, but the US, and especially the UK, may be dangerously on course for a sovereign debt crisis. Yet debt and deficits play a surprisingly minimal role in our countries’ politics. Overspending on borrowed money hardly featured in either nation’s elections of 2024. A Labour MP hoping for Andy Burnham to challenge Keir Starmer for her party’s leadership recently told Times Radio that investors would see the UK as “the best place to be” if only the government pursued “progressive policies that do speak to our communities.” She added darkly, “The markets will have to get into line” – which was like brandishing a saber at the heavens and threatening that the weather “will have to get into line”... or else!

debt bills

How the British helped JFK navigate the Cuban Missile Crisis

The Atlantic alliance hasn’t always been quite as special as politicians on both sides of the sea like to pretend. To take just the last sixty years: there were the differing views on Vietnam that led Lyndon Johnson to assess the British premier Harold Wilson as "a creep," while Richard Nixon privately considered Ted Heath "weak" and "as crooked as a corkscrew" (which was saying something coming from him). In October 1962, however, the principal Western leaders really did have something special. Between them, they probably helped save the world from nuclear annihilation. When on October 16, President John F.