Get housing on the agenda for ITV Leaders' Debate on Thurs 2 April

Housing is one of the top 5 issue in the polls nationally but, according to what I heard, it wasn't mentioned last Thursday on the C4/Sky Jeremy Paxman TV debate. To get it on the agenda for the ITV Leaders' Debate on Thurs 2 April 2015 at 8pm, please e-mail debate@itv.com and put in a question on housing. (Shelter are asking people to do this.)

The slippery slope fallacy and charging for NHS prescriptions

The slippery slope fallacy is a way of ridiculing an argument that says, “If we allow A to happen then Z will eventually happen too, therefore A should not happen.” The typical example is, “If we allow same-sex couples to marry, then eventually we'll be allowing people to marry their parents or their pets.”

economics: UK debt, deficit, GDP, etc, in 2012

I tried to get on to the nef and Quaker Peace & Social Witness (QPSW) ‘economic mythbusters’ online course in May/June but there wasn’t room. QPSW is now working with nef to make some resources available in due course: maybe course briefings and questions and edited clips of lectures. QPSW also recommended the Earth and Economy newsletter and Quakernomics blog.

So, in the meantime, the marvellous CIA World Factbook and False Economy continue to be my favourite sources of information on economics.

According to the latest (2012) data in the CIA World Factbook, the UK is the ninth largest economy in the world but 36th in GDP per capita.

GDP (purchasing power parity): £1.53 trillion; GDP per capita per year: £24,100. This has barely changed since 2010.  But there was a huge drop between 2008 (£28,330) and 2009 (£23,200) due to the banking crash.

Budget: revenues: £654bn less public spending £780bn = budget deficit £126bn. (This tallies with the other way that the budget deficit is expressed, ie as 7.7% of GDP.)

Public debt is 88.7% of GDP (2012 est.) which is £1.35 trillion.

Other key stats are

• GDP - composition by sector: agriculture 0.7%; industry 21.1%; services 78.2% (2012 est.)
• Unemployment rate: 7.8%
• Population below poverty line: 14% (2006 est.)
• Household income or consumption by percentage share: lowest 10%: 2.1%; highest 10%: 28.5% (1999). 

And finally a report from www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/apr/18/george-osborne-imf-austerity:  The head of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde, said on Thursday 18 April that the poor performance of the British economy had left her with no alternative but to call on George Osborne to rethink his austerity strategy.