UKHamlet's Blog

Prof Joseph Stiglitz says Osbourne has it wrong

The first human casualties of our wonderful government’s war on the deficit have come to my attention. Alison is a friend, she’s the mother of two small children, and a woman whose husband “took one for the company” last year and reduced his hours by 25%. They are the parents in a family who can just about get by, and they have been told her civil service job will not exist in the near future, not because it’s not a necessary job, but because she’s been sacrificed to the ideology of neo-liberal economics.

Think of the country as a work horse. You need it to work hard to help you pay off your debts, so would your first action be to cut its food? That’s what Cameron, Osbourne and Clegg are doing to the economy.

You may have heard of Professor Joseph Stiglitz – he’s the Nobel laureate economist who correctly predicted the global crash. He’s distinctly unimpressed with Osbourne’s budget. This, he predicts, will make Britain’s recovery from recession longer, slower and harder than it needs to be. The rise in VAT could even tip us into a double-dip recession. He took time to offer George Osbourne a bit of advice – which will probably go unheeded, because Osbourne’s objectives aren’t necessarily to improve the economy. They are an ideological attack on the state, with the intention of shrinking it by forty percent.

Continue reading

Lovely bones

I’m not thin. In fact I’m what some would call a BHB – big handsome bloke. That doesn’t include me, because I don’t like being big. My bigness is more to do with genetics than diet – I eat moderately and do a certain amount of exercise, including visting the gym twice a week. Still, I can’t shed those midriff pounds.

The reason for this is I convert more of my calories to fat than thin people – it’s a simple fact. The equation is easy to understand (even for skinny people) – everyone has a daily calorie burn off rate and it varies from day to day and person to person – if you consume more calories than you burn off, you will get fatter. FACT.

So, I could eat exactly the same number of calories and do exactly the same amount of exercise as a naturally skinny person, but I would burn fewer calories, therefore put on more weight, or lose less. This, of course, is a simplification, but it is in the area of accuracy and for the purposes of this article, it will suffice.

The thing is, I’m not complaining about the unfairness of this, or desirablility of being skinny, or even making excuses about my own inability to lose weight. No, I’m complaining about the sage like posturing of naturally skinny people, who want to tell me how to join their ranks. Why? Because they don’t know. They are there, they have always been there and they have no idea why or how I’m going to make that journey.

Continue reading