Home sweet home, and without a boarding card, as it was texted to me on my phone, and I just flashed that as I went through. Amazing ! Holed up at home for the day (19 november) but piling through lots of stuff, and mixed feeling about seeing us held up in the ft. As a family, we are digesting the news about child benefit (richer folk will lose it), worth a hundred and fifty pounds a month to us. I have to say that with the monumental nature of the savings that will have to come, if we are indeed as a society to do what needs to be done by the poor, all these higher-income supplements are surely…

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There´s an old film, if it´s tuesday, this must be belgium. It is, and it is. I am here officially to chair a session on competitiveness and inclusion, and unofficially to lobby and learn more about how manchester can draw down more funding from the eu (19 may). Many ways it turns out, although the question is whether we are brave and radical enough in the teeth of cuts to invest in a team that can work at it night and day to craft opportunity and ruthlessly pursue it in the dogged and sophisticated manner it takes. The session itself was execllent, or as excellent as these things can be with 5 cities starting by setting out their wares. Swift…

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Amazing who you see at the conservative party conference these days, and I was amongst them. Alone in a lift after breakfast with ian duncan smith (27 may), who prodded his floor (3) and then turned his back, guarding the buttons, so I had to politely lean in front of him to prod my own (1). Andrew lansley (16 june), by contrast, who was walking in the hotel as I walked out, seemed a more affable chap. Saw the back of boris, who seemed to be jumping up and down even as he ate breakfast standing up. John hayes is a story for another day, and I stoppped counting odd ministers when I hit double figures. Greg « magna carta…

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Even as the dollar continues to enable the us to spend, spend, spend, still the fed may yet go back to printing more money (“quantative easing” as it seems to be soothingly termed now), as may the bank of england, as public spending tails off and recovery looks unlikely to be able to pick up the slack. Even the anti-christ of asset purchase, the ecb, is slowly becoming a serial offender, again this week intervening to support the irish, with every sign of more to come on that front soon. The evidence is ever stronger that the western consumer has finally decided to stop spending ever more and start paying off debt, and even putting away a bit for a…

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I spoke at a cycling summit earlier this week. Not my best ever gig, but saved by the passion of the message I found coming through as I skipped over the plethora of statistics about how cycling can save the world to my own very real enthusiasm. Yesterday, I was practicing what I preach, picking up my youngest’s bike from the repair shop (I’m not very black-fingered) and the three of us going on a 10km-round trip. My other half was in budapest, as her mum rather suddenly passed away earlier in the week, though the kids didn’t know yet. We made a good day of it, pausing for lunch and just generally having fun in an urban environment that…

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Whilst brits were in tatters 3 days after the general election and still no government, more than 3 months after theirs, still no white smoke in belgium. It’s not unusual: the last round took 8 months, leading me even then to talk about breaking up. The only thing keeping together what is essentially 2 countries (french wallonia and dutch flanders) is brussels, which with both nato and eu headquarters is all but the capital of europe. Serbia and montenegro managed to bloodlessly split, czech and slovakia’s was even happy, so why not belgium ? Every time forming a national government becomes even more excruciatingly different, and this time has an added nasty edge as immigrants are no longer seen as…

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In my mind, this is a space away from work, but as I’ve just spent an hour of my early morning on it, and been so immersed I haven’t escaped here for a fortnight, it doesn’t seem inappropriate. It's also because I’m lucky enough to actually enjoy a large part of my another day, another dollar toil. Including blue-sky thinking about building a research centre. We’re not starting from scratch of course, as around the patch there are lots of people working on research, analysis, strategy, evaluation “and so forth” (as I might say in a paper) – but how, in a world where pillars are daily being knocked down to build a new temple to intelligence rather than do…

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A week back and I am still daydreaming holiday, finding it quite hard to return to the urgency of drafting that needs to be done yesterday, frameworks that must be managed over human obstacle courses, menus for grand dinners and manic preparations for having 30 mad kids run wild around the house in what is quaintly known as a “birthday party”. I guess I can’t complain though, as whilst my 30-odd days holiday a year compare poorly to the average french 38, they are a good notch above the uk average 26 and mile and a half ahead of the average american 13. This matters, because whichever way you cut the statistics, europeans work less than americans (and indeed most),…

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We brought back an interesting souvenir from hungary: my niece. So we’ve had a girl and a teenager in the house for a while, which is very different from two boys under ten. A characteristic however with even more influence is that our visitor is the second-born (of five). How many conversations I‘ve had about the first being thoughtful, diligent, diplomatic and polite, intellectual, an avid reader and a sensitive soul; while the second is more carefree and adventurous, outrageous even, argumentative if not downright rude, sporty, flexible, always pushing the boundaries and with a lower attention span. There is such a wealth of experience here it simply must be nurture not nature, with the way all we parents rushed…

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