Toxic Plants

As you may know, the British Prime Minister recently announced that a General Election would be held in the UK on 4 July. Campaigning here is ramping up, so I am going to depart from our usual gardening theme this month and look at some of the policies (or lack of them) up for debate (or not). For non-UK readers, here is a brief summary of UK politics. For over 100 years, UK governments have been formed by either the Labour Party or the Conservative Party. The current government is Conservative; the predicted result of the upcoming election is a swing to Labour. The Conservative Party is right-leaning and is somewhat comparable to the US Republicans; the Labour Party is left-leaning and is somewhat comparable to the US Democrats. There are several minority parties who have no realistic prospect of winning a majority or forming a government; however, they may hold the balance of power in a “hung Parliament” where no party has an overall majority. Minority parties contesting this el...

Does the Pope understand overshoot? This month I am going to depart from my usual gardening theme in order to explore “Conversations about perpetual growth”.  Politicians, economists and media people love talking about it , but ever since I was a child I have felt uneasy about the idea.  Surely nothing can grow forever, and everything must stop growing at some point?  However, I have found it surprisingly difficult to have conversations about this.  Whenever I suggest that perpetual growth may be impossible, people act as though they didn’t hear what I said, or change the subject, or look embarrassed as though I’ve said something socially unacceptable.  If I post a comment about it online, I either get no response, or I get “downvoted” which means other readers click on a “thumbs down” symbol to show they don’t like the comment - although they never explain why.  If I write to politicians or economists about it, they usually don’t reply. However, during my ...

Liz Truss, ex-Prime Minister of UK For anyone who has not been following the horror show of British politics in the last few weeks, here is a brief summary: Liz Truss was elected Prime Minister on 6 September 2022 following the resignation of her predecessor. She appointed Kwasi Kwarteng as her Chancellor, who announced a “mini-budget” on 23 September. This contained £45 billion in unfunded tax cuts including the abolition of the 45% higher rate of income tax and the scrapping of the limit on bankers' bonuses – both unpopular measures which were widely seen as benefiting the rich at the expense of the poor. Following the mini-budget, the financial markets tanked, interest rates rose, sterling fell to its lowest ever level against the US dollar and turmoil in government bond prices led the Bank of England to launch an emergency bond buying programme. This caused house mortgage lenders to withdraw over 40% of their products, with other products repriced upwards. The package was crit...