Joe Mellor — Ex-PM Gordon Brown has backed…Jeremy Corbyn

In a full about turn, Gordon Brown, has now decided that Jeremy Corbyn is a the right person to lead the UK out of it’s troubled times....

Brown, whose leadership of the country was fraught with setbacks, said that Corbyn’s war on rising inequality and stagnant wages was “absolutely right.”

The London Economic

Ex-PM Gordon Brown has backed…Jeremy Corbyn
Joe Mellor

Intel Today — Gordon Brown : UK misled over Iraqi WMDs

In an extract from his memoir, the ex-Labour leader says “we were not just misinformed, but misled”.

Intel Today
Gordon Brown : UK misled over Iraqi WMDs
L.

Secret US intelligence report on weapons of mass destruction was not shared with Tony Blair’s cabinet, new book claims

The Guardian
Gordon Brown says Pentagon misled UK over case for Iraq invasion

Michael Savage

Bill Mitchell — A former UK Chancellor attempts to save face and just becomes confused

On May 6, 1997, just 4 days after coming to office in what was to become Tony Blair’s retrogressive regime, the then British Labour Chancellor Gordon Brown announced that Labour would legislate the so-called independence of the Bank of England. The BBC claimed this was the “most radical shake-up in the bank’s 300-year history”, which gave “the bank freedom to control monetary policy”. Gordon Brown’s legacy to the British people, of course, is in his famous ‘light touch’ regulation, which he boasted about in the lead up to the GFC but went silent about soon after. But he has come out of the woodwork recently to reflect on his decision to set up the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) within the Bank of England and abandon the practice where the Chancellor and the Governor of the Bank would meet on a monthly basis to determine interest rates. He claims that decision kept Britain out of the euro and was a great success. But then in the same speech he railed against the ‘political’ intrusion of the MPC into broader fiscal policy debates and its failure to conduct monetary policy correctly during the GFC. A very confused narrative. The point is that central banks can never be independent of treasury departments and the claims to the contrary were just part of the depoliticisation of policy that accompanied neoliberalism. Brown is also wrong that setting up a separate MPC kept the nation out of the euro. Britain realised the euro would be a disaster long before 1997....

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
A former UK Chancellor attempts to save face and just becomes confused
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Gordon Brown — Social reform might not sound like an exciting investment, but it can pay off - literally

Making social reform work by enabling capital to profit from it rather than "be taxed to pay for it."

Clueless that a currency sovereign has zero cost of capital.

Project Syndicate
Social reform might not sound like an exciting investment, but it can pay off - literally
Gordon Brown, former Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer of the United Kingdom, is United Nations Special Envoy for Global Education and Chair of the International Commission on Financing Global Education Opportunity. He chairs the Advisory Board of the Catalyst Foundation

Robert Skidelsky — Conservative Election Manifesto

The Conservatives have continued to spin their familiar yarn of having rescued Britain from ‘Labour’s Great Recession’. This, as they must know, is the mother of all lies. The Great Recession was caused by the banks. Governments, the Labour government included, by bailing out the banks and continuing to spend, stopped the Great Recession from turning into a Great Depression. Yet practically everyone seems to believe that the Great Recession was manufactured by Gordon Brown.

The Conservatives claim that ‘by halving the deficit we have restored confidence to the economy’. This cheerfully ignores the near academic consensus that their deficit-reduction policies over the last 5 years have made the British economy between 5 and 10% smaller than it would have been with more sensible policies.….

Conservative Election Manifesto
Robert Skidelsky

ht Brad DeLong

Ramanan — The Illogical Golden Rule

Wynne Godley quote.

The Case For Concerted Action

The Illogical Golden Rule
Ramanan

Carey L. Biron — World Bank Urged to Include Human Rights in Safeguards Review

Backed by the German government and prominent civil society voices, United Nations experts are calling for the World Bank to explicitly incorporate international human right standards into its “safeguards” to minimise negative impacts of bank financing on vulnerable communities and environments.

The bank is currently wrapping up the first of a two-year review of its environmental and social safeguards, a process that has included dozens of global consultations. Initial discussion on those developments is slated for Saturday during semi-annual meetings between the bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) held in Washington. A publication date for a draft of the reforms has not yet been decided.

“All activities supported by the World Bank…should be included in the review to ensure consistency with international human rights standards,” a group of independent U.N. experts stated in a release Friday. “Doing so would improve development outcomes and strengthen the protection of the world’s poorest from unintended adverse impacts of activities financed by the Bank.”

Groups around the world are advocating for a broadening of the bank’s safeguard policies to more fully take into account specific needs related to gender, disability, indigenous rights and labour. Others worry that the reforms process could actually weaken safeguards, a fear reiterated by the U.N. experts.

As a development institution and a member of the U.N. family, the bank is obligated to give “due weight to international human rights standards”, Cephas Lumina, the U.N.’s independent expert on foreign debt and human rights, noted. “States must also adhere to their international law obligations when they act through international organisations. The World Bank is no exception.”

Inter Press Service
World Bank Urged to Include Human Rights in Safeguards Review
Carey L. Biron

The qualifier:

“When I started this job, I asked all of the econometricians and economists about the value added [by incorporating human rights], and they said that they just couldn’t establish such a connection,” NTF coordinator Anders Zeijlon told IPS. “It seems there are too many variables at stake.”

Zeijlon noted that he was “surprised” by the findings, but admitted it is difficult for the bank to prioritise human rights-related indicators without “hard-nosed data” that can explain their impact. However, related studies are underway.

“In the coming years you will see a large number of evaluations and more detailed looks at specific sectors and so on,” he said. “The challenge will be to take that information and try to aggregate it in a useful way.”

"Value added by incorporating human rights"? When the number one source of value in modern political theory is human rights? How does one quantify the "value" of human rights? Impossible, because human rights are priceless, and all other values are minuscule in comparison.

BTW, this also pertains to developed nations like the US with large underclasses that are systematically excluded from the benefits of the society at large due to discrimination, economic marginalization, and other similar factors that keep sub-cultures in institutionalized poverty.

See also Learn From the Children by Gordon Brown, U.N. Special Envoy for Global Education and former Prime Minister of Britain.