Richard was the founding director of the Centre for Enterprise, Markets and Ethics. He was a visiting professor in the Business School at St. Mary’s University. He made a number of contributions to the life of St. Mary’s, including organising high profile events involving academics, business leaders and policy thinkers. He also guest lectured on the MA in Catholic Social Teaching.
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Providing Christian commentary on the recent budget is not especially easy. There was a measure to remove the two-child cap on Universal Credit payments that was welcomed by many Christians. But the rest of the budget was really a collection of bits and pieces as well as deferred tax rises on which it is difficult to provide a Christian analysis.
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We have a new government which is just as fiscally constrained as the previous government. One reason it is fiscally constrained is because of the low birthrate. Perhaps we would do better in that respect if we had a tax system which did not discriminate against a parent staying at home (or working limited hours outside the home) whilst caring for the famiy’s children and elderly.
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There is a wide variation in practice in relation to whether business enterprises respect the natural environment and human dignity as well as the rights of local communities. Best practice in environmental sustainability and the protection of the rights and dignity of local people can only be achieved if both governments and companies fulfil their proper functions and behave ethically. A typical situation here might be a mining or other industrial company choosing to operate in a poorer country.
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I wonder how many of us know what our carbon footprint actually is? The average for those of us in the UK is around 6.0 tonnes of greenhouse gases (GHG) each year (Our World in Data) For comparison, it’s 6.76 tonnes globally and 17.7 tonnes in the US and 9.8 in China.
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The family is a much-neglected topic in political discourse – even amongst Christian members of parliament. And, even where politicians are supportive of the family, they do not seem to be able to express an over-arching narrative that ensures that the family forms the focus for political decision-making.
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Catholic social teaching has a lot to say about the basic systems of law that should underlie a flourishing business economy. In recent years, Catholic social teaching has also commented on regulation. Although a distinction between law and regulation is not made explicitly in Catholic social teaching, such a distinction is helpful. It would help clear up confusion between the role of government in regulating economic life (where prudential judgement might be applied both in relation to who regulates and how much) and the role of government in providing the basic framework of governance.
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Some would say that the National Insurance hike of 1.25% for each of employers and employees, Boris Johnson seems to have all but erased the (already thin-wearing) conservative ideology found within the Conservative party. However, there are some broader debates that we should be having that do not cross party lines.
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Yesterday, I ended a presentation to sixth-formers by commenting that nobody would want to be Rishi Sunak. Of course, in the strict sense that is not true – indeed, many of the people to whom I was talking might well have had ambitions to be Chancellor of the Exchequer. What I meant was that the Chancellor was facing the most difficult combination of circumstances of anybody in his position since the mid-1970s.
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Finance and banking are institutions heavily associated in most people’s minds with modernity and the development of modern economies. While there is a certain truth to that, in the sense that the scale and reach of such institutions accelerated in the nineteenth century, it disguises the fact that most of the tools, methods and institutions associated with modern finance attained their mature form in the Catholic world of mediaeval Europe.
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