Government is dead; long live iDemocracy

Accept we’re bust, slash back the state, and let the people decide, says MP Douglas Carswell. Here he talks to Merryn Somerset Webb on how the people can rein in the excesses of the state.

Earlier this week there was a conversation on Twitter (where you should be following me: @merrynsw) about bloggers. Where have they all gone? It used to be you couldn't move for the hordes of people chucking out opinions on everything from debt to GDP ratios and cyclically adjusted price/earnings ratios. No more. Many of the blogs have disappeared or become almost entirely inactive and very few have popped up to replace them.

Why? Theories abound. Perhaps bloggers have found proper jobs. Perhaps the professionally financed news organisations have got better at web stuff and displaced them. Perhaps they got fed up with being wrong all the time and went back to watching daytime TV. Or perhaps, as Joshua Brown of the blog Reformed Broker suggests, everything "that can possibly be said has been said" and they just got bored.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.