Having spent more of my life than is natural arguing in favour of airport expansion, I can tell you that Rachel Reeves is right to pick the cause up, as she is reportedly doing. But she has chosen a mouthful which it is unusually difficult to chew on. The proposal I helped put forward – […]
Here is something you will not hear a lot of people say. If you are prepared to think counterintuitively, the Budget was better than expected for two sets of interlocking reasons. First, it eschewed many of the wilder measures speculated about beforehand, such as a wealth tax, or dramatic increases in inheritance tax or capital […]
For those who work in the real economy, some good news at last. The work-horse fuel upon which business and industry depends, diesel, has recently plunged in price and will likely bring inflation down with it. According to the RAC, the price of diesel is now down to 145.9p a litre. There are many causes […]
The situation for the UK economy is so positive it is, in fact, a ‘black swan’ event. But instead of heralding bad news nobody saw coming, such as 9/11, the financial crisis, or Covid, my view is that this black swan signifies exceptionally good news. Britain is about to have the greatest economic boom any […]
Assuming one can look beyond Covid, the critical issue which the British economy faces is lack of business investment. This is the forgotten fourth leg of GDP and has been limping along at the worst rate in the G7. In that regard, the only real long-term thinking in the Budget was the review by Lord […]
The Government is hoping to go on an inward investment drive next year. Let us hope the new National Security and Investment Bill does not spoil it. The Bill gives Ministers wide ranging power to investigate and block takeovers and asset purchases, including in Scotland, and potentially gets right into the heart of the market […]
Ever since the 1800 Act of Union led to demands to improve access to London – and the commissioning of the brilliant engineer Thomas Telford to build the Menai Bridge, enhancing the route from Holyhead for Irish MPs – better transport between the constituent nations of the United Kingdom has been an ongoing political issue. […]
For me, there have been two notable cultural trends of the last three years in the West. First, a howling negativity emanating from what one might describe as the bourgeois intelligentsia; and second, the traditional Establishment being stuck like rabbits in the headlights, panicking and not knowing what to do. One can blame this on […]
I am not one for overly criticising Mark Carney. Along with George Osborne, he deserves credit for navigating us out of the financial crisis and restoring order and discipline to the banking sector. On the day after the referendum in 2016, when the Conservative party decided to publicly disembowel itself, it was Carney who stepped […]
Earlier this week the Shadow Cabinet briefed members of the utility industry on Labour’s nationalisation plans. The fact that this received no press commentary and that National Grid’s interim results did not mention nationalisation at all speaks volumes for how the City is bizarrely uninterested in this general election. The risk is one of complacency. […]
Margaret Thatcher would have known exactly is wrong with the current Conservative party. It has forgotten who its people are and what it stands for. It has slipped its anchor. When she was Prime Minister, my grandfather was the chairman of the National Union of Conservative Associations (whose successor organisation, the National Convention is right […]
What happens next? That is the question which everybody is asking after the second spectacular defeat of Theresa May’s Brexit plan. Given that only 24 hours ago it had a reasonable chance of passing and those expectations were dashed, one hesitates to be definitive. But here is my guess, based on the legal position and […]
People have a wide variety of views on what Brexit should ultimately look like – Canada Plus, WTO rules, No Deal, a second referendum, Mrs May’s Backstop Treaty, a Norway-style solution – but hardly anyone has been focusing on the matter at hand: what to do on the morning of December 12. The narrative we […]
At last some good news. Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch brand behemoth, has axed its plans to flee grim Brexit Britain. If it had done so, it would have been a huge Vote of No Confidence in London and the FTSE100, resulting in the loss of one of the most sustainable and reliable businesses in the index. […]
David Cameron started it. Prior to the EU referendum he repeatedly warned that “the Norway option isn’t right for Britain”, claiming that as a member of the European Economic Area (EEA) and its related European Free Trade Agreement (EFTA), Norway had to accept free movement, all the rules of the single market, pay into the […]
When Jock Lowe, the longest serving Concorde pilot, got a group of us together five years ago to form the Heathrow Hub consortium to promote his simple but innovative idea to solve one of the great political and economic conundrums of our time – how to expand Heathrow in the most acceptable way possible – […]
The British economy is slowing. There. I have said it. After repeatedly writing upbeat pieces for CapX to counter the doom and gloom mongers in the last two years, the facts are changing and so is my mind. I would go further and say that the weakness of the economy, much of it Brexit-related, is […]
Great news! The EU divorce bill of £35-£39bn has gone down already and might be lower still. That is what the National Audit Office has found. The NAO published its review of the Brexit financial settlement this week and rightly warned that although the £35-£39 billion range “were consistent with” the Treasury’s internal modelling, “the […]
Few problems are more pressing for the Government, and society, than sorting out the Student Loan System. What has been surprising, so far, has been that the argument has tended to hover around how to enable students to carry on borrowing large sums while simultaneously coming up with financial ruses so they don’t have to […]
The local elections in London in May could be annihilation for the Conservatives. So says Lord Hayward, a former MP with a knack for predicting elections correctly. London has always been a Labour city, add Tories quietly getting their excuse in early. The fear is the party could actually lose control of the flagship boroughs […]
