The latest GDP figures out today will give Rachel Reeves some cause for relief. The latest estimates from the ONS suggest that the economy expanded at a rate of 0.5% in the three months to February 2026. A welcome change from the doldrums that characterised 2025. But one swallow does not make a summer, and […]
While the Covid pandemic was a pretty universally horrible experience, one of the few positives to emerge from it was the rise of working from home. For a great many people, no longer having to commute into the office five days a week has been a great boon. However, there are a certain number of […]
Back in the 1980s The Beastie Boys famously sang that ‘you gotta fight for your right to party’. Fast forward to 2026 in London, and perhaps it’s never been harder to take advantage of that ‘right’. The house party has become one more casualty of the housing crisis. While there’s no hard quantitative evidence (those […]
It’s no secret that the last 18 months have hit retailers hard. With so many of us forced to turn to online retailers, many traditional shops have gone to the wall and commercial vacancies have increased. In truth though, traditional retailers were already in serious trouble well before the pandemic. The rise of online retail […]
Given that I work for a free market think tank founded by Margaret Thatcher, it’s probably not all that surprising that I support a free trade deal between the UK and Australia (the first of many, we should hope). After all, competition, innovation and consumer choice underpin the work that we do – and freer […]
From the beginning of Britain’s Covid crisis, comparisons with the Second World War have been inescapable. The profound changes to our way of life, the economic toll and the sense of a shared national struggle have all felt particularly resonant in a country whose national identity has been so profoundly shaped by that conflict. From […]
Among all the many billions of pounds of spending yesterday, Rishi Sunak also announced that he was following the recommendations of the Low Pay Commission (LPC) and increasing the National Living Wage (NLW). That means in April 2021 it will rise by 2.2% to £8.91 and extending it to those aged 23 and over (it […]
Nowhere is the economic damage wrought by coronavirus more apparent than in the unemployment stats. Even with massive government support, the jobless rate is rising and now stands at 4.8%, an increase of 0.9 percentage points on a year ago. And we all know that worse is still to come. At some point soon, when […]
Amid the flurry of Covid news, yesterday’s announcement on the future of Britain’s rail network has gone somewhat under the radar. The announcement from Transport Secretary Grant Shapps is a pretty big deal – a rescue package for that effectively marks the end of the franchising system that has been in place since privatisation in […]
Even before the pandemic hit, the British economy was bumping along, with sluggish growth, stagnant wages and productivity growth among the worst in the developed world. The Government had done a good job of bringing the public finances under control, only to see much of that work evaporate in the space of just a few […]
There are many questions that will confront us once the pandemic finally ends, but near the top of the list will be the question of what to do about China. Whether it’s the inhumane way it treats its Uighur minority, its blatant disregard for Hong Kong’s autonomy, or its role in helping to kickstart the […]
With the ONS announcing a probable uptick in new cases of coronavirus in the UK last week, the big fear now is of a resurgence in the virus sweeping across the country – as it is already doing in the US and is threatening to do across much of Europe. Just as with the rest […]
It was said of the financial crisis that it was a once in a century event – and no doubt many of my generation hoped t it would be the only epoch-defining economic catastrophe we would live through. Sadly, the coronavirus means we know have to experience another. Of course, it’s the elderly who now […]
As the old saying goes, “never let a crisis go to waste”. And there’s certainly good evidence that some on the radical left see this pandemic as a chance to expand the scope and power of the central state. If this is indeed a war, then the hope is the aftermath might resemble a modern […]
It is a truth universally acknowledged that every few years a new adaptation of one of Jane Austen’s works must be released. The latest offering is a new adaptation of Emma, to my mind the funniest and best of her novels. Yet while Austen has long been regarded as one of the English-speaking world’s greatest […]
It’s fair to say the Government’s plans to allow Flybe to defer its Air Passenger Duty payments have been met with a mixed response, with British Airways already launching a legal challenge to try and overturn the decision. Still, one side benefit of the political farrago has been to highlight just how poor a tax […]
Yesterday’s report into the high pay of executives, and its finding that the average FTSE 100 chief will earn per hour almost 120 times what the average employee will, has once again thrust inequality into the political limelight. There are very good reasons why, in a globalised economy, the heads of multi-billion pound multinational corporations […]
The recent Labour party proposal to reduce the working week to 4 days (or 32 hours), without loss of pay, is probably a seductive one for many people. After all, who wouldn’t want to reduce the amount of time they spend in the office without having to reduce their pay? But as we at the […]
I recently raced one of my friends to see which of us could read The Lord of the Rings fastest. Sadly, I was pretty comprehensively trounced. But it got me thinking. As a hugely popular work of fantasy, it’s easy just to see the epic trilogy as a glorious exercise in escapism. But that is to […]
“The United States is our greatest ally. It is the foundation of the Alliance which has preserved our security and peace for more than a generation”. So said Margaret Thatcher in the House of Commons in 1986. It’s a sentence which sums up nicely the special relationship between the UK and the US, which in […]
