What was the Government expecting when, within weeks of taking office, it started merrily handing out above-inflation pay rises to public sector workers with no requirement to improve lamentable productivity? Already the unions are coming back for more. The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) has described a 2.8% ceiling on pay rises for next year […]
Like a drunken thug kicking his victims when they are already lying on the ground, no punishment for the oil and gas sector, it seems, is ever quite enough. One measure in Wednesday’s Budget got a bit lost among the other nasties: the Energy Profits Levy (EPL) will be raised from 35% to 38%. Moreover, […]
There will be many headaches awaiting Keir Starmer if, as seems almost certain, he becomes Prime Minister next Friday. But none will be quite so immediate as the junior doctors’ strike. For the BMA to walk out before a new government has even had a chance to negotiate with it is a pretty clear statement […]
Rishi Sunak came to the first of the leaders’ debates in this general election campaign with one aim above all others: to drum into the heads of viewers the idea that Labour will increase taxes on the British people to the tune of £2,000. Working on the old adage of political campaigning – that when […]
If I received a call from my bank telling me that I was £10,000 overdrawn, then the next day they called me again to say that they had recalculated and in fact I was only £9000 overdrawn would I leap in the air, tell myself I have just received a £1000 windfall and start dreaming […]
Mark Carney was the Fabio Capello of central banking. Fed up of being defeated in the quarter finals of the World Cup, the Football Association scoured the world with an open cheque book in the belief that if you paid a knock-out salary to recruit the best manager you would end up with a knock-out […]
It’s not hard to see how Keir Starmer got himself into the position of promising to decarbonise the electricity grid by 2030 – five years earlier than the government’s own target. Net zero is popular with the public, he will have concluded, therefore if Labour tries to push a little ahead of the Conservatives it […]
According to its corporate bumf, private bank and wealth manager Coutts has a mission in ‘helping create a more inclusive culture’. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to include offering its services to individuals whose political views differ from those of its directors. Now we know for sure that the bank closed Nigel Farage’s accounts not because […]
So, Rachel Reeves has decided that her ‘Green Prosperity Plan’ isn’t such a guaranteed way of enriching the nation, after all. When the Shadow Chancellor announced it in 2021 the plan was to spend £28bn a year throughout the next Parliament, on solar, wind and nuclear, as well as insulating homes and subsidising industries such […]
Thursday was supposed to be ‘green day’, when the Government was going to reveal its latest plans for reaching net zero by 2050. But what was delivered merely served to underline how far that Britain is from achieving that target. The public simply isn’t taking up the bait. As Sir John Armitt, chairman of the […]
