The Resolution Foundation wants to cap ISAs (investment savings accounts), the UK’s tax-protected savings and investment accounts. You pay into an ISA with your post-tax income, and can either invest within it or just get interest on cash savings. Any interest, capital gains or dividends you receive within the ISA are not taxed. Today you can contribute […]
When Facebook and its other services disappeared from the internet on Monday night, it seemed to confirm many people’s worst fears about the company. The outage, some said, demonstrated how indispensable Facebook had made itself to our lives – and hence, they argued, how important it was to regulate it or break it up. The […]
Mergers and acquisitions in tech have come under intense scrutiny in recent years. Some fear that Big Tech companies like Google and Facebook have been able to protect their market positions by acquiring smaller would-be competitors and stifling competition as a result. The canonical example of this is Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram in 2012. At […]
Last week gave us a picture of things to come in Britain. First, the Government raised National Insurance contributions by 2.5%. This was ostensibly to pay for “social care”, but the money will mostly go to the NHS, with social care’s problems left largely unaddressed. Then, on Saturday, The Times reported that the Government will […]
Should bureaucrats decide how Google designs its search results page? The Government seems to think so. It plans to set up a new body that will regulate tech companies in much the same way as British Gas and Thames Water, with all the box-ticking and drag on innovation that involves. What’s worse, over time, this […]
Competitive markets are important not just because they affect the price of things we buy, but also the look and feel of where we live, and even where we go when we die. Conservative MP John Penrose’s new report on competition calls for a return to a Thatcherite focus on choice and consumer-friendly economics. He’s […]
Critiques of big tech are ten a penny, but it’s not often that you hear a politician, let alone a Conservative one, saying we should shut down tech companies altogether. So it was a surprise to see Tory MP Tobias Ellwood arguing in the Mail on Sunday that we would be better off if the […]
Facebook is being sued by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and 48 US states for its acquisitions of WhatsApp and Instagram in 2014 and 2012, respectively (as well as over restrictions about third-party API access to Facebook’s platform, which I will not try to cover here). If these plaintiffs are successful, they could lead to […]
Britain’s competition regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has published a report on the state of competition in the UK. (Disclosure: I was part of a group that gave some comments to the CMA during the drafting of this report.) The report relies heavily on aggregate data to make judgements about the health of […]
That many scientific fields are rife with error, bias and outright fraud may be unsurprising given the succession of news stories about prominent psychologists faking results and pop-psychology gurus fooling gullible Conservative politicians into ‘power posing’ at party conferences. But Stuart Ritchie’s Science Fictions: Exposing Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype in Science, published this month, […]
News that Hong Kong’s British National (overseas) passport holders could soon have a path to move to the UK and gain citizenship is a good first step to help people escape growing Chinese authoritarianism in that great city. But it is nowhere near enough: there are only 300,000 current BN(O) passport holders out of Hong […]
Over the weekend the papers were abuzz with rumours that Sajid Javid might use next month’s Budget to scrap higher rate tax relief on pension contributions. It’s not the first time this has been floated as a way of saving money by ending what many see as an expensive tax break for the rich. However, that […]
Labour’s manifesto is nothing if not bold. Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell have committed to hundreds of billions of pounds of new spending commitments, part-financed by the £80 billion in tax rises the party outlines in its costings document. Most of these taxes would fall on investment – in total, Labour claim they would increase […]
Onward is a Conservative think tank that says it wants to give “new ideas for the next generation”. This week it has released polling that tries to figure out what would get more people under 35 (“young people”) to vote Conservative. The results are counterintuitive, suggesting that, among other things, young people want less immigration […]
Don’t call yourself a centrist if you’re a liberal. I know why you do it. You hate the people running the left and right at the moment, and your main priority is to communicate that you’re not with them. Same here. But “centrism” implies that you’re trying to find a balance between the two of […]
Building a new railway in Britain is a herculean task. When Crossrail eventually starts operating at the end of this year, it will have been 75 years since the first proposals were made, and it will have cost the taxpayer tens of billions of pounds. If Crossrail 2 ever happens, it will have been at […]
In the coverage for our new report on the UK Border Force, “The Border After Brexit”, it’s understandable that most newspapers focused on its security failings. It’s obviously worrying and noteworthy that potentially thousands of high-risk flights are being missed, and no note of this is being made. But this is best understood as one symptom […]
You probably know the bad things about Ted Cruz already. He’s an extreme Texan conservative who fries his bacon with the heat of his assault rifle. He spearheaded a pointless, wasteful government shutdown over Obamacare. He’s appeared at the same rally as a psychotically anti-gay preacher, being introduced by him the day after he said […]
The EU is building an army, or so we’re told. Proposals from the Commission to build an armed, drone-equipped independent EU border agency have been met with horror here in Britain, as well as in places like Poland and Sweden. As bad as they sound, the proposals are probably the only way to make Europe’s […]
