We must congratulate the Resolution Foundation for their startling findings about agency workers. They are reaching for the smelling salts in that most maiden auntish manner because they have discovered that there may soon be as many as one million people working in that way. I, on the other hand, think their findings are marvellous […]
Nick Clegg and his friends at Open Britain have decided to treat us to another report on the horrors of Brexit and of being outside the Single Market. Mr Clegg will be joined by Chuka Umunna and Anna Soubry today to detail the coming disaster. It goes without saying, of course, that their underlying report, […]
Philip Hammond, in the Autumn Statement, confirmed that the Queen will continue to pay the highest tax rate in the country, then those on the incoming Universal Credit, then the rest of us. This is not, perhaps, quite how we should arrange a taxation system. It is, however, the one we’re going to get. The […]
Here we go again. The TUC is telling us that, horror of horrors, the UK is near the bottom of the world rankings across all categories of infrastructure spending. The statement is part of their submission to the Treasury for the Autumn Statement – presumably the idea being that we’ll all be so ashamed of our […]
As one of the few people to self-refer as a “neoliberal”, along with my colleagues at the Adam Smith Institute, I take umbrage at George Monbiot’s denunciation of neoliberalism and all who sail in her. It’s not simply because he disagrees with me and mine. No, the umbrage comes from Monbiot’s entire and total ignorance of what to […]
On both sides of the Pond now, the unregarded masses have risen up and given the Establishment a thorough slapping. But the triumph of Trump does provide something of a problem for Brexit. Until now, Liam Fox has been going around telling all and sundry that we can just sign free trade treaties with everywhere […]
Living Wage Week is here again, along with the announcement, on Monday, of the new level at which the wonderful wage has been set. Sure enough, we’ve been told that it will be going up in London by 35p an hour to £9.75, and in the rest of the country by 20p to £8.45 an […]
It was Giles Wilkes, now of the Financial Times, who said that the New Economics Foundation should stand for “Not Economics, Frankly”. And reading today’s Guardian, I could see what he meant. The paper carries an op-ed by Anna Coote, a senior fellow at the think-tank. She’s making the remarkable claim that as productivity rises, […]
There was shock, horror and protest today as an investigation by the Press Association told us that the Government’s plans for the UK’s flood defences are skewed towards wealthy families and regions. The loudest criticism came from the Green MP Caroline Lucas, who announced: “It’s simply wrong for richer areas to get more protection than […]
No one will ever abolish boom and bust. Not while human beings are driving the business cycle. So our reaction when the inevitable downturn comes is important. This past recession shows the value of the neoliberal – Thatcherite even – insistence on a flexible labour market. For when GDP dropped so did productivity – rather than employment. The Sheffield Political Economy […]
Nick Clegg has told us all, several times in fact, that a hard or clean Brexit is going to mean rising food prices. This is because a reversion to the Word Trade Organisation (WTO) rules once we have left the European Union means that other countries will put up their tariffs against our food exports […]
The skilled labour of the nation is going to waste we are told today. There are those with the ability to do important and responsible jobs who are not employed to do so simply because they wish to work part time or in job shares. Thus, obviously, we must have more senior part time and […]
The way to defeat ISIS is to make sure that we’ve all got to pay more for our euros when we go on our summer jollies to the beaches. This must be so because this is the solution that the government has engineered and we all know that governments gets things like regulation right, don’t […]
Dr. Ian Duncan took to CapX recently to tell us that rare metals must be recycled because they are, well, rare. It should happen despite currently not being economic because their rarity means that they’re going to run out. I have nothing against the recycling of metals: I’ve done it for a living myself. However, […]
Ambrose Evans Pritchard tells us in the Telegraph that Brexit, the prospect of Britain leaving the European Union, would be a disaster for British farming. Quite the contrary, it would be the necessary first step to British farming returning to being a useful and profitable part of our society. Pritchard takes as his starting point a report […]
