Britain’s spending and tax choices now fall to John Healey. My expectation? Higher spending, higher taxes and meaningless tweaks to welfare reform. Tuesday’s decision to cut VAT from domestic electricity bills could save the average household around £45 a year. Fine as far as it goes. But it will do nothing to boost productivity, stimulate […]
Almost lost between this week’s national mourning (in England anyway) over the World Cup, and the endless Westminster fantasy-football speculation about who’s going to be in or out of Andy Burnham’s first cabinet, was an oh-so-British announcement about Dartmoor ponies. The endangered breed had been put in further peril by Natural England’s plans to protect […]
Below is a speech incoming Prime Minister Andy Burnham could give – one that would unite the country around a shared vision of prosperity. Prosperity for All My fellow citizens, Today, as I stand before you as your Prime Minister, I want to cut through the political noise and give you the unvarnished truth about […]
The way we as consumers engage with news, TV and online media is continually evolving. Traditional TV has been increasingly usurped by streaming services. Apps like YouTube are taking up a greater share of viewers’ time and are now successfully competing with the likes of Netflix. It is natural that in this environment competition is […]
Should Sadiq Khan decline to run for a fourth term as London mayor, his contribution to public life will largely have been stoking the culture war. From spaffing European symbols over the New Year’s fireworks to funding bemusing anti-misogyny campaigns, the public messaging has been relentless, if little else has. And yet there’s another cultural […]
Britain has built a tribunal system so sprawling and risk-free that it now consumes the very people who should be running organisations, improving products and services and designing more productive companies. What was meant to be a quick, low-cost alternative to the courts has become a parallel bureaucracy that traps skilled workers in disclosure exercises […]
Viewers of ‘Clarkson’s Farm’ – now back for another season – will be familiar with Jeremy Clarkson’s long-running battle with the bureaucrats of West Oxfordshire District Council. When his Diddly Squat farm shop boomed, the council dragged their feet over planning permission for a car park extension, bizarrely decreed he could only sell goods from […]
Every year, I eagerly await a report that confirms what I see before my eyes. KPMG’s ‘Illicit Trade in Tobacco Report’ is a beast of research, conducting in-person ‘pack-surveys’ (where packets of tobacco, whether to be rolled or already neatly packed into paper, are surveyed to find whether they are legally bought or smuggled, counterfeit […]
In the leafy district of Bassetlaw, council officers want to get tough. Although not in the way you might expect. Last Wednesday night, local politicians weren’t discussing bins, planning or district improvement projects. Instead, they busied themselves going after the humble ‘cake shed’. In recent months, a baked-goods revolution has swept the nation. Stalls have […]
Admired for his reformist approach to the NHS, Wes Streeting is generally seen as the most market-friendly figure on the British Left. Yet his call for social media companies to be treated like tobacco businesses reminds us that even the best of a bad bunch can still be pretty awful. After resigning as Health Secretary, […]
At its peak, Britain was known as the workshop of the world. Sheffield produced high-quality steel, Manchester still had a strong textiles sector and the West Midlands was world-renowned for its cars. Glasgow, Sunderland and Newcastle were shipbuilding hubs, Stoke-on-Trent produced ceramics. Cities around Britain provided steady employment for skilled tradespeople, keeping communities together and […]
After nearly two decades of weak growth, stagnant wages and stubbornly high inequality – alongside one of the worst productivity records in the developed world since the financial crisis – Britain’s central problem is how to get the economy growing again. We don’t build enough homes. We don’t generate enough cheap energy. We don’t invest […]
Britain stands at a rare strategic inflection point, embrace AI or continue on a path of sluggish economic growth for the foreseeable future. The International Monetary Fund recently forecasted that the energy shocks from the Iran war will hit the UK the hardest of the world’s advanced economies, cutting its estimates for UK growth this […]
The following is an edited transcript of Lord Wolfson’s keynote speech at the 2026 Margaret Thatcher Conference on Prosperity, organised by the Centre for Policy Studies, in which he argues that replacing Britain’s failed planning system would be the first step towards a freer, faster-growing economy. My father actually worked for Mrs Thatcher as her […]
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 […]
This week the IMF cut its forecast for UK growth by a hefty 0.5 percentage points to 0.8% for 2026, the sharpest downgrade of any G7 economy. The OECD last week went lower still, to 0.7%, leaving the Office for Budget Responsibility’s forecast of 1.1% looking increasingly optimistic. Britain cannot afford to persist with an […]
As London heads toward local elections on May 7, voters will hear plenty about housing, crime and the cost of living. But on the streets, literally underfoot, a smaller, more visible issue is shaping perceptions of how well the city is run: the explosion of dockless e-bikes. What should have been a triumph of consumer […]
Ofcom’s determination to dictate to the world’s media what they are allowed to say continues apace. Its latest proposals are contained in an obscure-sounding draft rule just introduced by the Government called the The On-demand Programme Services (Tier 1 Services) Regulations 2026. This would essentially bring suppliers such as Disney+ and Netflix, and anyone else […]
Despite reviving economic growth being an avowed priority for every government since the Covid-19 era, the record has been lacklustre. The obvious question is why? What are the constraints that hold back ministers who want to support investment, innovation and growth? Of course, there are some fundamental limitations that any government has to operate within. […]
British businesses have faced numerous challenges over the past few years, not least extortionate energy bills. According to the International Energy Agency, the UK has had the highest non-domestic energy prices of any member state, creating a significant barrier to growth and investment. What’s more, the government has imposed additional regulatory costs on businesses, such […]
Everyone talks about growth. How we don’t have it. How we desperately need it. From the Global Financial Crisis to war-induced energy crises to trade-crashing tariffs at the clicks of American fingers, our economy seems forever at the mercy of worldly vicissitudes. International onlookers could not be faulted for thinking that, for the past 18 […]
As much as I hate to admit it, there is a lot to like in the Government’s water white paper. But there’s a reason for that: the best ideas are lifted straight from the Conservative Party. Stripped of the hollow slogans and performative toughness about tackling sewage that have dominated the debate in recent years, […]
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