Earlier this month, the Government announced it would pause its wide-ranging plans for Local Government Reorganisation (LGR), which would have redrawn local council and parish boundaries and overhauled a system that has been in place for centuries. As focus shifts to Andy Burnham’s less wordy – but no less ambitious – plans for devolution, England’s […]
For most of the post-war period, each generation in Britain could reasonably expect to be materially better off than the last. Since the financial crisis, that has changed. Productivity growth has been exceptionally weak and improvements in living standards have stagnated. This was the starting point for ‘Boosting Britain: A blueprint for radical financial and […]
A generation ago, when Asia’s leading tiger economies were places like South Korea or Singapore, India was the region’s teenage disappointment. Everyone agreed it had huge potential but it seemed stuck in life’s slow lane. The ‘Hindu rate of growth’ was a byword for handwringing and frustration, rather than the awe and admiration we take […]
Nobody ever built a wind farm with wind. An energy transition is always a project that uses its current energy source to build its replacement while keeping everyone fed and warm. Every turbine, panel, pylon and battery is made, moved, installed and replaced with the help of cheap oil. The question under the plan for […]
A century ago you had to be rich to get any kind of choice over your clothes. And if you weren’t in the upper echelons of society you could forget going on a foreign holiday. Today, mass production ensures there is an abundance of clothes to choose from at all budgets, and cheap flights have […]
The UK only has 13 days worth of natural gas storage capacity, and it’s about to be cut in half. Britain needs gas storage now, and it will need it as North Sea extraction declines. Otherwise, we’re badly exposed to another energy crisis. Centrica has seemingly given us an easy out by offering to regenerate […]
We live in an age of rapid economic change. New technologies are having an impact on the world that was unthinkable a generation ago; and industries are more mobile than ever, meaning that supply chains get reshaped, new centres of growth emerge and we see the resulting shifts in the balance of economic power. Yet […]
It’s been reported that officials in the Trump administration have given their UK counterparts a dressing-down over the Online Safety Act and the social-media ban for under-16s. As someone who previously worked on digital trade for the UK government, this does not surprise me. Both the Trump and Biden administrations have seen British laws such […]
It’s not often that a Labour announcement reminds you of music. Reading Andy Burnham’s confirmation of his commitment to Net Zero in the Guardian last week, I couldn’t help but think of The Who’s 1971 epic rocker ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’. Within it are the lyrics: ‘And the world looks just the same, And history […]
When you drive through the potholes and your suspension gives out, or when you sit fuming at temporary traffic lights because of roadworks, it’s for a reason. It’s because the cost to you in delays and disruption doesn’t figure much in the council’s budgeting or the contractors’ work schedules. The familiar ‘I don’t give a […]
Britain’s political class loves to talk about ‘reforming welfare’, but everyone knows the limits of that ambition. Voter Welfare – the £333.7 billion the state is forecast to transfer from taxpayers to households in 2025–26 – is politically untouchable. A population brought up on free cake is unlikely to vote for the plate being removed, […]
So, this week financial markets started pricing four or even five Bank of England rate rises over the next year. On the evidence in front of me today, that is lunacy. In fact, I called it rubbish on GB News yesterday lunchtime. Against that backdrop, the Federal Reserve raised its key interest rate by 25 […]
You could almost hear the revolutionary vitriol dripping onto the Labour benches during Monday night’s Lords debate on political donations, following the announcement of Reform’s £72 million bonanza from two crypto billionaires with UK voting rights but recent residence abroad. ‘An undermining of democracy and rampant Americanisation’, one peeress spat out. A case of ‘the […]
If there was one event that ended Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’, it was 9/11. The growth and predominance of globalisation were followed by anti-Western intellectual movements. Many, especially on the Left, are still obsessed with rationalising the insanity of the attackers – most notoriously streamer Hasan Piker, who claimed in 2019 that ‘America deserved 9/11’. […]
Did you ever hear the one about the leaders of Sinn Fein, Plaid Cymru and the Scottish National Party holding a press conference? It sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, but yesterday, the UK’s foremost regional separatists came together in Cardiff to pressure Andy Burnham into facilitating the dissolution of the nation. Michelle […]
If rumours are to be believed, Kemi Badenoch and the Conservative Party are thinking about scrapping inheritance tax. Inheritance tax is a pernicious tax that punishes people for doing things that we are supposed to do: building things, saving and investing. Crucially, it is also a tax on loving your family and wanting to leave […]
If you think this summer has been sticky, count yourself lucky you were not in the Cabinet in August and September 1931, in the midst of possibly the worst economic crisis the country has ever faced. It is worth looking at what happened then, because high energy and Government borrowing costs mean a crisis of […]
There is a standard response from any Chancellor or Prime Minister asked questions about government finances: ‘I am not going to write the Budget in front of you’. And neither should they. The Budget is a potentially market-moving financial event. The figures it contains have to add up, make sense. The measures have to be […]
The Victorian economist William Stanley Jevons was clearly a worrier. When, in 1863, the Tyneside arms-maker Sir William Armstrong calculated that Britain’s coal would run out in 212 years, Jevons checked the sums. Armstrong had assumed the country’s appetite for coal grew by the same tonnage every year. But it actually grew by the same […]
Margaret Thatcher is back in the news. But it is not her admirers on the Right who have put her there. It is our new Labour Prime Minister, whose diagnosis of our country’s ills seems to be that Britain was on the right path up until 1979, when the Conservatives got into power and precipitated […]
Late on August 28, trade talks between Canada and the United States broke down, an escalation in the trade war that the Trump administration began with Canada in early 2025. This escalation isn’t because Canadians favour tariffs as much as the US president, but because they refuse to quietly acquiesce to American demands. It might […]
A rare glimmer of sanity as Reuters reports that the British clothing retailer Next ‘has won an appeal allowing it to keep paying warehouse workers more than sales consultants’. The report adds that: The ruling on basic pay overturns a key part of a 2024 Employment Tribunal decision in favour of over 3,500 current and […]
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