Britain was the cradle of the Industrial Revolution – where cheap, abundant coal fuelled the inventions that built the modern world. Those breakthroughs – railways, modern medicine and electricity – transformed humanity. But we often forget that it was energy, our ability to produce it and (crucially) to store it, that made all of this […]
Today the Tax Foundation updates its annual International Tax Competitiveness Index. It’s not great reading for the UK, which comes 30th out of 38 countries. This is one place better than last year but two places worse than 2014, the first year of the Index. The Index aims to measure how well a tax system […]
There wasn’t much to like about the previous iteration of this Labour Government but airport expansion was one of them. Rachel Reeves committed early on to expanding City airport, opening the baffling spare runway at Gatwick, expanding Luton and Stansted and building a third runway at Heathrow. It was an aviation extravaganza for London aimed […]
Should banks be taxed more? That seems to be one of the routes that the Chancellor will go down in the Budget, according to news reports from Bangkok, where he is attending the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Thousands of bankers will be in attendance and he is likely to […]
It’s never easy being young. The hormones, the debt, the uncertainty: the burden hangs heavy. Under Labour, it’s become even harder. In the period April-June this year, there were 981,000 Britons aged 16-24 classed as not in education, employment or training (NEET). This is both morally and fiscally unconscionable. Being a NEET is not fun, […]
The remarkable thing about Britain’s tax burden is that however high it rises, the government always manages to spend more than it can afford, and John Healey’s first Budget looks unlikely to be any different. Businesses are expected to swallow higher taxes, workers are expected to give up more of their earnings and anyone lucky […]
The IMF has just published its biannual World Economic Outlook. The report appeared to be modestly good news for the UK, predicting higher-than-expected economic growth of 1.3% in 2026, up from a 1% forecast in July. But one thing that caught my eye was the way that the IMF reported that the UK would see […]
For the past 10 years, the European Centre for Entrepreneurship and Policy Reform (ECEPR) has been mapping Europe’s knowledge-intensive jobs in a recurring study, with a particular focus on how the geography of knowledge is shifting. The 2026 index shows the UK ahead compared to other large nations in Europe, but also reveals that smaller […]
‘Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in,’ says Michael Corleone in ‘The Godfather Part III’. A decade after we voted to leave the European Union, much of the establishment is still in denial about the verdict that was delivered. Andy Burnham has been absolutely shameless. Campaigning in the Makerfield by-election, […]
What explains prosperity? That is the most important question in economics. It was this question that led Adam Smith to write ‘The Wealth of Nations’. Before Smith, the physiocrats like Turgot explored it in works like ‘Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Wealth’. It is this question that makes economics not only interesting, but […]
The Chancellor seems to be weighing up a rise in capital gains tax (CGT) in the Budget later this month, with some suggesting it could be equalised with income tax rates of up to 45% – in line with Wes Streeting’s proposal earlier this year, when he was jockeying for the Labour leadership. For a […]
Britain now pays more to borrow than Greece: at the start of October, 10-year gilts yielded around 5.4% against roughly 4.5% for Greek bonds. Little more than a decade ago, Greece was a basket case – at the centre of the Eurozone debt crisis. Yet markets are now demanding higher yields from Britain, prompting many […]
As the dust of party conferences settles and journalists try to read the runes of what they mean for the coming political year, two things are already clear. The first is that Andy Burnham’s conference speech was a masterclass in tickling the tummies of his party faithful, with a heady mix of teary emotion and […]
Just as there is a battle on the Right in Britain, so too is there a battle inside the Conservative Party for what the party should focus on. There are those who are concerned about the threat of political Islam, the damage to the social fabric of the Boriswave and other elements of mass immigration, […]
I particularly enjoy a phrase that appears in Christopher Bullock’s ‘The Cobbler of Preston’: ‘Tis impossible to be sure of any thing but Death and Taxes.’ The sentiment was later popularised by Benjamin Franklin in his correspondence. In the world of government budgets, there’s another thing that is, sooner or later, unavoidable: fiscal consolidation. That […]
It has been reported that the UK looks set to follow the example of the EU in imposing tariffs on electric vehicles from China. This would be a mistake, for five main reasons. First, we have to look at the main reason why the UK is considering doing it. The EU is using its proposed […]
The UK-EU relationship must be viewed through the lens of the battle for the world’s operating system. There are three operating systems in the world. The first is a competition on the merits system where countries are free to engage in regulatory competition but inter-operate on the basis of mutual recognition and equivalence. This historically […]
Even before he became Prime Minister in July, Andy Burnham had talked about the country in institutional, positively mechanical ways. He promised to ‘give Britain the circuit-breaker it needs’, and said that his Number 10 North, part of the Office for the Prime Minister and Cabinet based – where else? – in Manchester, would be […]
The Manchester City scandal drags on. Tax Policy Associates now argues, based on the Premier League commission’s findings and leaked documents, that the club may have failed to pay some £12 million in income tax and NICs due on the pay of Roberto Mancini, who managed the club from 2009 to 2013. City, which denies […]
Britain is looking for the effects of artificial intelligence in all the obvious places: redundancies, vacancies and unemployment numbers. So far, there is little evidence of dramatic change in overall headcount. The Office for National Statistics reports that most British businesses using AI have not changed the size of their workforce, even as AI adoption […]
Andy Burnham used the Labour Party conference in Liverpool this week to commit the Government to a National Care Service, universal and free at the point of use, while promising to ‘stick to our fiscal rules to get borrowing and debt down’. The service is due in the next Parliament and is supposed to be […]
A year ago I ended the Growth Commission’s annual Growth Budget with the prediction that if the then Chancellor Rachel Reeves continued with her policy of tax and spend, she – or more likely her successor – would be back in a year’s time asking for more. So the Government can’t say that they weren’t […]
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