This article is taken from our Weekly Briefing email. Sign up here. There’s been a lot of talk recently about fake news and filter bubbles – about the tendency of social media to show us only the news that’s slanted towards what we already believe. But people often forget that even ostensibly neutral news is already […]
The headline figure of an additional £122 billion of borrowing over the next five years will no doubt have been a source of great concern to many people. This decline in the public finance outlook since March this year (less than half of which is related to the UK’s exit from the EU) is somewhat […]
Pain, said C.S. Lewis, is bearable if it has a purpose or a deeper meaning. A decade has now passed since the start of the Great Recession, and those who have borne the brunt of it are entitled to ask whether such a purpose lies behind the Western economy’s continuing troubles, and what it might […]
If you had become Chancellor of the Exchequer out of the blue, as a result of a political upheaval that threatened to knock the economy sideways and make a mockery of all previous forecasts, you would probably take the opportunity to say you “no longer seek to deliver a surplus” within the current parliament while […]
In the end, the big story of the Autumn Statement was really about debt — some £2 trillion of it by the end of the Parliament, peaking at over 90 per cent of GDP. George Osborne barely ever met his deficit reduction or debt targets, and wasn’t going to meet the final ones he announced […]
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 […]
Much of the focus of this Autumn Statement will not be on policy announcements from Philip Hammond. It will, in fact, focus on the Office for Budget Responsibility’s (OBR’s) assessment of growth forecasts in a post-Brexit world. The forecasts set out by the OBR are likely to be highly contentious due to the potential political […]
When Philip Hammond stands up to deliver the Autumn Statement, almost all of the attention – if the past is any guide – will be on how he decides to spend the nation’s money. But it’s time that the Chancellor, and the country, took a much closer look at the other half of the equation: […]
Announced with much fanfare 11 months ago, the Paris Climate Treaty finally came into force earlier this month – just in time for the election of Donald Trump to potentially render the whole thing moot. But there’s a bigger problem for climate campaigners than Trump. It’s that the Paris Treaty will in any case have […]
It’s easy to take markets for granted. We have become so dependent on them that if we woke up tomorrow morning and found that they had completely disappeared, we would be in complete disarray. I certainly would not know how to go about growing my own food, making my own suits or fixing the roof. […]
A few years ago, I heard Theresa May address a gala dinner in Westminster. Her speech, which ranged far beyond her responsibilities at the Home Office, was the clearest possible statement of intent: she wanted to be Prime Minister. The year after, I went to the same dinner, to listen to Philip Hammond. His speech, […]
There is no doubt that Britain’s infrastructure is in need of upgrading. Britain’s road, rail and air transport infrastructure scores 27th, 19th and 18th respectively out of 138 countries analysed by the World Economic Forum. There are also well documented problems associated with broadband provision in the UK. According to the Ookla speedtest, the UK […]
Most Americans are watching out for how President-elect Trump proposes to govern at home and what he intends to do. The rest of us, while considering that, are also paying attention to what his presidency might mean for international relations and foreign policy – nowhere more so than with regard to China. If his rhetoric […]
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 […]
It is, I know very well, not fashionable at the moment to praise members of the political class. And in particular, it is positively dangerous to celebrate anyone who might be thought either metropolitan, liberal or even a member of an elite. So to record my admiration for an Old Etonian intellectual, who occupied a […]
There is no direct equivalence between the UK’s historic decision to leave the EU and the extraordinary election of Donald Trump in the US. Yet to some extent, a number of common denominators explain both populist movements. If centre-right movements want to survive across the Western world, they will need to consider how best to […]
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