When a household pays £450,000 for a new home in England, a striking share of that price is not paying for bricks, mortar or even land. It is paying for planning obligations, biodiversity rules, regulatory overhead and delay-driven finance costs – none of which is itemised for the family that ultimately bears the cost. Stamp […]
Let me give Andy Burnham his due. For the best part of a decade he was the most persuasive voice in the country for letting go – for the plain truth that a decision taken in Whitehall about a town no official has ever visited tends to be worse than the one the people who […]
The Roman historian Livy can claim to have invented an entire genre. Midway through his vast History of Rome, he breaks off from the narrative to ask a question nobody had thought to put in print before: what would have happened had Alexander the Great turned his armies west and marched on Italy? It is […]
Andy Burnham is, apparently, going to solve the old age care problem. I tend to think he won’t but there we are, me and my cynicism. For he’s talking of organising something like the NHS, a National Care Service, which – as with the NHS – is the wrong way to do things. In order […]
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 […]
John Healey is the eleventh chancellor since the 2008 global financial crisis. Some of his predecessors served only briefly, but the direction of travel has been clear, regardless of who occupied Number 11. Growth has been modest, living standards have stagnated and the public finances have deteriorated. The pandemic made matters worse, but the direction […]
Barring some form of constitutional crisis, Andy Burnham will become Prime Minister. We do not even know who his new Chancellor will be, let alone what their policies and priorities are. However, whoever gets the top job at 1 Horse Guards Road, they should make tax reform their top priority if they want to bring […]
Most of those who, despite all discouragement, continue to invest in the UK have a sense of foreboding over an Andy Burnham premiership. We know that he will try to reconcile two irreconcilables. First, he will offer bold, exciting change from the uninspiring couple of years under Keir Starmer. Second, he will resist holding an […]
Rachel Reeves has found another group of taxpayers to squeeze: graduates who still think they have a student loan rather than a second income tax. At the 2025 Budget, she froze the Plan 2 student loan repayment threshold at £29,385 for three years from April 2027, rather than uprating it with earnings. Freezing a threshold […]
The OBR’s latest Fiscal Risks and Sustainability report, published this week, gives a blunt assessment of the UK’s public finances: we can’t go on like this. If nothing changes, government debt will rise to an unsustainable 300% of GDP in 50 years’ time. How did things get so bad? Well, there’s one big demographic challenge […]
In a recent speech, Andy Burnham, Makerfield’s new MP and likely our next PM, said he would end ‘trickle-down’ economics. What on earth was he talking about? The Left often accuses the Right – and particularly the last Conservative government – of practising this voodoo art form. Supposedly, right-wingers give tax breaks to the ‘rich’ […]
When Andy Burnham enters No10 in weeks the pressure to implement new policy will be massive. The advisers who hold his ear will try to act fast, thinking that they have learnt the lesson from Starmer’s processology. Labour MPs have made their desire for ‘big change’ known for months but have failed to articulate it […]
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 […]
Britain’s national debt is on course for £3 trillion this year. Servicing it costs £30 billion a year at 1% interest and £150 billion at 5%, near where long-dated gilts have recently been trading. That’s a number so big it almost becomes meaningless. So, let’s try another way: it’s about the yearly gross pay of […]
The battle of essays between Labour Party grandees has given British politics a distinctly retro feel over the last week, as Tony Blair, Keir Starmer, Wes Streeting and Andy Burnham behaved like competing 18th-century pamphleteers explaining in earnest detail why things will only get better if they’re in charge. The ideas these once-and-would-be-future Labour prime […]
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 […]
The British investment industry wants everyone to be familiar with a cartoon squirrel. Savvy, the character fronting a 20 million pound advertising campaign, is the latest attempt to boost investment in the UK. The government-backed ‘Invest for the Future’ initiative, launched last Thursday, is supported by some of the biggest financial services firms in the […]
The Community of Madrid offers a 99% reduction in inheritance tax for close family heirs. So a daughter who inherits €600,000 from her father will pay, after the ‘bonificación’ rebate, just over €1,500. This came as a surprise to me and to the delegation of policy experts I led to Madrid to meet and learn […]
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 […]
One way to sell a new tax is to do the hard work of proving that it’s a good idea. ‘There’s some problem that needs to be solved,’ ‘here is the solution’, sort of thing. Say, carbon emissions are bad, we should have a carbon tax. In the absence of any such evidence, it’s necessary […]
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 […]
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