The right language aimed at the wrong level. This was a Budget focused on micro-management. The Chancellor used the right language about the need to help workers and business, but it was predicated on ‘the state knows best’, with significant interference through targeted spending and tax hikes. The Red Book contained no fewer than 98 […]
Ed Conway is a great economic commentator. Yet even the best of us err. In a long essay for the New Statesman, the Sky News economics and data editor recently argued that Britain runs on what he calls the ‘MoneySavingExpert model’. ‘The country’s guiding principle,’ Conway wrote, ‘from the Thatcher years to the Blair ones […]
In 2010, Paul Krugman wrote a New York Times column titled ‘Learning From Europe’. For decades, Europe was the model that American left-leaning economists wanted America to follow: a big welfare state, generous welfare programmes and large-scale redistribution. But it seems something has changed. Krugman has now written about France being on a ‘fiscally unsustainable […]
There are many phrases of Adam Smith that are well worth echoing today, and one of the most significant is this: ‘The end of all production is consumption.’ It is not to create jobs. The people who talk of new industries creating many new jobs are putting the cart before the horse. The aim of […]
Most people experience data regulation pretty much every day through those insufferable cookie pop-ups. This tick box process of getting user consent ultimately benefited nobody while practically annoying everyone. Hundreds of millions of human hours have been spent clicking through those things on websites across the internet. The previous Conservative government promised to get rid […]
This week, Nimby Watch is in Cardiff Bay, at the site of the Welsh Senedd Oooh…Wales. Why are we here? Surely you’re not about to kvetch about the Senedd building. They finished it 20 years ago! I’ll admit it’s not my favourite building from the outside – very generic glass-and-steel – but the inside is […]
Making sure it always pays to work is political motherhood and apple pie: something so obvious it’s barely worth saying. Odd, then, that last week when Kemi Badenoch suggested changing childcare rules which leave successful parents facing crazy 100%-plus tax rates if they earn more than £100,000, she faced a barrage of criticism. The critics […]
Imagine borrowing £10,000 from the bank, lending it to a friend, then telling everyone the debt’s gone – because your friend owes you the money. That’s obviously nonsensical – you still owe the same £10,000 to the bank, regardless of what you did with the money. But that’s Labour’s approach to our public finances. Let […]
I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s 12 years ago. I then started and ran a successful business, helping 339 mothers and 37 fathers back into work, and won Entrepreneur of the Year at the UK Business Awards. After five or six years, my health began affecting the business. Today I receive Personal Independence Payment (PIP). My […]
As an Anglo-Scot, I had a dog in the fight that was the Scottish independence referendum 12 years ago. I was a visceral opponent of the dismemberment of the United Kingdom, which, I believed, would damage everyone in the British and Irish Isles. As the UK’s ambassador to the UN in 2014 put it, ‘it […]
A quick show of hands. How many of you have a working torch in the kitchen drawer, and not just on your phone? Candles, matches or a working pack of AA batteries? What about a week’s worth of tinned food, a camping stove, a full jerry can? A generator? Most readers will have answered no […]
The Government has finally bowed to common sense and given the green light to the Jackdaw gas field in the North Sea. It’s the sensible move and a good start, although a decision on Rosebank is not yet forthcoming. Given the resistance both projects have faced, it’s worth setting out why Jackdaw’s approval is good […]
When John Healey sits down next Wednesday, the press gallery will focus hard on his headroom against the fiscal rules. In March the OBR put this at £23.6 billion against the main rule, which requires day-to-day spending to be covered by revenue by 2029/30. A recent Reuters poll of economists suggests it has since shrunk […]
The lifeblood of the economy. The backbone of Britain. When it comes to small businesses, it’s easy to lapse into cliché. But that’s because they really, really matter. The overwhelming majority of businesses in Britain are small businesses. They employ more than 13 million people. And it’s almost impossible to exaggerate how tough things are […]
Let’s go fly a kite? There has been rather less briefing about proposals to be announced in next week’s Budget than in recent years. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, John Healey, has been far less forthcoming than his predecessors, Rachel Reeves and Jeremy Hunt, whose plans were dribbled out weeks in advance. Some have suggested […]
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 […]
