John Healey’s debut Budget was a coward’s charter. Despite there being a record 98 measures in the Chancellor’s announcement, all the major decisions have been kicked into the long grass. Despite having resigned as Defence Secretary over funding concerns under Keir Starmer, Healey delayed detailing how the Government would fund raising defence spending to 3.5% […]
Wednesday’s Budget was a depressing fiscal exercise in entrenching stagnation, protection of vested interests, and the discouragement of enterprise (on one count, it left 25% of our small businesses substantially worse off). But if you thought that was all, take a look at some modest proposals for labour law quietly slipped out at much the […]
Good news everyone. The Government has conceded the war on free trade. The Chancellor has seen the light and announced a package of tariff removals and extensions with the explicit aim of reducing household costs. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the package announced is pitiful. It should be celebrated that you […]
The next assault upon economic logic to arrive in the bookshops is coming from Isabella Weber. The Guardian is already drooling over ‘Anti-Fascist Economics: In Defence of Affordability, Dignity and Democracy’ which means, obviously, that all proper-thinking residents of north London will be doing so as soon as they can. Weber is an economics professor […]
This was meant to be a do-no-harm Budget. If that was really the aim, it has failed miserably. It’s a Budget that raises taxes by £7 billion and attacks entrepreneurs, savers and the rental market in particular. The first point to note is that the increases in income tax on savings and property income are […]
Yesterday, the Chancellor had the chance to confront a runaway benefits bill and a tax burden strangling growth. He bottled both, and instead billed the banks and workers. John Healey stood up yesterday afternoon and told the Commons that fiscal discipline was his first commitment. He then announced that Britain will borrow more in every […]
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 […]
