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 […]
Andy Burnham has one prescription, and he means to fill it, whatever the patient walks in with. The man with the broken arm, the woman with chest pains, the child with a fever: each leaves the surgery with the same pad of repeat scripts, which call for higher taxes on the rich, more generous benefits […]
Keir Starmer says he is fighting to stay. The problem is that is all he is doing. Last week’s King’s Speech was written to save his skin, not to fix anything. Take the spiralling welfare bill, which even his own Chancellor recently admitted desperately needs gripping. But there was no Welfare Bill in the King’s […]
For thousands of years, governments have been tempted to respond to inflationary pressures by imposing caps on prices. Diocletian’s AD 301 Edict on Maximum Prices is a famous early example, but there were repeats throughout the ages. By the 1970s, prices and incomes policies were being used by many governments to try to counter inflation. […]
This was not the King’s Speech Keir Starmer imagined it would be. The crisis engulfing the Prime Minister has become so terminal that Buckingham Palace even questioned whether it would be appropriate for the King to speak at all. But Starmer hasn’t maneuvered himself to the top job for nothing, and he patently won’t go […]
I was in a field in Kent as the local election results came in. As an unapologetic adherent of the metropolitan elite, it’s not my natural environment. But over the weekend it became increasingly clear that I’m not the only Londoner who’s out of touch with the rest of the country. The capital is now […]
After a poor set of local election results, the Government has returned to a familiar British political reflex: the ‘reset’. It is a word that sounds decisive, almost therapeutic, signalling that a Prime Minister has learned from their own mistakes and is now freshly aligned with reality. Yet in Westminster, the ‘reset’ is less a […]
In leisure centres and town halls across the country, the cheers of the victors can be heard alongside the half-hearted claps of the vanquished. Democracy at its most local – and for the people involved, most personal – is being played out in over 130 English councils, including every borough in London. Few beyond the […]
Governments rarely earn applause for changing their minds, but sometimes it is well-deserved. In the past few weeks, ministers have killed two policies that would have made Britain poorer, a one-year freeze on private rents and a statutory power to direct where pension funds invest. The rent freeze, briefed on a Sunday and definitively buried […]
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 […]
In the pantheon of destructive, counterproductive laws of the last few centuries, Labour’s new Renters’ Rights Act, which starts today, must be up there with the worst. Perhaps alongside the Corn Laws of 1815, or the Trade Union Act of 1906 that allowed unchecked industrial unrest and economic decline, or the Town and Country Planning […]
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 […]
The House of Lords is trying to help the Government recognise the dangers of the mandation powers it wishes to include in the wide-ranging Pension Schemes Bill. It has asked the Commons to reconsider three times. How did we reach this impasse? Ministers believe investing in private assets will enhance workers’ long-term returns. Most large auto-enrolment […]
The following is an edited transcript of Lord Wolfson’s keynote speech at the 2026 Margaret Thatcher Conference on Prosperity, organised by the Centre for Policy Studies, in which he argues that replacing Britain’s failed planning system would be the first step towards a freer, faster-growing economy. My father actually worked for Mrs Thatcher as her […]
It takes a special kind of political crisis to make a right-winger agree with Diane Abbott. As Keir Starmer faced MPs on Monday over his appointment of renowned sinophile and friend of Jeffrey Epstein Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the US, Abbott struck at the heart of the Prime Minister’s weakness. Portraying himself as feeling […]
This is the transcript of a speech delivered by the Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions during the Commons debate on the Pension Schemes Bill on April 15, 2026. Who knew that the Pension Schemes Bill would become so controversial? It is a Bill on which there was so much consensus; a Bill […]
