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Martin Vander Weyer

Pubs, schools and water in crisis: my economic forecast for 2026

Forecasting is a mug’s game, as the Bank of England governor Mervyn King once said. But I’ll sketch a few trends for 2026 nevertheless, starting on a positive note in the stock market before moving on to some of the many choices on an à la carte menu of gloom. The FTSE 100 index will have ended 2025 almost 20 per cent higher than it started – slightly better than the US S&P 500 index – and the consensus of fund managers is that (having closed for Christmas at 9,870) it will carry on upwards, perhaps even towards 11,000. Why? In short because many UK blue-chips in traditional sectors such

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Ryan Shorthouse

Cutting Britain's giant welfare bill would be an act of kindness

Does having money really matter that much? There are those, usually with quite a bit of it, who want us to care less about materialism. But, unequivocally, money really does matter – not because of any status it supposedly brings, but for the freedom it buys: freedom to choose how we live and how we look after others. Considering this, it seems that the deep disillusionment with mainstream politicians in recent years stems from a protracted and ongoing period of stagnant living standards over which they have presided. But the truth is that the average person has not got poorer since the global financial crisis. They have got a little

Thursday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump is running out of tricks to prop up the American economy

President Donald Trump dozed off during his cabinet meeting on Tuesday. Who could blame him? Listening to Secretary of State Marco Rubio drone on about Russia would prompt souls less hardy than Trump to catch some shuteye. What should be keeping Trump awake, or at least uneasy, is the shaky state of the American economy. The federal government may not be releasing much data, but the payroll processing company ADP is reporting that private employers cut 32,000 jobs last month. The losses were heavily concentrated among small employers who have been slammed by Trump’s capricious tariff policy. The only positive sign has been in the data centre industry, where investments

Martin Vander Weyer

Why the Budget let banks off the hook

‘Banks don’t vote and citizens don’t love them, so they’ll always be the Chancellor’s target of choice,’ I wrote in September when one of this autumn’s many false Budget trails pointed towards a left-pleasing extra surcharge on bank profits. But it didn’t happen: partly because Rachel Reeves was love-bombed by Goldman Sachs chief David Solomon and JPMorgan chairman Jamie Dimon, promising new investment in the UK if she held off; partly because she had evidently figured out that a raid on banks that already pay higher tax rates than in any other major financial centre – many of whose bosses are already packing to move to Dubai – would make

Monday

James Heale

Starmer defends Rachel Reeves over Budget 'lies'

Much of Rachel Reeves’s Budget was unprecedented: the leaking, the speculation and the OBR accidentally uploading its details an hour early. This morning, Keir Starmer added another entry on that list. The Prime Minister assembled the nation’s journalists to lecture them about the many wonderful things contained in his neighbour’s Budget – something Reeves surely ought to have done in her own speech last Wednesday. Starmer rattled off a list of policies announced last week: frozen rail fares, prescription charges and fuel duty, childcare costs slashed and £150 off energy bills. But, naturally, all the waiting hacks wanted to ask him about was the central question which dominated the weekend

Sunday

Charles Amos

Pensioners don't need a £10 Christmas bonus

This week, 17.5 million people on various benefits including the state pension and disability living allowance will receive a £10 Christmas bonus. It’s about time though, that Keir Starmer played Scrooge and finally abolished the bonus altogether. For, unlike their Dickensian forebears, poor pensioners this Christmas won’t be going without food or warmth. In fact, they have more than enough of both. When the Christmas bonus was introduced by the Tory minister Keith Joseph more than 50 years ago, the basic argument was that pensioners needed the money to cope with that year’s soaring inflation of 7.1 per cent. Although believing £10 did not go far enough, the Labour politician

Friday

Tim Shipman

Rachel Reeves’s Budget was based on fiction

I think we will look back on this week as one of the most pivotal of this government. It was the moment when Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves revealed themselves. This week’s Budget showed clearly what Reeves’s revealed preferences are – and what they are not When we were all trying to work out what Theresa May really thought about Brexit, her chief negotiator Oliver Robbins privately told his team they should be guided by her ‘revealed preferences’. This week’s Budget showed clearly what Reeves’s revealed preferences are – and what they are not. Growth is not, as the government keeps claiming, its top priority. Growth was downgraded for every

Ross Clark

Starmer's workers' rights U-turn is a small victory for business

A psychoanalyst might have some ideas as to why Keir Starmer’s thoughts have suddenly turned to the subject of unfair dismissal. But on the face of it, the government’s U-turn on giving workers the right to sue their employers for unfair dismissal from day one of their employment does seem to mark a change in its relations with business. The Employment Rights Bill had become bogged down in the House of Lords as peers and business leaders warned of the bizarre consequences of the legislation. The ability to sue for unfair dismissal would have provided a field day for job applicants who managed to land themselves a role for which they

Tim Shipman

Defending marriage, broken Budgets & the 'original sin’ of industrialisation

38 min listen

‘Marriage is the real rebellion’ argues Madeline Grant in the Spectator’s cover article this week. The Office for National Statistics predicts that by 2050 only 30 per cent of adults will be married. This amounts to a ‘relationship recession’ where singleness is ‘more in vogue now than it has been since the dissolution of the monastries’. With a rising division between the sexes, and many resorting to alternative relationships like polyamory, how can we defend marriage? For this week’s Edition, host William Moore is joined by political editor Tim Shipman, assistant editor – and parliamentary sketchwriter – Madeline Grant and the Spectator’s diary writer this week, former Chancellor and Conservative MP Kwasi Kwarteng. As

Thursday

Christopher Snowdon

Zack Polanski’s insane economics

When the ubiquitous Green party leader Zack Polanski was on the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg show singing the praises of wealth taxes last month, he said something that got my spider-sense tingling: ‘This isn’t about creating public investment, we can do that anyway, we don’t need to tax the wealthy to do that.’ On the face of it, this is a slightly odd thing to say. Other lefties, such as Richard Burgon MP, have argued that a wealth tax could be used to give more money to Our Precious NHS or remove the two child benefit cap. Polanski is right to say that we can have more ‘public investment’

James Kirkup

Britain is giving up on work

Work is good. Work generates wealth, makes people happier and, maybe, delivers salvation. The Protestant work ethic is much disputed among sociologists and economic historians, but most people accept that some level of work is both necessary and desirable. This makes it all the more troubling that, buried in the OBR data under the Budget, are signposts to a future Britain where fewer people work at all – and where those who do are working less. The Office for Budget Responsibility says the labour force participation rate is forecast to fall ever so slightly, from 63.5 per cent in 2024 to 63.4 per cent in 2029. A tenth of a percentage

Rory Hanrahan

Rachel Reeves may have just killed the Great British pub

It is just after tea-time on Budget day, and my pub is already half-empty. A few hours ago, Rachel Reeves stood up and, in the name of ‘fiscal responsibility’, drove the final nail into what remains of Britain’s hospitality industry. By failing to address the devastation that Labour’s decision to hike employers’ National Insurance did to pubs, restaurants and hotels, it could be game over for hundreds of beloved locals. Reevesageddon is not just a Budget. It is a requiem. Raise one last pint while you still can There was little in the way of good news for us publicans in the Budget, but there was plenty to make us

Rupert Hawksley

Reeves' Budget could mark the finish line for British horse racing

When Rachel Reeves confirmed in her Budget that horse racing will be exempted from rises in gambling taxes, there were cautious celebrations. Racing Post editor Tom Kerr described it as ‘a reprieve for the sport’s battered finances’. Trainer Mark Walford, referring to the industry’s ‘Axe the Tax’ campaign, told the trade newspaper: ‘Racing as a whole has got behind the campaign, and it shows what we can do.’ This was a disastrous – potentially existential – day for racing My advice would be to put the champagne away. This was a disastrous – potentially existential – day for racing. The tax exemption is essentially meaningless in the context of the broader

Martin Vander Weyer

Let the Daily Mail buy the Telegraph

When I first joined The Spectator under the proprietorship of Conrad Black, we operated in sisterhood with the Telegraph titles which he also owned, and no one objected to the Daily Mail ringing the Spectator house in Doughty Street most Fridays to buy the best of the week’s articles for re-publication or to commission the authors to rewrite them in humourless Mail house style. In short, there were frequent meetings of minds in our grove of the media forest. Three decades later, The Spectator sails confidently on under its new owner while the Telegraph – orphaned when the Barclay family lost control to Lloyds Bank in 2023 and the subsequent

Wednesday

James Heale

Rachel Reeves's Klarna Budget: spend now, pay later

After the frenzy of the Commons, comes the poring over the fine print. Rachel Reeves’s Budget is being studied across Westminster, following a chaotic lunchtime in which the OBR’s response was uploaded online an hour before her speech. That speech was heavily pre-briefed, with few real surprises. Taxes were hiked by £26 billion – though not as much as last year’s £32 billion. The level of fiscal headroom has been doubled to more than £22 billion. Growth will be up this year from 1 per cent to 1.5 per cent – but down from earlier projections by 2029. ‘The Chancellor is relying heavily on tax rises towards the back end

Lucy Dunn

Labour's Budget sparks North Sea fears

True to form, Rachel Reeves’s autumn Budget didn’t land smoothly. The publication of the OBR report she was supposed to unveil during her announcement meant that broadcasters, politicians and the public were more focused on scanning the leaked document than the speech she had been preparing for months. The headlines have focused on a huge uptick in welfare spending, stealth taxes which may or may not constitute a Labour manifesto pledge and the scrapping of the two-child benefit cap (Labour backbenchers can breathe a sigh of relief). What has received relatively less coverage is the North Sea – and just how energy-friendly Labour’s Budget is.  Reeves’s fiscal statement will have

Madeline Grant

Rachel Reeves is a true disaster artist

It is genuinely astonishing that Rachel Reeves isn’t accompanied by the Benny Hill theme at all times. Her ability to harvest the fruit of incompetence is without compare. She is the Nellie Melba of cock-ups, an anti-Midas in a pantsuit and a Lego hairpiece. Really, those of us who take joy from seeing a disaster artist hone their craft ought to have thrown bouquets at her from the gallery.  Today was a real tour de force. Having trailed for weeks that this would be the Budget that restored her reputation, Reeves managed only to enhance her reputation… for screwing things up. Of course there were some excellent supporting performances; a

Ross Clark

The EV charging tax is the coward's way out for Rachel Reeves

One moral of the Budget is to beware of governments offering you incentives to buy a particular kind of car. On the advice of the then EU Transport Commissioner Lord Kinnock 25 years ago, the Blair government encouraged us all to buy diesel vehicles on the grounds they did more miles to the gallon and were therefore better for the environment. A few years later those who fell for the bait – including me – suddenly found ourselves treated like antisocial thugs, destroying kids’ lungs, and had our cars driven off the road by ULEZ zones. But at least we got the chance to drive around for a few years

Matthew Lynn

The Budget has created a £2 million house-price limit

It has lots of original features. It is close to good schools, and with a few cans of Farrow & Ball it will make the perfect family home. The estate agents already have lots of familiar lines they use to sell a property. From next year, they will have one that will be more crucial than any other: it is priced at £1.95 million, just escaping the new ‘mansion tax’ introduced by the Chancellor Rachel Reeves in her Budget. In effect, we have just introduced a price limit on houses – and it will distort the market even further. The UK has had some spectacular badly designed taxes over the decades.

Isabel Hardman

Badenoch's PMQs attack ran out of steam

Kemi Badenoch had two chances to attack the government today: first at Prime Minister’s Questions, and then again in response to the Budget. The Tory leader used her first bite of the cherry to try to frame the Budget speech as being part of wider government chaos. The attack started out well, but lost steam towards the end. Badenoch went off on a tangent about Angela Rayner Badenoch started by paying tribute to ‘the many farmers who have come to Westminster today to protest the shameful attack on them in last year’s Budget’, before claiming that ‘this has been the most chaotic lead up to a Budget in living memory,

Michael Simmons

Rachel Reeves’s Budget is a shambles

What we have seen today is unprecedented. The entire list of Budget measures announced by Rachel Reeves – along with their costings and economic impacts – were leaked by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) an hour before the Chancellor took to her feet. The OBR apologised and called it a ‘technical error’, but make no mistake: this is perhaps the biggest scandal in Britain’s Budget history. Make no mistake: this is perhaps the biggest scandal in Britain’s Budget history The headlines from the Budget are: Reeves will hike taxes by a total of £26 billion. Income tax thresholds will be frozen again, raising £8 billion and dragging nearly 800,000

The Spectator

Kemi blasts Reeves's Budget after OBR leak

Kemi Badenoch has labelled the Budget a ‘total humiliation’ after Rachel Reeves’s big announcement was derailed by an Office for Budget Responsibility leak. ‘There is no growth and no plan,’ the Tory leader told the Chancellor after Labour hiked tax, froze income tax thresholds and scrapped the two-child benefit cap. Reeves used her Budget to announce that: A new levy will be imposed on properties worth more than £2 million Income tax thresholds will be frozen for another three years from 2028 The two-child benefit cap will be lifted The OBR has updated growth for this year to 1.5 per cent of GDP Follow every twist and turn of the