Money

Labour’s Yimby plan could lock the Tories out of power for good

As opposition leader, Sir Keir Starmer long struggled to define what ‘Starmerism’ is, other than ‘not Corbynism’ and ‘not Toryism’. Last Autumn, he belatedly stumbled across a policy theme which he has since tried to make his own: ‘Yimbyism’, a positive ‘Yes In My Back Yard’ attitude to development: the antidote to Nimbyism.  Labour’s rhetoric on housing has been confrontational In her first major speech on economic policy, Chancellor Rachel Reeves picked up this ‘Yimby’ theme in order to bolster her pro-growth credentials. Policy announcements include bringing back mandatory housebuilding targets, removing green belt protection from bits that are clearly not green (the ‘grey belt’), and overturning the ban on onshore wind. 

Ross Clark

The trouble with Ed Miliband’s North Sea oil plan

Just Stop Oil continued its campaign by spreading orange paint over road junctions in Westminster this week, but why bother when the organisation seems now to be in power? Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband is said to be weighing up blocking new licenses for oil drilling in the North Sea. Labour has previously said that it wouldn’t allow exploration of entirely new fields but wouldn’t stand in the way of the continued exploitation of existing fields. Yet even this limited exploration now looks in doubt. How is the government going to generate that income if oil and gas companies are not going to be allowed to drill? The Department for

Ross Clark

The trouble with Rachel Reeves’s ‘National Wealth Fund’

What country ever went wrong with a sovereign wealth fund? It is easy to envy Singapore and Norway – the latter of which now has £1.3 trillion squirrelled away, equivalent to £240,000 for every citizen. Britain would be in a much better situation now had it, like Norway, invested its windfall from the North Sea, rather than chucking it into the pot of general day-to-day expenditure. Paying state and public sector pensions liabilities out of tax revenue rather than from a long-term investment fund is going to become an ever more serious burden on the state. We shouldn’t, then, sniff at Rachel Reeves’ idea for a ‘national wealth fund’. It is just that what

Dyson won’t be the last business to cut jobs

A major new factory from one of the American tech giants perhaps? Or a new lab from one of the pharmaceutical giants? Or, best of all, a huge new green energy fund. The newly appointed Chancellor Rachel Reeves was probably hoping for some positive investment news for her first week in office, especially as she has decided, in an unprecedented move, to make ‘growth’ a ‘national mission’. Instead, one of the UK’s best businesses has cut almost a third of its UK workforce – and that will just be the start of the corporate exodus from Labour’s Britain. Dyson will argue that its decision to axe 1,000 jobs in the

Ross Clark

Was this council’s four-day week experiment really a success?

What a surprise. South Cambridgeshire District Council has declared its controversial experiment with a four day week – which put council staff on a 32 hour rather than 40-hour week with no loss of pay – a tremendous success. The council, whose chief executive Liz Watts was revealed last year to be doing a doctorate on the subject of the four day week as well as her day job, has published the results of a study by the Universities of Salford and Cambridge which claims that the council’s performance improved on 11 measures during the trial period compared with prior performance and decreased on just two measures. You can read

Sunday shows round-up: the Tory election defeat inquest begins

Jonathan Reynolds on Reform: ‘Now…they will get the scrutiny they deserve’ On Sky News this morning, Trevor Phillips pointed out that Labour had the smallest vote share of any election-winning party – and asked the business and trade secretary Jonathan Reynolds if it was sustainable that votes for smaller parties like Reform and the Greens did not translate into seats. Reynolds argued that Labour’s successful campaign under this electoral system gave them a legitimate mandate to govern, and claimed that smaller parties were given ‘far less scrutiny’ because they’re not seen as ‘parties of government’. Reynolds also implied that many people who voted for Reform don’t really know their policies.

Would Rishi Sunak really be welcome in Silicon Valley?

Rishi Sunak’s bags are probably packed. The plane tickets are booked. And no doubt he has found somewhere for the family to stay while they look for a permanent home. It is widely assumed that, having lost the election, Sunak will soon disappear to Silicon Valley as quickly as possible to restart his career. But hold on. Sure, it is easy to understand why Sunak would want to get as far away as possible from the car crash he has presided over. Yet after running one of the most spectacularly inept election campaigns in history, will the tech giants still want him?  Sunak has just fought what will surely go

Ross Clark

Why German carmakers don’t want EU tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles

I recant. On a number of occasions I have asserted that the European Union is run by lobbyists acting on behalf of French farmers and the German car industry. It seems I was wrong – or perhaps that I have become wrong as the politics of global trade has shifted. A more accurate way of putting it would be to say that the EU is run by people who think they are acting in the interests of French farmers and the German car industry, but who are not quite plugged in to what those industries really want. It is a typical case of EU protectionism. However, this time, there is a twist At

The (selfish) case for immigration

The 2024 general election ‘should be the immigration election’, Nigel Farage has said. The Reform leader’s wish has been granted: the topic of immigration is a major focus of debate. It’s also a big issue in the United States’ presidential election. Much of the debate in both countries depicts immigrants as a burden that receiving countries should accept (if at all) only out of altruism or a sense of obligation. But this is misleading, and ignores the many benefits of migration to Britain and other receiving countries. Open migration is not just charity for migrants Accepting migrants is the right thing to do, in part because it saves many thousands of

Marine Le Pen’s plan for France is a recipe for stagnation

Big business will be brought onside. The bond markets will be mollified. And there will be plenty of reassuring words about dealing with the budget deficit. With the first round of voting in France’s parliamentary elections set for this week, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National is preparing for government. This week it has set out a programme designed to keep investors, if not exactly happy, at least under control. There is just one catch. It is also a programme for stagnation – and that means France’s out-of-control debts are going to grow and grow.  Nothing that Bardella is proposing will do anything to lift France out of its rut With

The Supreme Court’s oil ruling spells trouble for the SNP

Judges on the Supreme Court appear to have joined Just Stop Oil. In a landmark ruling, with profound implications for the UK energy industry, they’ve said that Surrey County Council cannot give permission to drill new wells on an existing extraction site, Horse Hill, which already has a couple of them. This is because the oil might be burnt – which admittedly tends to happen with hydrocarbon fuels. Net Zero campaigners who brought the original action against the ‘Gatwick Gusher’ as they called it back in 2019 are ‘over the moon’. The Scottish government, however, is not quite so sanguine. The Supreme Court’s ruling is illogical Could the ruling mean the end

Kate Andrews

Why the Bank of England isn’t lowering rates yet

The Bank of England has, unsurprisingly, held interest rates at 5.25 per cent for the seventh time in a row. Markets downgraded their expectations for a June rate cut some time ago. Once Rishi Sunak called a general election in late May, the prospect of an early summer rate cut became even more unrealistic. The Monetary Policy Committee notes in its minutes that ‘the timing of the general election on 4 July was not relevant to its decision at this meeting’. Instead, its decision was based solely on ‘what was judged necessary to achieve the 2 per cent inflation target sustainably in the medium term’. Central banks never want to

James Kirkup

A Danish lesson for Labour in how to revive Britain’s economy

The coincidence of the 2024 general election and the Euro 2024 football tournament is a great lesson in the myopia of Westminster and its creatures. Somewhere, deep in our hearts, we do know that the vast majority of people in Britain (OK, England and Scotland) are far more interested in the football than in the ups and downs of the campaign. But does that stop us fixating on the minutiae of that campaign? Not at all: for political nerds, this is our championship, after all, one of those (quite) rare moments when all the stars, all the heroes and villains, are on the pitch together, generally kicking lumps out of each

Kate Andrews

Why Sunak will struggle to win the credit for falling inflation

After a three-year saga, inflation has finally returned to the Bank of England’s target. The Office for National Statistics reports this morning that the inflation rate slowed to 2 per cent in the 12 months to May 2024: its lowest point since July 2021. The greatest contribution came from another slowdown in food and non-alcoholic beverages: having once peaked at a staggering 19.1 per cent in 2023, prices have now slowed to 1.7 per cent in the year to May, down from 2.9 per cent in the year to April. It’s a painful reminder of what triggered an early election in the first place Clothing and footwear also played a

London can thank Macron for becoming Europe’s largest stock market

When Paris overtook London as the continent’s largest stock market two years ago, it was widely seen as a significant milestone in Britain’s relative decline. It was a sign of the City of London’s weakness – and it was evidence that the UK’s departure from the European Union was slowly destroying its once powerful financial markets. But hold on. This week, London has reclaimed top spot. French president Emmanuel Macron’s high-risk gamble on a general election has already backfired, at least financially, and he has now gifted financial leadership back to London.  Thanks to France’s president, the smart money is leaving Europe On Monday, the total value of all the

How the Scottish Tories can survive

‘The thing is,’ says one Conservative member of the Scottish parliament, ‘that we wanted rid of him – just not like this.’ Scottish Tory leader Douglas Ross’s decision to stand in next month’s General Election infuriated colleagues. His response to that backlash – to resign his position – has driven some of them positively apoplectic with rage. If Douglas Ross’s successor wishes to see a revival in the political centre-right in Scotland, their first decision should be to abolish the party they lead The Scottish Conservatives, revived from near death by former leader Ruth Davidson, are now heading towards polling day under the stewardship of a man who’s made it

In praise of Nigel Farage’s war on banks

Why did it take Nigel Farage to suggest clawing back some of the super profits pocketed recently by British banks? Why hasn’t Labour thought of stopping the Bank of England paying interest on the deposits of commercial banks? There is, after all, plenty of money for the taking. In 2023, HSBC reported a record net profit of over $30 billion (£24 billion). Lloyds made around £5.5 billion and Barclays trousered £6 billion. The UK banks have never had it so good. They have been coining it because of high interest rates which acts like a reverse ATM machine. The Reform election manifesto, sorry ‘contract’, proposes accessing some of this by getting

Labour shouldn’t squander the chance to fix council tax

In the final election push, the Tories are trying to drag the Labour party into a game of taxation whack-a-mole. The Conservatives seem to think that the threat of tax rises is the one lifeline they have. After bungling their £2,000 per-family line with a row about where the numbers come from, they are now teasing out denials about specific raises from the left. First, it was over Capital Gains Tax, and then council tax, forcing Labour to deny they would re-band, as Welsh Labour have done. A tax levied according to what your property was worth (or, indeed, hypothetically worth) in 1991 feels a bit baffling Starmer and his

Ross Clark

Why the Tories’ tax black hole attack on Labour will backfire

The Conservatives love trying to reduce their estimates for the cost of a Labour government down to a neat per-household figure, which makes it easy for voters to appreciate but comes with the danger that the figure will fall apart on closer examination. That is what happened with Rishi’s Sunak’s claim, made in his ITV two-way debate with Keir Starmer, that Labour is planning tax rises of £2,000 per household. That turned out to be over four years rather than one, as many people might have assumed, and turned out to rely on all kind of assumptions which were made by Conservative party researchers rather than the Treasury officials to

France could pay a heavy price for Macron’s Liz Truss-attack on Le Pen

As Emmanuel Macron heads into a fraught election, France’s president is repeatedly warning voters of the calamitous consequences of electing Marine Le Pen’s National Rally into government. In doing so, he is effectively weaponising the bond market. His allies point to what unfolded under Liz Truss’s government. The message to voters is clear: don’t even think about. The debt crisis is largely of Macron’s own making Throwing a ‘grenade’ at those considering backing National Rally might be smart politics, but it is very dangerous economics – and the consequences may be catastrophic for the country he leads. You can hardly blame Macron for panicking: his decision to call a snap