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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

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.

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keir Starmer has been promising ‘no surprises’ on tax in the Labour manifesto. At first glance, he has – technically – delivered on that. There is nothing new on tax in today’s manifesto: the hikes already announced were included, and the pledge not to raise income tax, National Insurance, VAT or corporation tax were there too. The surprise, then, is what isn’t included. There is lots of commentary on tax (attacks on Tory ‘unfunded tax cuts’, getting better ‘return for taxpayers’). But there is no comment on any other specific tax. In other words: a few tax hikes have been ruled out, and all the others are being left on the table

There is something a little refreshing about the Green party. In contrast to Rishi Sunak, who has no option but to carry on pretending he has the slightest chance of remaining in Downing Street after 4 July, Green party co-leader Adrian Ramsay admitted at his manifesto launch this morning that his party isn’t looking to form the next government. The party’s realistic hope seems to be to double its number of Commons seats, from one to two. Nevertheless, the Greens do have a full manifesto for government, so let’s do it justice by taking it seriously. Mercifully, the Greens seem to have not bought into the fashionable concept of ‘degrowth’