Money

Rishi Sunak shared a delightful moment of honesty on the Today programme on Thursday. Mishal Husain asked him how households will cope if, as the Office for Budget Responsibility has forecast, energy bills rise by a further £830 a year – on top of the rises already due to take effect in April. No, no, no, said the Chancellor, you can’t believe the OBR forecast on energy prices: ‘They just take what the market expectation is at a given time, and since they closed their forecast actually the forecast for energy bills in the autumn has come down by £400.’ It was a fair point. Except, if the Chancellor doesn’t think

I said yesterday that I expected the Chancellor to increase universal credit by more than planned. I was misled. I was wrong. Today, Rishi Sunak’s official forecaster, the Office for Budget Responsibility, is explicit about how painful Sunak’s refusal to increase benefits will be for those who rely on them. It says:  ‘Lags in CPI (or inflation) uprating of benefits mean they fall almost five per cent in real terms in 2022-23, reducing their real value by £12bn, and take up to 18 months to catch up fully with higher inflation’. It means those who are unemployed, on very low incomes, or who rely on the state pension, are going to be in

When sanctions were imposed on Russia there was a big exception: Europe was still buying and paying for oil – leading to a bizarre situation. The West was doing everything it could to help Ukraine while still sending Putin hundreds of millions of dollars a day. But how much was that revenue worth to the Kremlin? As sanctions began to hit Russia, the price of Brent crude (the oil benchmark) soared to $130 a barrel, the highest since the 2008 financial crisis: an increase of over 90 per cent. It’s fallen since then but today it’s still sitting between $107 and $115 dollars a barrel – well above where it had been weeks

The Conservative plan to tackle the NHS backlog has, so far, run roughly along the lines of the New Labour approach to the hefty waiting lists in the health service at the turn of the century. More money, more flexibility when using the private sector and greater ‘patient choice’ (which in this context translates as patients who’ve been waiting a very long time being able to get treatment in another part of the country where waiting lists aren’t quite so bad). So far, the main difference is that ministers are just shouting a bit less at hospitals (though GPs might argue they are bearing the brunt this time instead) than

It goes without saying that sacking your entire staff via a ten-minute video call while their cheaper, foreign replacements sit outside in buses is a pretty disgusting way to treat people. True, P&O’s cross-Channel operation has been rendered unprofitable as a result of Covid, but this wasn’t a case of a headcount reduction or management urging pay restraint until the company can get back on its feet again. It was a wholesale dismissal of workers, plenty of whom will have had decades of service. No wonder some refused to leave their ships. How ironic, however, that so many of the biggest critics of P&O this week are ardent Remainers. What

The Bank of England has voted to hike interest rates to 0.75 per cent, the third successive rise, which puts rates back to their pre-pandemic levels. Historically, we’re still at ultra low levels, but the rise is anything but insignificant. After the Federal Reserve made its first move to lift interest rates by 0.25 per cent (its first rise since 2018), it was all but guaranteed that the Bank would vote to lift interest rates again. The Fed had been holding out longer than most, with CPI in the United States hitting nearly 8 per cent, a 40-year high, before it took action. But the narrative that price hikes are

Aside from deterring a few tourists, and people filming fantasy epics, closing down New Zealand during the Covid pandemic didn’t make much difference to the global economy. Neither, come to think of it, did Mark Drakeford’s determination to keep Wales free from Covid-19, and even Australia’s dedication to closing itself down didn’t matter that much as long as the mines stayed open. For most of the last two years ‘zero Covid’ policies have mainly affected the people unfortunate enough to live under them and those trapped from returning home. But China? That is something different. And right now Beijing’s almost certainly doomed attempt to crush the virus is as much