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Exclusive: Why the Tories feel so spooked by Jeremy Corbyn

One of the things that the Tory conference taught us was quite how worried the party is about Labour. There was almost a Mean Girls-style obsession with talking about Jeremy Corbyn in speeches on the stage, including Theresa May’s own address at the end of conference, where she returned to the problems with the Labour Party a number of times. The Tories are right to be worried, and not just as a result of last year’s snap election. I understand that the reason Labour has decided to talk so much about the way capitalism has left certain voters behind is that recent polling carried out by the party found it

Why Trump’s new trade deal shouldn’t be a surprise

The news that the US, Canada and Mexico have agreed a new trade deal, USMCA, may have caused a little surprise this morning among Trump critics. Isn’t the US President supposed to be leading the world into a new dark age of protectionism, sparking a 1930s-style depression as he puts the interests of a few blue collar workers in rustbelt industries above the health of the US and global economies as a whole? Yet for anyone who has been following Trump’s methodology the news shouldn’t really have caught them unawares. Trump, it is true, was elected thanks in part to promises to protect US workers from unfair foreign competition. Yet

Revealed: Seumas Milne’s bumper pay rise

At party conference last week, several Labour front benchers poured scorn on ‘fat cat bosses’ with excessive earnings. Jeremy Corbyn himself promised to end the country’s culture of ‘greed is good.’ It appears, though, that a bit of greed isn’t so bad when it comes to lining your own friends’ coffers. The Evening Standard reports today that Corbyn, who earns around £140,000 a year, has given his closest aides whopping pay rises of up to 26 per cent. The average salary of his three best paid advisers is now £94,421, four times the salary of a London nurse. Corbyn’s closest ally, former Guardian hack and champagne socialist Seumas Milne is

Labour’s welfare reform problem

Angela Rayner, one of the ‘rising stars’ of Jeremy Corbyn’s frontbench, received rapt applause from Labour members when she spoke to the conference. It wasn’t just that she gave a passionate, warm and funny speech. It was also that she came armed with policies that the party faithful really liked, such as ending the academisation of schools and halting the free schools programme. Even though the roots of these school reforms are in New Labour, they’ve become steadily more unpopular since the Conservatives extended and modified the programmes themselves. Announcing their end as part of Labour’s National Education Service was always going to be a popular move. In that same

Donald Trump is a free trade hero | 19 September 2018

President Trump has stated on numerous occasions that he wants to increase trade. Under his wise rule, he assures us, American trade will thrive. It will be Yuge! Why would anyone doubt that desire? He’s a businessman and businessmen want to do more business not less. In pursuit of this, Trump has also said that that he favours a low or no tariff world, but that it must be based on reciprocity – an easily understandable form of fairness but one which has earned Trump scorn from right, left, and centre. The subject came up at a dinner I attended recently. It was mostly populated by right of centre journalists

Why should we listen to the IMF’s Brexit warning?

Why are we so addicted to economic forecasts? We’ll know they are going to turn out to be wrong because they always do. And yet still we can’t seem to stop ourselves hanging on their every word. This morning it is the IMF’s turn, once more, to have its forecasts for the UK economy treated with undue seriousness. The Guardian reports that the IMF ‘backs Theresa May’s warnings over no-deal Brexit’ – by saying a ‘no deal’ scenario would lead to ‘substantial costs’ for the UK. But even May’s Chequers deal will condemn Britain to economic mediocrity, according to the IMF. The FT reports that, in the case of a

The banks abandon Project Fear

Three senior bankers from Barclays, J.P. Morgan and Citi descended on the House of Commons today to give evidence to the Treasury Select Committee on the impact of a No Deal Brexit. Their interview must have seemed like perfect timing for Chancellor Philip Hammond, who is currently doing his own tour of the Commons and is expected to drum up support for Chequers by stoking fears of the calamitous impact of No Deal Unfortunately for Hammond, the three bankers were not nearly as morose as the Treasury could have hoped for. Instead they said the risks of No Deal were comparable to the instability they regularly faced across the world.

Why GDP growth has nothing to do with the World Cup or the warm weather

We don’t hear much of the phrase ‘despite Brexit’ any more – it is just a little too obvious. Instead, pro-remain news sources have decided to apportion good economic news on the weather and the World Cup. This morning, the ONS announced that GDP growth in the three months to the end of July had risen to 0.6 per cent, the fastest for a year and doing much to make up for a sluggish first quarter. The Guardian was quick to identify what it saw as the reason, giving the news the headline: ‘UK Growth Picks up to 0.6 per cent after World Cup and heatwave boost.’ The BBC followed

Poland is trying a new approach with capitalism. Will it work?

After communism collapsed in 1989, Poland wiped its hands of socialism. Capitalism swept in, bringing fast-food chains and shopping malls. Today, the country is the EU’s sixth-biggest economy. GDP per capita has overtaken Greece’s and is catching up with Portugal’s. Yet despite this outward success, many Poles feel left behind. In response, the Polish government proposes “solidarism” – capitalism with a social face, involving more social support, especially for families – as a sort of third way. This doesn’t mean that the Polish cabinet is made up of a bunch of Corbynistas. Far from it. Though typically described as “right-wing”, the Law and Justice (PiS in Polish) party, which has

Was Wonga all bad?

The wonder of Wonga is that it lasted so long. The arch-villain of the payday loan sector, which grew like a mutant fungus out of the wreckage of the financial crisis, once clocked up a record Representative Annual Percentage Rate (APR) on its loans to gullible and desperate cash-seekers of 5,853 per cent, and was ordered in 2014 to write off the debts of 330,000 delinquent borrowers who could never have passed proper ‘affordability’ checks. The imposition by the Financial Conduct Authority of a cap of 0.8 per cent per day on lending rates, plus limits on default charges, knocked out many smaller competitors, but Wonga (with a 30 per

Donald Trump’s WTO threat shows he is becoming predictable

The obvious reaction to Donald Trump’s threat to withdraw the US from the World Trade Organisation (WTO) is that it isn’t exactly going to help the Brexiteers’ cause. For months they have been arguing that everything will be okay in the event of a ‘no deal’ Brexit – we will simply trade under WTO rules. And then comes along the leader of the world’s largest economy and says he wants out of that organisation, threatening its existence, or at least its position as the undisputed arbiter of global trade. But then another thought springs to mind, with even more severe repercussions for the world: Donald Trump is becoming predictable. We

The Spectator Podcast: When money dies

Venezuela is racked with hyperinflation. The crisis is now so bad that the president has instituted a new currency which essentially cuts off several zeros from the old one. But will Maduro’s mad policies actually make things worse in a country that is already suffering terribly? On this week’s Spectator podcast, Professor Steve Hanke, an expert on hyperinflation who served as an adviser to former Venezuelan president Caldera, and Dr Julia Buxton, of Swansea University, discuss Jason Mitchell‘s cover piece on what happens when money dies. On the podcast, Julia Buxton describes the miserable situation on the ground as a result of a socialist experiment gone badly wrong: ‘The great tragedy

Revealed: the Scottish uni courses for (feepaying) English students only

When Alex Salmond stepped down as First Minister, he famously unveiled a commemorative stone engraved with the message ‘The rocks will melt with the sun before I allow tuition fees to be imposed on Scottish students.’ If he wants to see melting, he should go to the UCAS website and look at the courses up for grabs in the clearing system – then change the settings to say you’re Scottish. The courses melt away. (For example, here is the English version of Glasgow University clearing courses: law, history, all sorts of gems. And here is the Scottish version). Why the difference? Because England’s students bring fees. As a direct result

The UK economy is now growing faster than the Eurozone. Isn’t this good news?

Maybe I should really give it a few more hours, but I can’t help noticing the lack of headlines this morning along the lines “UK economy growing faster than Eurozone”. Goodness knows we had enough headlines drawing attention to the opposite, when that was the case. There was the Guardian’s “Eurozone Grows Twice as Fast as UK after GDP Rises by 0.6 percent” from 1 August last year, the Independent’s “UK economic growth dwarfed again by Eurozone in third quarter” from 31 October last year, and the BBC’s “Eurozone Growing Faster than UK” from 2 May this year. But now that the economic boot is suddenly on the other foot

Labour’s universal basic income would leave the poorest worst off

Google the words ‘Universal Basic Income’ and you will be find high praise and excitement from a wide-ranging collection of people. Richard Branson, Mark Zuckerberg and now John McDonnell have all announced they believe that ‘free money for all’ is a good policy. UBI has fans on both the left and the right. Dutch author Rutger Bregman published his bestseller Utopia for Realists earlier this year that championed a basic income for all; while American Conservative author Charles Murray has also supported the roll-out of a similar programme. Understood simply as a single cash transfer to each individual, regardless of how rich or poor they are, it would guarantee a

Fewer British workers are sick, so why isn’t the Guardian celebrating?

I know the Guardian is desperate to stop Brexit and will dredge up anything to try to back its case – daily running fanciful predictions of economic Armageddon made by think-tanks as if they were fact, even though those same think tanks have been hopelessly wrong in the past. But honestly, there comes a point when even the newspaper’s editors must be beginning to realise that their demented doom-mongering is making them look ridiculous.     This week the Office of National Statistics (ONS) put out figures showing yet another decline in the number of days lost to sickness by British workers. It is now down to an average of 4.1 days

The EU’s migration solution? Throw cash at the problem

When European leaders met earlier this month to thrash out an agreement on  migration, they succeeded in rescuing German Chancellor Angela Merkel from the precipice. But it is already becoming clear that the deal they struck was more a temporary papering over of ideological differences on migration than a permanent solution. While the EU agreed on the possible establishment of migrant transit centres on European soil, disembarkation platforms in north Africa, and a general statement that illegal migration was a European problem, the detail of how all this would work in practice was ignored. Not a single European country volunteered to host a reception centre, and attempts to persuade governments in north

Sam Leith

Books Podcast: Jesse Norman and how to properly appreciate Adam Smith

Adam Smith is the most quoted and misquoted economist of all time. But was he the prophet of devil-take-the-hindmost neoliberalism, or the heroic enemy of cartels, monopolies and stitch-ups? To try to get him in the round, I’m talking in this week’s podcast to Jesse Norman, author of the new Adam Smith: What He Thought and Why It Matters (reviewed in last week’s Spectator by Simon Heffer). Norman argues that we can only understand Smith in the round by reading his Theory of Moral Sentiments as well as the Wealth of Nations; and by putting him in the context of the Scottish Enlightenment and the thinkers such as Hume who

Public sector pay rise masks political row to come

The Downing Street media grid must be a rather dismal affair these days, with announcements planned that barely get any attention at all thanks to a combination of Brexit and another minister being on the brink of resignation. But one story that has come off reasonably well is today’s public sector pay award. Ministers have confirmed that around one million workers in the health service, schools, armed forces and so on will receive a raise of between 1.5 and 3.5 per cent. Obviously, this works nicely politically because everyone loves a pay rise. But the small print of this announcement reveals that it’s not going to make life dramatically easier

Elon Musk: Genius or jerk?

Elon Musk, the California-based entrepreneur behind the Tesla electric car, the SpaceX commercial rocket venture and several other wacky start-ups, made a fool of himself with his attempt to intervene in the Thai cave rescue and subsequent Twitter spat, but there’s no doubt he’s an original thinker and a remarkable businessman. If the futuristic Tesla is a fine feat of technology, what’s more impressive is that the company is not only still in business after 15 years without turning a profit and having lost at least $3.5 billion since 2015, but that its market capitalisation, at $52 billion, is bigger than Ford’s at $42 billion. Tesla built more than 100,000