The Tories took a serious beating in Thursday’s by-elections. Whilst Boris Johnson and his government refuse to take responsibility for the big issue of the day – inflation – and fail to convey any meaningful central purpose to their government (‘levelling up’ being clearly nothing more than an empty soundbite) they will continue to face huge
Most people date the beginning of Boris Johnson’s current woes to the start of the partygate scandal, and especially to the revelations from 10 January 2022 onwards about the ‘bring your own booze’ event that Johnson himself had attended. But Johnson’s problems can also be seen as having started at an earlier date and from
Inflation has hit a 40-year high. The cost of household utilities rose by an average of £700 last month. We are now facing inflation of 9 per cent and the figure is still careering upwards. In response, politicians and ministers have attacked the Bank of England. Some commentators have even started to call for Governor Andrew Bailey to
Labour MPs and parts of the media are currently exploring, as part of the partygate scandal, whether if you repeat often enough that someone has lied, you can make that an accepted fact, even if you do not have a shred of evidence or reason to believe it. The latest example came in the Commons
Keir Starmer, aided and abetted by Boris Johnson’s many internal enemies within the Conservative party, has managed to get into the public consciousness the idea that if Boris Johnson attended a ‘party’ during lockdown, he should resign. There are a number of good reasons that the Tory party might feel it was time for a new
Today the government has said that for the next three weeks it will be mandatory to wear masks in shops and on public transport, pending a review. It was already mandatory to wear a mask on the tube, as a condition of travel. So to avoid mixing up ideas, let’s focus on the new mandate
The Treasury’s analysis of the short-term impact of Brexit offers us two scenarios for the two years following the referendum: a base ‘shock’ and a ‘severe shock’ scenario. The base case means 3.6pc less economic growth in the two years following Brexit, with inflation up 2.3 percentage points and house prices down 10pc. A first thing to grasp is the connection
Dear David, From Q2 1979 to Q1 1981, quarterly real GDP fell in the UK by 5.5%. Unemployment rose rapidly, from 1.4m in Q2 1979 to 2.4m by the end of the recession, then continued rising through to its peak of 3.3m in 1984 – 12% of the workforce. Unemployment stayed above 3m for 51 straight
Lots of brouhaha the past few days about the apparent M&S policy (later back-tracked upon) of allowing Muslim staff not to serve pork or alcohol. Why, though? M&S presumably has orthodox Jewish staff whom it does not insist must work on Saturdays? Why would we be any more outraged if it let some staff not
Tomorrow we finally move from generalities to specifics. No need to argue any more about whether the losers will be up in arms or will it all be a damp squib. Tomorrow we get the gory detail. At the time of the Emergency Budget we were told to expect cuts in non-ring-fenced departments of 25
Recent events in the Eurozone have led a number of commentators to suggest that we are nearing some repeat of the financial crisis that followed the nationalisation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in August 2008 and the subsequent (and consequent) bankruptcy of Lehman’s. In my view, the current situation is rather different from that
In the table below, we consider how the budgets of various departments grew over the last Labour government. It spells out the very large rises in Health and Education (together, the rises in these two departments accounted for 61 percent of the total rise in departmental expenditure over the period). And we can see that
Policy Exchange has repeatedly urged that the country’s fiscal problems should be addressed principally by spending cuts, combined with some tax rises. We have recommended a ratio of 80 percent spending cuts to 20 percent tax rises. The “structural” deficit in the UK (i.e. the bit of the total deficit that will still be there
This morning the inflation figures were released for September. They show that the economy is in ongoing deflation, as it has been since March 2009, with the annual change in the Retail Prices Index (RPI) standing at -1.4 percent. At the same time, the policy index used by the Bank of England to determine its
Public spending is currently accelerating at an unprecedented pace — more swiftly, even, that during the total loss of control during the 1970s. Spending is due to rise £120bn, 20%, in just three years from 2007/8 to 2010/11, taking it from 41% of GDP to above 50% — a much more rapid rise than in
