Martin Vander Weyer is business editor of The Spectator. He writes the weekly Any Other Business column.
As the interminable Budget wait goes on, so does the trawl through the Chancellor’s bin bags. I refer to the old tabloid method of digging in celebrities’ dustbins for evidence of depravity or scandal; in Rachel Reeves’s case, that would mean piecing together shredded Treasury analyses on all the various tax wheezes floated since July.
Scheduling the Budget almost four months after their election victory would have counted as a monumental misjudgment for the Labour government were it not for all the other cock-ups that turned their first 100 days into a sitcom. Still, the extended period of speculation about which taxes Rachel Reeves is really planning to raise has
How excited are you to hear the Prime Minister talking tech with Eric Schmidt, an American billionaire who used to run Google? Me neither. But their on-stage conversation is billed as the highlight of the government’s International Investment Summit in London next week, designed to show the world the UK is ‘open for business’. What
So farewell, Ratcliffe-on-Soar: the UK’s last coal-fired power station shut down on Monday, having burned five million tonnes of coal per year since it opened in 1968. Back then, 80 per cent of national power came from coal, our primary energy source since the 1880s; at the turn of this century there were still 25
Next month’s Budget tax raids on capital have provoked a festival of creative doom-mongering on the fringes of Labour’s conference as well as in the columns of the business press. Most frequently voiced is the prediction that the 2,000 or so denizens of London’s private equity community who benefit from the ‘carried interest’ tax wheeze
The burden of higher taxation must fall on those with ‘the broadest shoulders’, says the Prime Minister, and City folks assume that means yet more raids on banks. Soft targets because no one loves them, they have also profited from higher interest rates. But they’re already subject to a surcharge on corporation tax and an
We expect Ryanair tickets to cost more on holiday Saturdays than term-time Tuesdays and Uber fares to surge in the rush hour. When bidders drive an Old Master painting into the millions, we praise the skill of the auctioneer. And of course dynamic prices can go down as well as up. These are market mechanisms
How passively we respond to revelations of Labour’s real direction of travel. As millions of pensioners brace for the confiscation of winter fuel payments and other Budget tax raids, shouldn’t they be pinning on their medals, raising their banners and marching down Whitehall – alongside columns of private school parents, furious at the imposition of
Back to work, back to school, back to politics: the French call it la rentrée and my own summer idyll in their country must end soon too. Back to the miserabilism of Starmerland – where all news, especially good news, must be seen as bad. What good news is that? I mean that shop prices
Twice I met the tech tycoon Mike Lynch, once a decade or so ago and again this year, shortly after he returned from his fraud trial acquittal in California. On the first occasion, I followed him as a speaker at a corporate conference in, of all places, the National Football Centre in Burton-on-Trent. He was
The French television personality Laurent Baffie, interviewed by Le Figaro, came up with a nice phrase for the success beyond most expectations of the Paris Olympics: it had been ‘une parenthèse enchantée’, he said, but parentheses always have to close and ‘la merde va revenir’. I’m guessing he meant France’s brief political truce will end
A bout of global stock-market turmoil and an outbreak of UK street violence as adjacent news items gave an apocalyptic feel to the start of the week. But as rioting continued, markets appeared to steady, led by Tokyo with a 10 per cent Tuesday rebound. We know the ugly sentiments that animate the thugs –
More than a third of UK universities are in financial doo-doo: staff cuts, cancelled courses, slashed research budgets and possible bankruptcy beckon. Behind this is the fact that domestic students paying £9,250 in fees (way behind inflation since that figure was last raised in 2017) cost £11,750 to teach, representing a collective annual £5 billion
If the new government’s ‘pensions review’ takes forward last year’s ‘Mansion House reforms’ – credited to chancellor Jeremy Hunt but largely the work of the then Lord Mayor of London, Nick Lyons, and designed to push the UK’s largest private-sector pension providers to commit funds to unlisted equities and vital infrastructure – all to the
Market reactions to the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania represent, according to taste, rational bets on the significantly increased likelihood of a second Trump presidency or stark confirmation of the madness that has overtaken America and threatens the civilised world. Shares in Trump Media & Technology – the parent of his social media platform Truth Social
‘They knocked down our old house in three hours,’ says a friend who has embarked on what he says is a conventional rebuild, nothing Grand Designs about it, on the south coast. ‘But it’s taking forever to get planning permission for the new one. They want reports on everything, from bats to highway impacts: you’d
‘I drink champagne when I’m happy and when I’m sad,’ Madame Lily Bollinger (1899-1977) remarked. ‘Sometimes I drink it when I’m alone. When I have company I consider it obligatory.’ As the last constituency results trickle in, we’ll all inevitably find ourselves in some combination of those four states. If you’re sad, I hope at
‘We are the masters now,’ I chirrup to my Holborn and St Pancras neighbours – misquoting Labour attorney-general Hartley Shawcross from 1946. I don’t mean I’ve decided to throw in my vote with the predicted Labour landslide: frankly, I’d rather give it to the candidate calling himself Nick the Incredible Flying Brick. What I mean
The seizure of enemy treasure, formerly known as plunder and pillage, is an ancient tool of war. Though still practised in the world’s nastiest conflict zones, it’s a tricky business within a rules-based international order. The G7’s agreement to lend $50 billion to Ukraine – using income from $300 billion of frozen Russian assets to
Nigel Farage and I agree on one thing: a red-carpet welcome at the London Stock Exchange for Shein, the Chinese online fashion retailer, would be ‘a very bad idea’. Valued at £50 billion, Shein could become London’s biggest-ever initial public offering. Both the departing Chancellor Jeremy Hunt and the shadow business secretary Jonathan Reynolds have
