Economy

When the Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer gave his full backing to his Chancellor Rachel Reeves, the brief panic in the markets following her tearful performance in the House of Commons subsided. Gilt yields stopped rising, the pound clawed back some lost ground, and the markets recovered their nerve. It was easy to spin that as bond investors backing Reeves. But is that really true? The markets have seemingly already lost confidence in the Chancellor. They simply prefer stability to chaos, and they quite rightly fear that any of the plausible alternatives will prove even worse. Bond investors have already lost faith in the Chancellor ‘She will be the Chancellor

Labour MPs blaming Rachel Reeves over welfare cuts are like teenagers blaming their mum for telling them to wear a coat when there are bloody great storm clouds on the horizon. It’s silly and it won’t save them from getting soaked. But this is emerging as part of the blame game over Labour’s welfare debacle, where the party’s MPs forced the government to shred its own welfare bill by threatening to vote it down at second reading. ‘She must be toast,’ a Labour MP told the FT. The Times quotes a senior Labour source accusing Reeves of having ‘very little political acumen’. The argument, apparently, is that Reeves is at

The economy has stagnated, foreign investment has collapsed, the non-doms have fled and the entrepreneurs are following them. Meanwhile, Labour backbenchers are clamouring for more spending. Not much has been going right for the Chancellor Rachel Reeves. But she has a grand new plan: increase taxes on saving. Reeves has been reduced to scrabbling around for money wherever she can find it Reeves is expected to announce later this month that the amount that can be put into a tax-free cash Isa every year will be slashed from the current £20,000 to as little as £4,000, and perhaps even less. The decision will be dressed up as encouraging saving in

The machines are already smarter and better organised than humans. They never ask for a pay rise, and they don’t ask any awkward questions about the company’s environmental record. An artificial employee is, in many ways, the model employee. But is artificial intelligence really responsible for a recent fall in entry-level jobs, as new figures from Adzuna, the online jobs board, would have you believe? Or is the Chancellor Rachel Reeves as much to blame as the ChatGPT founder Sam Altman? It may be fashionable to blame AI, but it is wrong It is certainly looking like a tough year to graduate from university. According to figures from Adzuna, the

As Sir Keir Starmer offers concessions to 126 rebels to water down his welfare reform bill, a scandal that undermines the entire Universal Credit system goes ignored. The Spectator has seen figures revealing that the HMRC data feed which powers Universal Credit payments to low-paid workers may be so error-strewn that as many as one in four claimants has been underpaid, overpaid or not paid at all. When Universal Credit was introduced 11 years ago to modernise benefits, it required a robust data system to drive it. HMRC’s answer was the ‘Real Time Information’ (RTI) system – hailed at the time as the most significant overhaul of the tax system since

At last, Keir Starmer has bowed to the inevitable. Having first adopted a posture of defiance, then conciliation, the Prime Minister has tonight admitted capitulation on the great welfare revolt. The Guardian reports that the ringleaders of the 126 rebels who signed a wrecking amendment to the Welfare Bill are now claiming ‘massive concessions.’ It follows a tense afternoon of talks between Starmer and his MPs. It means another big U-turn for Starmer – and another hole in the Treasury’s finances The rebels say that they have been promised significant changes to planned cuts. These include moderating the Bill to make it easier for people with multiple impairments to claim disability benefits. Starmer also

Rachel Reeves does not have many supporters left. The bond markets don’t think much of the Chancellor. Business groups have rubbished her policies, and so have many of the UK’s largest companies. Meanwhile, Labour backbenchers are furious about both the chaos over the winter fuel allowance and the cuts to the welfare budget. Now, it looks as if the Bank of England may have turned on her as well, if comments from the Bank’s governor are anything to go on. We might expect Andrew Bailey to avoid any direct criticism of the Chancellor. After all, she is his boss. What’s more, a public split between the UK’s two most important

We are not the fastest growing economy in the G7, even though the Labour party promised that we would be. We are not topping any tables for inward investment, and we have fallen to the bottom of the league for new companies listed on the stock market. Still, it is good to know that there is still one measure where the UK economy comfortably beats the rest of the world. We are now losing more millionaires than any rival nation. The exodus of wealth out of the UK, it appears, is accelerating – and very soon this is going to turn into a big problem for the Chancellor Rachel Reeves.