Economy

It has impeccable green credentials. It is crucial to the country’s power grid. And it is one of the UK’s largest private companies. A floatation of Octopus Energy should have been just the kind of event that would give the London Stock Exchange a much needed boost. And yet it now emerges that it may well choose a rival market to list its shares. If that happens, it will accelerate the City’s decline into global irrelevance – and an incoming Labour government may well finish it off.  It is probably the worst news the London market could have had. The chief executive of the giant Octopus Energy, the largest electricity

It is possible that President Macon had some clever plan when he called a general election in the wake of catastrophic European election results last night. After all, he has a reputation for always being several moves ahead on the political chessboard. And yet one point is surely clear. France can’t afford a Le Pen government – and its election may well trigger a crisis in the French debt markets.  Le Pen, after all, is a high welfare, big state, economic nationalist It is, perhaps, not quite such a foregone result as Britain’s election a few days earlier. And yet after the second round of voting on 7 July, it looks

It had been called the dinner party from hell. A seven-strong convention of the also rans. But only one dinner guest really mattered: Nigel Farage. The populist politician’s last-minute decision to stand as a Reform candidate in Clacton has struck fear into the hearts of Conservative MPs across the country, but especially in the 60 marginal seats that Professor John Curtice says Reform could help the Tories lose on 4 July. The surprise of the night was a new coalition on electoral reform between Farage and the Lib Dems But none of tonight’s participants in the BBC debate were going to allow the debate to turn into the Nigel Farage show. He

There is a very big problem with Jeremy Hunt’s Family Home Tax Guarantee, though which he promises a Conservative government would not increase the number of council tax bands, carry out a council tax revaluation, cut council tax discounts, impose capital gains tax on sales of main homes or increase the level of stamp duty. It reminds voters of all the times that the Conservatives have jacked up property taxes in the past 14 years. No-one paid more than 4 per cent on any sale. George Osborne soon changed that When David Cameron become Prime Minister in 2010, stamp duty was levied at 1 per cent on homes sold for between

My colleague Ross Clark has shown how the Tories cooked up that £2,000 figure. They worked out the total cost of what they think Labour will do, using standard HM Treasury costings. Then, they divided that by the number of in-work households (18.4 million). This is a subset of the 21.4 million total UK households, so no pensioners or workless households. By choosing a smaller denominator, you concentrate the increase and conjure up a scarier figure. Then they quadruple-counted. So they took each year’s estimate for tax rise and then added them together over four years and – presto! – you end up with £2,000. But let’s apply a similar method to

So, we have a little more flesh on the bones of Labour’s energy policy, with the party giving more details of Great British Energy, the state-owned company it wants to set up to invest in wind and solar energy. But there are still gaping holes in Labour’s promise to decarbonise the electricity grid by 2030 – and save consumers money in the process. First to note is that Labour seems drastically to have toned down the claims as to how much its energy policies will supposedly save consumers. Until today it was claiming that it would save us ‘up to £1,400’ a year. Given that under Ofgem’s price cap the

When the Bank of England finally delivers an interest rate cut, can the Tory party take credit for it? Rishi Sunak thinks so. ‘We are the party who has committed to bringing down inflation, which is a necessary condition for bringing down interest rates,’ he told the Times in an interview published today. ‘And I think people can see we have delivered that.’ Of course no politician is in a position to promise or deliver a rate cut. That decision sits firmly with the BoE’s Monetary Policy Committee, who this month voted to hold the base rate 5.25 per cent for the six time in a row. But to be fair to

Junior doctors will be staging yet another walkout in the week running up to the election: five days in total, from 27 June to 1 July. It is the 11th walkout since March last year, as the union insists they will not settle for less than a 35 per cent pay raise. The dates are no coincidence: there is no moment more politically fueled than the run-up to polling day. This gives more weight to the government’s argument that these strikes have always been political in nature, and certainly resulting in political consequence: the NHS waiting list rose by roughly 500,000 after Rishi Sunak pledged to get the waitlist falling,

Speaking to business leaders in the East Midlands this morning, Rachel Reeves delivered a fairly uncontroversial speech. In her first major address since the election was called last week, the shadow chancellor insisted that Labour is the ‘natural party of British business’ (a point bolstered by today’s letter signed by over 100 business chiefs endorsing Labour). She said she wanted ‘to lead the most pro-growth, pro-business Treasury our country has ever seen’ – who could argue with that? She then went on to restate her commitment to fiscal discipline and a promise to make the numbers add up. While the dig at free markets won’t have been everyone’s cup of tea, it was

Another day, another big policy pledge from the Tories – and this time it’s a pitch for the grey vote. Rishi Sunak is pledging to cut tax for pensioners. A Conservative government would increase the personal allowance for pensioners in line with the Triple Lock by introducing a new age-related allowance. It is being billed as the ‘Triple Lock Plus’ whereby both the state pension and their tax-free allowance rise in line with the highest of earnings, wages or 2.5 per cent. As things stand, tax thresholds are being frozen for three years – which would not only drag five million more into higher tax bands but mean the basic