Money

It is day three of Labour’s latest strategy: to try to blame Nigel Farage for the forthcoming tax rises in the Budget. After Health Secretary Wes Streeting had a go on Monday, Rachel Reeves this morning has made a similar point. The reason she is looking to raise taxes in the Budget, the Chancellor says, is because of Brexit. ‘There is no doubting that the impact of Brexit is severe and long-lasting,’ she said. Next up, apparently, is Keir Starmer, who at one point is going to tell us that Farage is guilty of campaigning for Brexit and then walking away from its implementation. Given that he wasn’t, and never

On Question Time last week, Zack Polanski, the Green Party leader and erstwhile boob-whisperer, declared that there is no evidence that the wealthy leave Britain because of wealth taxes. A bold claim, and a wrong one. It’s also revealing, symptomatic of a growing belief on the populist left that Britain’s problems could be solved if only we shook the ultra-rich’s pockets a little harder. Polanski assured the audience that a wealth tax would only fall on those with more than £10 million in assets – as if this made it both morally tidy and economically painless. Unfortunately, history and basic arithmetic disagree. France tried almost exactly that, with a rate

As Nigel Farage prepares to abandon pledges of up to £90 billion in tax cuts, there will be plenty of people arguing that his Reform party is giving up on its free market, small state roots. Other critics may say this is proof that Reform is shifting further to the left and pandering to its new voters in the old Labour heartlands. A few critics may well even accuse it of joining the ‘uniparty’. Perhaps so. And yet, with its dominant lead in the polls, Reform also had to get rid of a set of policies that often gave the impression they had been scribbled on the back of a

Stock exchanges around the world compete with each other to entice the most exciting companies to sell their shares on their markets, via Initial Public Offerings (IPOs). London was once the financial capital of the world, and a leader in IPOs. Now it has fallen to number 23 in the global IPO rankings, having been surpassed by the likes of Mexico and Indonesia. In 2006, at its fundraising peak, $51 billion was raised on the London Stock Exchange, with companies such as Unilever and Vodafone making London their home. This year, London IPOs raised just $250 million. Even companies already listed on the London exchange, such as AstraZeneca, are shunning it

It already faced tariffs in the United States, and it has been struggling to cope with some of the highest industrial energy prices in the world. Now what remains of the British steel industry faces what could well be a terminal blow. The European Union is about to impose tariffs of 50 per cent on steel imported from the UK. Labour ministers will no doubt start cobbling together rescue packages, and trying to devise a new strategy to rescue the industry. But perhaps it would be best just to be honest – and let the industry die.  The EU has set out plans to cut the amount of steel imported

The message the Tories want you to leave their conference with is that they are the party of prudence. The party of fiscal responsibility who will make the first ‘serious down payments’ on the size of the state, as shadow chancellor Mel Stride explained at a Spectator drinks reception last night. Today, he will set out his plan to achieve that. Stride will ‘recommit’ his party to ‘fiscal prudence’ by announcing £47 billion in savings for the public purse. Those measures include: The Shadow Chancellor will say that his party ‘will never, ever make fiscal commitments without spelling out exactly how they will be paid for’. Great. Trouble is there

When Rachel Reeves speaks at Labour party conference today, she has a tough message to deliver. The Chancellor will announce her plans to ‘abolish youth unemployment’ by forcing Britain’s jobless youth into work. There’s a moral case to be made for welfare reform and the Chancellor must make it today The ‘youth guarantee’ scheme will offer the carrot of a guaranteed work placement once unemployed 18 to 21-year-olds have spent 18 months out of the workforce. Those who turn down job offers or training places, however, will face the stick via sanctions such as having their benefits docked. With nearly one million 16 to 24-year-olds classified as not in education,

Donald Trump’s political and legal assault on the Federal Reserve has provoked concern and indignation from the defenders of central banks’ operational independence. Amid the sound and fury, some simple points are being forgotten. Whether or not this distracts central bankers from their main goal of controlling inflation is a matter of debate First, public trust and confidence in central banks is critical if banks are to be operationally independent. That trust was shaken when many central banks lost control of inflation in 2021, erroneously seeing it as ‘transitory’. In the inquest that followed, many central bankers blamed this mistake squarely on their forecasting models. Clearly models had much to answer

The OECD expects the UK economy to outperform the eurozone and grow by 1.4 per cent over the year. But there is a downside to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s latest figures: the body expects the UK’s inflation problem to persist, ending this year at 3.5 per cent, down just a touch from the 3.8 per cent measured by the ONS (Office for National Statistics) in July and August. It predicts that inflation will be 2.7 per cent at the end of 2026 – still a long away from the Bank of England’s two per cent target. Inflation in Britain is due to be markedly higher than in the

There really is no good news for Rachel Reeves as she prepares her second Budget. This morning’s borrowing figures are not just bad; they hint at a sense of hopelessness, that Britain is sliding inexorably towards a very deep fiscal crisis. This is yet another fiscal black hole for Reeves to fill, along with another about to be created by the OBR In August, the government had to borrow £18 billion, £3.5 billion more than in August 2024. This is in spite of £40 billion worth of tax rises (or rather tax rises which were hoped to raise an extra £40 billion) in last year’s Budget. Government receipts are indeed up

The Bank of England has held interest rates at 4 per cent. Threadneedle Street’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) voted seven to two to keep rates where they are. The fact inflation now sits at almost double the Bank’s 2 per cent target outweighed concerns about the slackening jobs market and what its impact on Britain’s lacklustre growth. Two members voted to cut rates to 3.75 per cent, but the overall decision is no surprise. There’s a growing sense that the bulk of committee members feel they perhaps made a mistake in cutting rates last month with inflation still climbing. Markets don’t expect another cut this side of Christmas and the

Are Britons getting sicker and sicker – or is our health improving? There seems to be something of a paradox. According to figures from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) the number of sickness absences has increased from an average of 5.9 days per worker in 2019 to 9.4 days in 2024. Interestingly, the sharp increase in the number of sick days has coincided with a rise in working from home Remarkably, it has increased by 1.6 days in a single year – it was 7.8 days in 2023. This is based on a survey of 1,100 employers, which also found that the most common reasons for work

As the Chancellor Rachel Reeves gets to work on her second Budget – to be delivered on 26 November – red lights flash everywhere. Gilt yields were up again as markets lost faith in her ability to balance the books. Reeves or Darren Jones – whoever is really calling the shots – will spend the next few weeks fixated on those yields. The price they land at when the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) settles their Budget forecast could make or break the government. I understand that the initial plan was to have a Budget much earlier, but that the decision was taken to put it off for as long

The pound is starting to slide. Gold is punching through record highs, and long-term gilt yields are hitting levels that have not been seen in thirty years. It is not a Liz Truss style crisis, at least not yet, although it is worth noting that the price the government has to pay to borrow money is way above the levels it reached when the former prime minister ‘crashed’ the economy. But it is starting to become painfully apparent that the Labour government is rapidly losing the confidence of the financial markets. It is yet another nervous week for the economy. The yield on 30-year gilts, the best long-term measure of

The theme of my holiday reading has been the insidious ways in which the vanities and fetishes of rulers harm the interests of citizens. I started with 1929, Andrew Ross Sorkin’s new history of the Wall Street crash, which I’ll be reviewing elsewhere ahead of its release in October –my point here being not about whether President Herbert Hoover and the US Federal Reserve mismanaged that market cataclysm and its aftermath, but rather the fact that my zero-value, plain-cover ‘uncorrected proof’ copy of the book was held up by French customs for almost three weeks for want of a ‘commercial tax ID number’ on the packaging label. ‘A common post-Brexit

Quietly, without even a press release let alone a fanfare, Britain over the past 12 months has just passed a grim milestone. The number of people on out of work benefits has surpassed the peak reached in the early 1990s. Indeed, it is higher now than it was at the peak of Covid-19 in 2020. There are now 6.5 million people living on out of work benefits Remember when unemployment of three million used to generate headlines every week, in the early 1980s and then again a decade later? Well, there are now 6.5 million people living on out of work benefits. Yet it hardly causes a ripple in the political

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna News that Italians now enjoy a higher standard of living than the British made me think: my God, life must be truly awful in Britain. Yes, the Italians do have much to feel good about in terms of the quality of their lives thanks to the beauty of their country, the splendour of their history, culture and cuisine, and their impressive defence of the traditional family and way of life from the threats to them of the modern world. When I’m drinking, I buy a superb local Sangiovese for €2.60 a litre dispensed into plastic mineral water bottles from a huge cask in a wine shop in

From Lord Kinnock’s demand for a wealth tax and VAT on private health fees to Gordon Brown pressing for gambling taxes, it is plain that Labour has run out of ideas other than dreaming up new ways to part us from our money. Even so, Kemi Badenoch is ill-advised to go on an all-out attack on council tax reform, as she did in a Mail on Sunday column yesterday. You don’t have to be a socialist or even a Labour supporter to see that council tax is horribly regressive According to the Conservative leader, Rachel Reeves is plotting to do as Labour have done in Wales: to set up an