Money

Hannah Tomes

The Tories don’t care about generation rent

For millennials like me, the prospect of owning a home is a pipe dream. Soaring rental costs and crippling bills make saving for a deposit impossible. The reality is that, as a friend said to me recently, our best chance of getting a foot on the housing ladder is when a home-owning family member pops their clogs. We’re far from alone. Yet the Tory leadership contenders have nothing to offer those who hope one day to buy a house. Perhaps it’s not much of a surprise that this is an issue the Tories are ignoring: Boris Johnson’s government was elected, in part, on a manifesto pledge to build 300,000 new houses –

Nick Cohen

Truss and Sunak are blind to the coming crisis

In times of crisis in the 20th century, voters called for politicians from opposing parties to put aside their differences and unite in a national government. Such is the collapse of the Conservative party we now must beg Tory politicians to stop fighting and unite in a Tory government. Martin Lewis has said that Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson should be able to agree on a package to cover the expected 70 per cent rise in the domestic energy cap in the autumn (with more to come in January).  ‘You’re all in the same party,’ he cried. ‘You should be able to work out some unifying policy, something

Ross Clark

Bring on the housing crash!

It has been a long time coming, given that shares and bonds have been falling for most of the year, but this morning there are the first signs of a slide in house prices. Don’t get too excited: the Halifax House Price Index fell by just 0.1 per cent month on month, and prices are still up 11.8 per cent year on year.  But it is an indication that things might finally be changing in a market which has seemed to defy logic ever since the arrival of Covid. Yes, the deepest recession in recorded history was accompanied by a boom in house prices. Even when interest rates began to

Robert Peston

Will the Bank of England say sorry?

Months ago I said the Bank of England would face a barrage of criticism and a challenge to its independence for failing to raise interest rates enough last year during the post-Covid economic rebound and then for putting them up big time now as we head into recession. So it has proved. And by the way, this does not mean that Bank independence has failed, or that allowing politicians greater sway over how much and when interests rise, would be better. It probably wouldn’t be. The Bank should stop pleading that its failure to call the inflationary turn early enough is irrelevant Nor does it mean Liz Truss would be

Ross Clark

Is the Bank of England’s recession warning right?

The Bank of England has warned that Britain will fall into a recession this year. Its Monetary Policy Report, released today, predicts that the economy will shrink from October, with the downturn lasting until the end of 2023. The Bank of England also hiked interest rates from 1.25 per cent to 1.75 per cent, the biggest rise for 27 years. The Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee has never previously raised the base rate by 0.5 per cent in its 25 years of existence. Previously it has only upped rates in quarter-point stages (and there haven’t been many of those, especially in recent years). The rise will, of course, affect

Kate Andrews

Why Liz Truss u-turned over public sector pay

That was quick. Less than 15 hours after pledging a robust reform of public sector pay, Liz Truss has performed a u-turn on plans to bring national pay bargaining to an end. It comes after criticism mounted that slashing pay for new frontline staff was not the most obvious way to handle an escalating cost-of-living crisis. In a sense, it’s a crime of poor timing rather than poor policy. National pay bargaining has long been questioned as a fair way to compensate staff on the government payroll. In part it’s due to the reasons laid out by Truss: there are obvious differences in the cost-of-living throughout the country, which might

Fraser Nelson

The trouble with Sunak’s new tax promise

Rishi Sunak should have started his campaign offering a 4p cut to the basic rate of income tax instead of going with a Cameronesque finger-wagging ‘stability before tax cuts’ message. His pledge to cut the rate to 16p, unveiled last night, now looks like a panicked U-turn when it is in fact consistent with his long-standing view of politics: that Britain is in danger of turning into a high-tax, high-spend European style social democracy because Tories keep forcing through extra spending without thinking how they’d pay for it. As chancellor, he sought to stand athwart such process by putting up taxes and hoping the pain would force his party to

John Keiger

The French buy-out that explains Macron’s strategy

It’s a platitude that France and Britain are rivals and have been for centuries. But, since the 1904 Entente Cordiale, the rivalry is more a question of competition than conflict. Always, in the darkest hour, each sided with the other, even if post-war they didn’t fully recognise the other’s contribution. Britain congratulated itself over the Dunkirk evacuation when in truth without French troops holding off the Germans, the ‘plucky’ armada would never have completed its mission; to this day the French believe that American troops were more numerous than British in the Normandy landings.  With the passing of the French war-time generation the postwar moral debt to Britain and residual goodwill

Will China blockade Taiwan?

Xi Jinping has made it very clear over the years that he is determined for China to reunite with Taiwan. He has staked his legacy and his legitimacy on it. The problem for Beijing is that the polls in Taiwan continually show that only one per cent of the population is in favour of reunification now. If Xi wants Taiwan then he will almost certainly have to take it by force. Although some western commentators argue that Russia’s travails in Ukraine have made an invasion less likely, there is no evidence to support a change in policy in Beijing. Even though Taiwan’s military is undertrained and equipped with tanks and

Nick Cohen

Sunak and Truss have no answer to the big problem facing the West

You will never measure the depth of our troubles if you listen to the contenders for the Tory leadership. Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss talk as if the 21st century never happened. They cannot see how the world has changed. Like the devotees of an ancient cult, they imagine that it is possible for a prime minister in the 2020s to follow the programme of Margaret Thatcher from 40-years ago. Their lines sound so antiquated because they have no plausible vision for creating a modern, united country. Then, who does? Rather than watch the contest, I have been reading the best modern historians as they struggle to find order amid

James Forsyth

Truss and Sunak are arguing about the wrong things

The Tory party needs to distinguish between the different types of blue-on-blue arguments. There is the peripheral stuff about shoes and earrings which would be no great loss to the debate if it was to end; then there are the substantive issues on which the party does need to thrash out what it thinks.  The biggest divide in this contest is over the economy In the Times today, I suggest five arguments that the Tories need to have in this contest. Having been friends with Rishi Sunak for decades, and having known Liz Truss since she became an MP in 2010, I think they are capable of having a constructive argument. The

Ross Clark

The surprising tricks that can cut your energy bills

We are all facing months of rising bills, with warnings that there may even be blackouts ahead. But all is not lost. Here are ten ways you can cut your energy consumption – and some of them will surprise you… Change your lightbulbs – even the ‘energy saving’ ones. If you still have old-style incandescent lightbulbs in your home – or even the original, fluorescent energy-saving bulbs – you are wasting a fortune. A five-watt LED lightbulb produces as much light as an old-style 60-watt lightbulb does. Lighting constitutes the single biggest proportion of most energy bills on account of how often we have the lights on – so this single change can

Sam Ashworth-Hayes

Biden’s word play can’t save the United States from a recession

Some denials are more worrying than their absence. A company insisting that its director will be vindicated by the forensic auditors is unlikely to succeed in calming investors; a sports team insisting it has total confidence in its coach is likely to receive a flurry of speculative applications; and a president insisting that ‘we’re not gonna be in a recession in my view’ is unlikely to do consumer confidence a great deal of good. The major difference here is that the White House has the advantage of being able to mark its own homework. No matter what today’s GDP data shows, Biden’s team will be able to claim the US

Rishi Sunak’s energy bill u-turn is too little, too late

A tweak to the landfill tax perhaps? A minor adjustment to the airport levy? Rishi Sunak no doubt stayed up late into the night sifting through all the most minor tax cuts he could offer before re-launching his campaign with a dramatic u-turn. In the end, he plumped for axing VAT on energy bills, promising to scrap it for a year. Sunak’s campaign insist it will save the average household an estimated £160 as prices go up. The trouble is, it is too little, too late: if Sunak wanted to cut taxes he needed something far bigger and bolder. Sunak has gone for the most minor tax tweak imaginable, making himself

Kate Andrews

Why is Liz Truss’s campaign painting her as a victim?

I suspect Rishi Sunak will watch back last night’s BBC Tory leadership debate with some regret. His frequent interruptions of Liz Truss did him no favours — not simply because it came across at points as impolite, but because on plenty of occasions he would have been better off letting her answer his questions (or not answer his questions, as it was apparent on things like interest rates that she had not come equipped with answers). But Truss is at risk of making Sunak’s mistakes her mistakes. In response to Sunak’s debating tactics, Team Truss is going hard on the misogyny angle. Sunak’s performance is being explained in heavily gendered terms by

Can the new PM survive the winter?

Climate and energy have been peripheral issues in the Conservative leadership campaign thus far. In the early stages, only Kemi Badenoch and Suella Braverman indicated a desire for meaningful change, both calling for a serious reassessment or even suspension of net zero targets. Green activists were alarmed. Yet even now, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak are only offering a programme of dull continuity with Boris Johnson’s green policies. At most, their ideas amount to some window dressing measures: shifting green levies from energy bills to tax bills, and so on. In a few months’ time, however, Badenoch and Braverman may look rather prescient, because the new prime minister will find themselves

Putin could come to regret his gas game with Europe

Russian president Vladimir Putin has always enjoyed trolling European leaders. As relations between Moscow and Berlin deteriorate over reduced natural gas supplies and Ukraine-related sanctions, Putin is now brazenly gaslighting his German counterpart, chancellor Olaf Scholz. But it’s a move he could come to regret. Putin suggested this week that Germany should give the shelved Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline the go ahead to restore gas flows to normal levels. The amount of Russian gas flowing into Germany along the operational Nord Stream 1 pipeline under the Baltic Sea is capped at 67 million cubic metres per day (MMcm/d), or about 40 per cent of its technical capacity. Russia claims this is

Katja Hoyer

Germany is caught in Putin’s trap

A collective sigh of relief went through Berlin this week as Russia resumed its gas deliveries through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline after a scheduled ten-day maintenance break. But even with the immediate crisis averted, Germany remains palpably jittery: it is unclear whether it will have enough gas to get through the winter. Threats from Vladimir Putin to curb or even stop energy supplies to Europe altogether have been part of the Russian war strategy right from the beginning. Shortly before the invasion of Ukraine in February, when the German chancellor Olaf Scholz announced a halt to the controversial Nord Stream 2 pipeline, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev sneered: ‘Well. Welcome to

Why inflation will soon be over

Here’s a quick test: do you feel, in your bones, that we’ve entered into a new inflationary era or is this just a blip? If you feel we’ve entered into a new inflationary era, you are an economic conservative. You may believe in secular inflation thanks to the following: Brexit, trade wars, de-globalisation, Covid and Ukraine, which have all created shortages in manufacturing, oil, and wheat that we are powerless to fix. Perhaps you believe that sinister world leaders, business interests, and cartels control the markets in all this stuff and have decided to restrict it. Or you may think that central banks have been printing money so recklessly, and

Hannah Tomes

Draghi’s resignation leaves Italy in turmoil

Mario Draghi has resigned as Italian prime minister – for the second time in a week. But this time his resignation was accepted by President Sergio Mattarella, with a snap election expected in September or October. The resignation came after a fiery debate in parliament yesterday in which the populist Five Star Movement joined the right-wing League and Forza Italia parties to abstain on a vote of confidence in Draghi’s national unity coalition, which was ushered in and saw Draghi installed, unelected, as PM during the pandemic. Draghi will stay on as a caretaker prime minister until the autumn but he is leaving Italy in a state of economic chaos