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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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wages are rising. The economy is growing. The stock market is on the way up, and exports are booming. As he prepares for a long summer trying to persuade the membership of the Conservative party to make him prime minister, Rishi Sunak probably wishes he could be transported to some parallel universe where he could boast about his record as Chancellor. The trouble is, he is stuck with this one: and the news is relentlessly bad. This morning, inflation was up yet again, hitting a 40-year-high of 9.4 per cent. Yesterday, it was real wages falling sharply, as workers’ income failed to keep up with rising prices. Over the next

New Zealand has been voted the second worst country in the world to move to, according to a survey of immigrants encompassing most regions of the world. The survey, by the expatriate networking organisation InterNations, collated the responses of nearly 12,000 immigrants, living in 181 countries. It found that Mexico tops the list of the best country to live as an expat, while New Zealand ranked second worst, beating only Kuwait. Survey respondents ranked their new countries based on criteria such as cost of living, safety, bureaucracy and quality of life. While New Zealand ranked 51 out of 52, its Trans-Tasman neighbour Australia received a credible ninth place, with people

To listen to the would-be prime ministers of the Conservative party, things in Britain are going pretty well. Sure, Covid knocked the public finances off course, and the war in Ukraine has driven up prices at the pump, but structurally, Britain holds strong. This is about as far from the truth as it is possible to be. Unless the next prime minister can shake off this delusion, Britain is facing a second lost decade of economic growth. It’s important to put into perspective just how bad the last few parliaments have been. If the UK continues with the same level of growth it has seen for the last decade, Poland

In 2018, the Lancet published a study from the ‘Global Burden of Disease Alcohol Collaborators’ which claimed that there was no safe level of alcohol consumption. This was widely reported and was naturally welcomed by anti-alcohol campaigners. The BBC reported it under the headline ‘No alcohol safe to drink, global study confirms’. (Note the cheeky use of the word confirms, despite the finding going against 50 years of evidence.) The study wasn’t based on any new epidemiology. Instead, it took crude, aggregate data from almost every country in the world, mashed it together and attempted to come up with a global risk curve. As I said at the time: The

Since January, some 22,000 more Brits have died at home than would be expected in a normal year. These so-called excess deaths at home had stumped doctors and left GPs calling for an investigation. The causes remain unclear but a study published today offers the first clues to what’s going on. The study, funded by Marie Curie, found that deaths at home increased sharpest in the most affluent areas during the pandemic. While excess deaths occurred in all groups, in England there were 33 per cent more at-home deaths than pre-pandemic in the least deprived areas. Meanwhile, deaths in the most deprived areas grew just 21 per cent. In Scotland the

At a time of a worker shortage, we are somehow managing to keep 5.3 million people on out-of-work benefits. This is too much, says Suella Braverman. My colleague Stephen Daisley fervently disagrees and in his riposte, he quotes various figures about how Britain doesn’t spend very much on welfare compared to other countries. This is precisely what New Labour argued when it was keeping five million on benefits throughout the boom years and the argument didn’t stack up then either. The below shows the problem to which Braverman alludes: it really is quite a scandal and points to massive government failure. Set aside the wasted money: keeping 5.3 million working-age people

What began as a run on a handful of provincial banks is rapidly morphing into one of China’s worst financial scandals, threatening the stability of the country’s heavily indebted financial system. It poses a serious challenge to a Communist party obsessed with social order, which has thuggishly cracked down on desperate depositors demanding their money back. At the weekend, protesters in Henan’s capital Zhengzhou were charged, beaten and dragged away by unidentified security officials dressed in white shirts and dark trousers, who appeared to be working in concert with uniformed police. An estimated 1,000 angry depositors had gathered in front of a branch of the People’s Bank of China, carrying banners

Childcare in the UK is among the most expensive in Europe. A full-time nursery place for a child under five costs in the region of £14,000 per year; if there are multiple children, this easily rises to an amount that means women would be paying to go back to work after maternity leave. The result: if a couple can’t afford to support a family on a single income until children are school age, then quite likely they can’t afford to have a family at all. One typical reason given for these high costs is that regulations for the number of adults per child are more stringent than in many other