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With rumours swirling that the Ministry of Defence will see its budget boosted in next week’s spring statement it’s hard not to wonder: was Donald Trump right? The former President repeatedly criticised Nato members in Europe for not contributing enough to support the alliance, relying instead on the US to shoulder the burden. And while the UK has met the Nato commitment to spend 2 per cent of its GDP on defence, we’ve seen a massive decrease in our defence budget over the last half century. As war returns to Europe, a consensus view has emerged – that the UK grew complacent when it came to security. We recoiled at

Well down the list of things to worry about as the ghastly Ukrainian tragedy unfolds is the high probability that the Russian government will stop paying its international debts. But this risk should certainly be somewhere on that list – as the fallout from past defaults has shown. We have been here several times before. Moscow also defaulted on its debt in 1998, exacerbating a sell-off across all emerging markets. It led to the collapse of a huge US hedge fund, Long-Term Capital Management, which had to be bailed out to prevent a worldwide meltdown. This came too late to save many other investors from large losses. Ten years later, apparently

This morning’s revelation that the UK economy grew 0.8 per cent in January, the fastest growth since April last year, is welcome news after a Christmas plagued by Omicron – but it’s news that’s out of date, too. As Capital Economics warns: ‘This is as good as it gets for the year’. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the commodity price jump and the cost-of-living crisis will soon show in the figures. Today’s ONS release warns that even in January, businesses were already reporting significant rises in the cost of energy and staff wages. The week after next, Rishi Sunak will present a mini-Budget. The Chancellor faces a conundrum: how to explain the inflation and

With refugees fleeing Ukraine, shells raining down on civilians, and threats of chemical weapons being used on the battlefields of Ukraine, it was surely only a matter of time. Today the British government finally added Roman Abramovich to the list of sanctioned Russian oligarchs, freezing his assets, and making sure that he could not profit from any sales. That will impact his entire fortune, of course. But most of all, it will hit Chelsea Football Club – and radically re-shape the fortunes of the Premier League. Abramovich’s departure will mark the beginning of an exodus of global money from British football In the two decades since a then relatively unknown Russian

The priority for the UK and other rich democracies is to protect the people of Ukraine from the depredations of Putin’s forces. A close second should be protecting the poorest people in our countries and vital public services from the cancerous impact of soaring inflation, made much worse by the West’s economic warfare against Putin’s Russia. The most basic costs of living are soaring. And that means a devastating recession that has already begun for all those but the richest. This blow to living standards will be the worst in living memory, more pernicious than the impact of either the banking crisis or Covid. Talking to ministers and MPs, it is

The sheer complexity – and horror – of Russia’s war on Ukraine makes it difficult to distil the essential points. To take only one example, the battlefront north of Kiev, where the Russian convoy is stalled, is significantly different from that along the Black Sea, where Russian forces from Crimea have made substantial progress. A third front, in the east, is consolidating in Russia’s favour, though the fight was much harder and longer than Moscow expected. Amid this complexity, it is important to summarise what we know so far: 1. Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine appears to be the most catastrophic strategic mistake since the end of the Cold War and

When I was in Russia in the very early 1990s, there was a generic figure who seemed to stand at the entrance to every metro station: an ancient babushka in a headscarf and tatty coat, face creased with age and weather, holding out a flimsy plastic bag rolled into a little triangle, begging for kopeks. The collapse of communism had its winners and its losers – and these old women were the losers. The ‘social umbrella’ of the necrotic Soviet system may have provided its pensioners with a miserable existence, as a local explained it to me, but it had provided; and these women, having discovered that freedom is all

Britain must spend more on defence. As I say in the Times today the defence budget is already being increased but it is hard to argue that it is sufficient given how changed the security landscape now looks with Putin’s Russia launching an all-out invasion of a sovereign, European state. Until this week, the UK could argue that it would only increase defence spending still further when other European members of Nato had pulled their weight and were hitting the 2 per cent of GDP target. But now Olaf Scholz has announced that Germany will be spending 2 per cent – or more – by 2024, which poses another dilemma for London: does it

It was an odd launch event for what had previously been a much-touted initiative. While all eyes were on the war in Ukraine, Scotland’s finance minister, Kate Forbes, took to Dundee to set out Scotland’s new ten year National Strategy for Economic Transformation. Such events usually involve a room full of press, lots of questions, photographs, one-on-one interviews and then widescale coverage in the Scottish media. This event however was characterised by complaints from print journalists that they were excluded on spurious grounds of ‘ongoing Covid restrictions’, despite the finance minister speaking to a room full of business people and some select journalists to which this rule seemed not to

The price of Brent crude exceeded $112 a barrel this morning. There is, as yet, no interruption in supply from Russia, nor any ban on buying their oil (save for in Canada) – but western companies are reported to be exercising a voluntary boycott. Either that, or they are sceptical of whether their orders will actually arrive. Turkey has already closed the Bosporus Straits to warships. Much of the oil exported to Europe takes this route. Even a voluntary refusal to buy Russian oil will have serious repercussions for markets. Russia produces around 12 per cent of the world’s oil – which is a huge chunk to lose. Except, that