All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Tax rises are almost certainly coming, Britain’s leading fiscal think tank has said. Those taxes are most likely to fall on pensioners and the wealthy, according to Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS). ‘There is a good chance that economic and fiscal forecasts will deteriorate significantly between now and an autumn Budget.
The government has less than a week to decide how to respond to Donald Trump’s announcement of 25 per cent tariffs on car imports to the US. Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves still seem to think that Trump might exempt Britain, but there is little sign of that coming out of Washington. Unless Peter Mandelson
Call me old-fashioned but if I ever have the misfortune to be stuck inside a burning building, I want a fireman to come to my rescue. As the temperature rises, I won’t give two hoots as to whether my particular fireman is black, white, gay, straight, male or female. I just want someone brave enough
The Church of England website features a public consultation closing on 28th March on what qualities should be looked for in the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury. But aren’t the Church’s staff meant to be the experts on God? The Church, with all its committees, seems adept at diffusing and side-stepping responsibility. Could this be a fake consultation to
The Nato secretary general, Mark Rutte, has warned Russia that the alliance would defend Poland against any aggression and would do so without restraint. On a visit to Warsaw, he said: When it comes to the defence of Poland and the general defence of Nato territory, if anyone were to miscalculate and think they can
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It’s the morning after the afternoon before, and Rachel Reeves has just finished her broadcast round, where she has faced tough questions and negative splashes in the papers. The Daily Mail brands Reeves ‘deluded’, while the Daily Telegraph warns of ‘five years of record taxes’. The Guardian splashes with ‘Reeves accused of balancing books at expense of the poor’, while the Financial
Those of us who signed up for DNA testing kits from 23andMe did so thinking we’d unlock deep ancestral secrets. Maybe we’d discover we had royal blood, or finally settle the family debate over whether great-grandpa Dmitri was really Kenyan after all. Often, the results were far less conclusive: the tests revealed that we were
Labour’s decision to add VAT to school fees shows that the party has an irrational hatred of posh schools. Hiking fees might bring in relatively little money, but that hardly matters when there is a class war to be fought. While the targeting of private schools has grabbed the headlines, another story – with equally
Rachel Reeves wakes to a swathe of tricky front pages this morning after the Spring Statement in which the Office for Budgetary Responsibility (OBR) slashed next year’s growth forecasts. The Chancellor also announced extra welfare cuts in order to meet her fiscal rules. The verdict on the statement isn’t exactly positive, with Reeves facing criticism from
It’s back. The government is once again attempting to give the police powers to search homes without a warrant. Buried within the mammoth Crime and Policing Bill that is currently making its way through parliament are a couple of clauses that give the police warrantless powers of entry to search and seize stolen goods. Ministers
J.D. Vance is just about the least popular conservative in Britain right now. The US Vice President’s treatment of Volodymyr Zelensky, and more recent leaked text messages discussing strikes on Yemen, have left Vance mired in scandal. Even in America, home of the MAGA movement, he is among the most disliked veeps in history, at
Kenny MacAskill has won the leadership of Alba and just to underscore how cursed that position is, he defeated his rival Ash Regan by 52 per cent to 48 per cent. Alba is the party founded by Alex Salmond following an exit from the SNP that wasn’t entirely amicable. (You might have read about it.)
Rachel Reeves’ Treasury team and the No. 10 communications staff should enjoy a drink tonight. The Spring Statement is a success, at least in the terms that matter most to the Chancellor. That statement is probably most important for what it tells us about Reeves’ priorities. She’s more worried about the gilt markets than about Labour
Amid the back and forth during today’s Spring Statement over who really crashed Britain’s economy, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) published a 180 page document that makes grim reading for Labour and anyone looking to get on the housing ladder. Labour was elected with a pledge to build 1.5 million homes during its term. Backing
There is perhaps no document more useful for understanding the state of the nation than the Office for Budget Responsibility’s ‘Economic and Fiscal Outlook’. The 180-page document, released as soon as the Chancellor sits down after a Budget or financial statement, can not only seal the fate of a government but also tell us where
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This afternoon, Rachel Reeves made good on her promise to deliver only one fiscal set piece per calendar year by announcing what is widely being considered a Budget… this precedes a spending review in the summer and an actual Budget in the autumn. The headline is that the Chancellor had to find £15 billion in
Is Rachel Reeves toast? Not according to her. The Chancellor delivered an aggressively self-confident statement about Labour’s spending plans this afternoon. Soberly dressed in maroon, she rattled through her speech like a garden shredder grinding up branches and reducing them to pale little woodchips. Anyone would think she was pondering a leadership bid. After listing
Jeffrey Goldberg laid a trap and Team Trump has blundered right into it. In Monday’s sensational story, ‘The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans’, the Atlantic editor rather pompously declared that he was withholding some of the information he had received on grounds of national security, contrasting his own propriety with the slapdashery
Oh dear. It seems that some Labour ministers are in desperate need of some media training. First, there was Seema Malhotra mixing up the inflation rate with interest rates. Now, Darren Jones – Rachel Reeves’ No. 2 – has managed to put his foot in it on her proposed benefit cuts. Appearing on Politics Live
You’re more likely to see a protest against Hamas in Gaza than in London. For brave, spirited agitation against this army of anti-Semites that murders Israelis and oppresses Palestinians, forget Britain’s activist class – they’re too busy frothing about the ‘evil’ Jewish State morning, noon and night. Look instead to the bombed-out Gaza Strip itself,
It didn’t take long for the Commons to spot the glaring omission in Rachel Reeves’s boast that the Office for Budgetary Responsibility (OBR) has increased its growth forecast for next year and beyond. The OBR’s growth forecast for this year has just been halved relative to its estimate made last October, down from 2 per
Rachel Reeves didn’t want today’s Spring Statement to be seen as a budget, but a budget it has turned out to be. The Chancellor has had to find £15 billion of spending cuts across welfare and the rest of government. Rising borrowing costs at the start of the year chipped away at her headroom and
Scotland’s universities are in a crisis of Holyrood’s own making. The Scottish Funding Council is currently discussing bailout terms for the University of Dundee, while other universities, including my own alma mater the University of Edinburgh, have announced large redundancy packages to try and balance the books. This financial pressure, while exacerbated by other factors,
Rachel Reeves framed her Spring Statement around the insistence that Labour’s Plan for Change was already working, which meant that any changes she was having to make today had to be framed as small ‘adjustments’, rather than the sort of change of course that would allow the Conservatives to claim she was delivering an ‘emergency
Any session of Prime Minister’s Questions that takes place before a fiscal event is merely a warm-up act that everyone forgets within seconds, but today Keir Starmer made that warm-up a bit more closely connected to the Spring Statement by insisting to the chamber that ‘I have full confidence in the Chancellor’. He was answering
Howard Lutnick, former CEO of the financial firm Cantor Fitzgerald, and now Secretary of Commerce in the Trump administration, has quickly attained the status of pantomime villain in Ireland. Last year, Lutnick criticised Ireland’s tax arrangements, saying ‘It’s nonsense that Ireland of all places runs a trade surplus at our expense.’ He increased his pressure
Rachel Reeves delivered some bad news in her Spring Statement: the UK’s growth forecast has been halved to 1 per cent for 2025. But the Chancellor revealed that the Office for Budget Responsibility has upgraded its longer-term growth estimates from 2026. Reeves also announced a benefits shake-up and a crackdown on tax avoidance. Here’s how
Prince Harry has had an eventful couple of years. There was the controversy-studded publication of his memoir Spare and a plethora of court cases, the highest-profile of which was resolved earlier this year. After all that, the Duke of Sussex might be forgiven for wishing to keep a low profile for the rest of 2025.
The University of Sussex, one of the leading temples of progressivism in academia, has been fined £585,000 for failing to safeguard free speech following the Kathleen Stock affair. Stock, a philosophy professor, was hounded out of Sussex in 2021 over her belief in biological sex. The Office for Students (OfS)’s investigation into the fallout from
Happy spring statement day, one and all. Today’s fiscal event – which is definitely NOT an ’emergency Budget’ – looks set to contain more gloom and doom about Rachel Reeves’ vanishing fiscal headroom. Looks like that £40bn October tax raid didn’t help much eh? So, with inflation still running high and the growth figures revised downward,
Ukraine’s worst nightmare is coming true: Vladimir Putin has presented the bill to end his war – and Donald Trump is forcing Kyiv to pay it. After 12 hours of talks with seasoned Russian diplomats in Saudi Arabia, the US delegation was so worn out and desperate for a win that they agreed to ease
The delegation Moscow sent to ceasefire talks in Saudi Arabia was clearly well-chosen. Grigory Karasin, for example, the former diplomat (including a spell as ambassador to the United Kingdom, 2000-5) and Sergei Beseda, head of the Federal Security Service’s Fifth Service, especially responsible for penetrating and subverting Ukraine. They certainly seem to be doing a
Clothing retailers have saved Rachel Reeves from having to go naked into the debating chamber. As the Chancellor rises to deliver her Spring Statement today, she will have the comfort of knowing that the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) has fallen from 3.0 per cent to 2.8 per cent – and unexpectedly at that. The main
As Denis Healey said: ‘when you’re in a hole, stop digging.’ It has been a furious day in Trumpland after White House officials accidentally added journalist Jeffrey Goldberg to a highly sensitive group chat on Signal about planned airstrikes in Yemen. Initially, the administration went on the offensive, with Defense Secretary Pete Hesketh calling Goldberg
