Economy

In his cover piece for this week’s magazine, Neil O’Brien describes the great divide between London and the rest of the UK. One of the main differences he highlights is in their economies. He says: ‘In inner west London, economic output per head is £110,000 a year. In an important sense, these people are not living in the same country as the inhabitants of Gwent or the Wirral, whose output is just a tenth of this.’ In fact, London is set apart not just from those two poorest areas, but every other area in the country. You see, the second richest area — Edinburgh — has an output per head

You certainly don’t need polls to tell you that it’s been a bad couple of weeks for the coalition – but we’ve got them anyway. Pete noted on Sunday that the government’s approval rating was at its lowest since the start of this Parliament, and it’s actually dropped another three points since. Today’s YouGov poll finds just 21 per cent giving the coalition the thumbs up, against 64 per cent who disapprove. That’s almost identical to the 20-64 split YouGov found for Gordon Brown’s Labour government back in January 2010. The below graph shows how public opinion has turned against the coalition over the past two years: Today’s poll also

Flitting through the opinion pages this morning, there’s one headline that stands out far more than any other. It’s on Charles Moore’s column for the Telegraph, and it reads, ‘Even I’m starting to wonder: what do this lot know about anything?’ What follows underneath is effectively a catalogue of the ‘small things’ that may accumulate and cause voters to question both the coalition’s motives and its ability. I’d recommend that you read the article in full, but here is one passage from it that deserves highlighting. It concerns Francis Maude’s jerry can line: ‘But now that I have heard the Conservatives’ private explanation, which is being handed down to constituency

Pasties and jerry cans — who’d have thought that yesterday’s politics would descend into a roaring debate about two such innocuous items? And still the hullabaloo goes on. Most of today’s front pages lead with one or both of the stories, although I’d say it’s the jerry cans that win out overall. Thanks to Francis Maude’s suggestion that ‘a bit of extra fuel in a jerry can in the garage is a sensible precaution to take,’ we’re seeing headlines such as ‘Pumps go dry as ministers provoke panic’. As with the pasty row, which James discussed yesterday evening, the political dangers of this stretch far beyond the actual matter at

The row over the so-called pasty tax is a proxy. It is really a row about whether David Cameron and George Osborne get what it is like to worry about the family budget each week.   In truth, I suspect that they don’t. But I think the same probably goes for Ed Miliband, Nick Clegg and the vast majority of journalists. Most of the politics of class in Westminster, as opposed to the country, is the narcissism of small difference.   The best thing the coalition could do now is hold its nerve. The Budget did reveal that support for it is shallow. But, as one leading pollster said to

Will George Osborne’s refusal to look again at high levels of state spending become the greatest risk to Britain’s economic stability? There have been plenty of rude comments about the Chancellor’s supposed tactical ineptitude in the weekend press, but he has still managed to keep on borrowing and have almost no one notice. Osborne’s iron commitment is to spending, and a programme of cuts which total just under 1 per cent a year. His commitment to deficit reduction is flexible, as his three Budgets have demonstrated: Osborne spent the election campaign berating Labour for its lack of ambition in halving the deficit in four years. He’s now doing it in

The Institute for Fiscal Studies’ briefing is always a good place to pick up a few interesting nuggets of detail about the Budget — and this year’s is no exception. Here are five of the most striking points from their presentation this morning: 1. Beyond the next election. In November, Osborne caused a stir by announcing that — in order to meet his fiscal target — further spending cuts would be needed after 2015. Annex A of the Budget gives some more detail on this, and the IFS has crunched the numbers even further. They calculate that the fiscal consolidation from 2009-10 to 2016-17 will total £123 billion and that

With the Coalition taking pre-Budget briefing to new levels you’d be excused for thinking there’s little we don’t know about tomorrow’s statement. But here are four questions we can’t yet answer, and that will be crucial to assessing whether this is a Budget for low-to-middle earners as the Chancellor claims:
 1) Will the new increase in the personal allowance be restricted to basic rate taxpayers? When the Coalition raised the allowance by £1,000 back in April 2011 they cancelled out the benefits to those at the top by lowering the 40p tax threshold. The second time around — the £630 increase that kicks in this April — they didn’t. From