Government spending

Reversing our economic decline is not easy, but it is simple

Our immiseration came swiftly and stealthily. At the start of the 21st century, Britain was a prosperous country. Ambitious people fought to come here. We trusted that, over time, we would become wealthier – an expectation that had been accurate for most of the previous two centuries. Since the millennium, Britain and western Europe have pretty much stopped growing – especially if we ignore the impact of immigration and calculate GDP per head. Reversing this slowdown should be the top issue at every election, but it is surprisingly under-discussed. In theory, almost all our politicians want growth. Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves keep describing it, nasally and tautologically, as their

Was furlough the worst £70 billion ever spent?

Concorde obviously. The Iraq War perhaps? Or Scottish devolution? It is not hard to come up with a list of really terrible ideas that the British government has wasted money on over the last 50 years. Even so, and despite some tough competition, we now have a fresh contender. It looks as if the furlough scheme will top them all. The scheme ends today, with roughly a million people still collecting a slice of their wages from the Treasury. The total bill is set to come in at around £70 billion. To put that in context, for the same money we could have tripled spending on policing and just about

The difficult decision Rishi Sunak has to make

This week Boris Johnson is expected to announce an end to the national lockdown. However, with a return to normal still far away with the UK to move back into a stricter form of the three tier system, good news remains limited for the time being. That’s also the case with the Chancellor’s spending review. When Rishi Sunak gets up at the despatch box on Wednesday to announce his funding decisions, there will be hints of the difficult decisions he and Johnson face in the coming months and years as a result of coronavirus spending. Sunak and Johnson must decide whether to implement tax rises in this parliament, or fight the next