Treasury

In the latest issue of the magazine, a flock of politicians, commentators and economists offers George Osborne some advice for growing the economy. There are ten contributions in total, but here are three for CoffeeHousers’ consideration: Arthur Laffer Chairman, Laffer Associates Cut the 50p tax Reducing the burden which government places on the economy, through tax cuts, is the surest way to promote growth. I have never heard of a country that taxed itself into prosperity. Yet Britain last year raised the top rate of income tax from 40 per cent to 50 per cent. For more economic growth, and more tax revenue, this rate should be lowered immediately. This

One letter, that’s all it takes. After 38 City types wrote a letter to the Daily Telegraph this morning, urging George Osborne to drop the 50p rate of income tax, Westminster types have been chirruping on about it ever since. All three party leaders have had their say, except, so far as I can tell, Ed Miliband — although Ed Balls stood in for him anyway. Of all the responses, it is David Cameron’s that is the most noteworthy and perhaps even surprising. Speaking about deficit reduction on the Jeremy Vine Show earlier, the PM was unequivocal: ‘We have to try and do this in a way that is fair

George Osborne’s attack on the European Commission and his fellow finance ministers, for wasting time talking about a financial transactions tax when it is not going to happen, is quite a significant moment. It marks an attempt by Britain to knock this idea, which would hit this country far harder than anywhere else in Europe, off the agenda.   The Treasury, the Foreign Office and Number 10 have become increasingly exasperated about how this issue keeps coming up again and again. This feeling has been intensified by the fact that this issue is being discussed even as the crisis in the Eurozone is worsening by the hour.   Osborne’s remarks

The growth number for the third quarter of this year is out, and it’s a little bit better than expected: 0.5 per cent. Many economists were saying that we’d have to hit around 0.4 per cent to recoup the growth lost to the Royal Wedding and Japanese Tsunami in Q2, so we’ve managed that. But, that aside, this is not the time for party poppers and champagne corks. It may not be Econopocalypse, but it’s not Mega Growth either. We are still living in a bleak, borderline stagflationary environment. Besides, I still reckon that we oughtn’t get especially worked up about these quarterly figures anyway. For starters, the obsession over

The games have started a day early, folks. The latest quarterly growth figures are set to be released tomorrow morning, but already Ed Balls is waxing insistent about what they have to be: “Simply to stay on track for the Office for Budget Responsibility’s most recent forecast, already downgraded three times, we will need to see growth in the third quarter of 1.3 per cent. And to reach the OECD’s latest and more pessimistic forecast, we will need to see a figure next week of 0.9 per cent.” To be fair — and this is not something you’ll read often on Coffee House — the Shadow Chancellor has a point,

As George Osborne was addressing Tory conference, Standard and Poor reaffirmed Britain’s triple A rating. For the Osborne team, it sent out the perfect message — their deficit strategy is keeping the nation creditworthy. It was their piece of conference theatre for this year. The Chancellor’s address was a sombre affair. But, in some ways, it was his most impressive conference performance. It was a classic Osborne blend of politics and economics, but distinguished by a clear and precise analysis of why the economy was not recovering. Osborne’s big policy announcement was that the Treasury was now exploring credit easing. I’ll have more on this soon, but essentially the idea

Treasury Committee Chairman, Andrew Tyrie, has shaken the nascent Tory conference with a coruscating statement about the government’s growth plan and general legislative programme. He writes, in a detailed policy document for the Centre for Policy Studies that is political in its emphasis as much as it is economic: ‘There is much to do, and it is not just a question of gaps in policy. A coherent and credible plan for the long-term economic growth rate of the UK economy is needed. The Big Society; localism; the green strategy — whether right or wrong; these and other initiatives have seemed at best irrelevant to the task in hand, if not

The list of things that will be Big Politics when Parliament returns from its summer break is growing all the time: growth, the post-riot clean-up, the undeserving rich, multiple squeezes, and so on. But few will have has much everyday resonance as another item on the list: rising energy prices. This has been a problem for some time, of course, thanks to a toxic combination of trickle-down green measures, oil price spikes, and financial effrontery from the energy companies. But it looks only to get worse. This morning’s Telegraph reports on an internal Downing Street document — entitled “Impact of our energy and climate policies on consumer energy bills” —

Almost exactly a year ago, Tony Blair’s memoirs wafted into bookshops to cause a stir ahead of conference season. Now it it seems that Alistair Darling’s, due out next Wednesday, will do exactly the same. Judging by the extracts published over at Labour Uncut, the quiet man of the last Labour government will splash his simmering frustrations and enmities right across the page. Gordon Brown, he will say, became increasingly “brutal and volcanic”. Mervyn King was “amazingly stubborn and exasperating”. And Ed Balls and Shriti Vadhera will be accused of “running what amounted to a shadow treasury operation within government”. But the most eyecatching revelation, and perhaps the one with

First came the Germans and then came the Brits. The UK Treasury has secured an agreement with authorities in Zurich to tax the assets of UK citizens held in Swiss banks to reduce on tax avoidance and stamp out evasion. The deal will follow the lines of that which Switzerland made with Germany last month. The FT has details: ‘Taxes on future income will be withheld at a rate of 48 per cent, corresponding to the top 50 per cent rate that now applies to Britain’s highest earners. A one-off levy of between 19 and 34 per cent will be applied to all Swiss accounts held by UK residents, with the

The word flying around Westminster this evening is that the government is going to announce a fresh package to stimulate growth tomorrow. In line with recent reports, the expectation is that new enterprise zones will be unveiled. Enterprise zones are, of course, the linchpin of the chancellor’s current strategy, offering generous tax breaks for start-up industries, relaxed planning regulations and investment in state-of-the-art broadband, so this would not be a novel move. But an announcement would be timely nonetheless. Lamentable inflation figures released today are set to be joined by poor employment figures tomorrow, suggesting that economic and business confidence may be becoming even more tentative, especially in deprived areas. The grim continental situation is also a matter of grave