Fraser Nelson is a Times columnist and a former editor of The Spectator.
George Osborne rather glossed over the single most solid piece of good news in the Budget today: the Jobs Miracle. His pensions announcement means that tomorrow’s papers are likely to skip over it too. But it’s worth looking at – the government seems genuinely baffled as to why so many people are finding work. As
This will take a while to sink in – we simply have never seen this before in a Budget. George Osborne has just revolutionised the way pensions work; millions of people will have just found their pensions pot turned into a bank account. The punitive 55 per cent tax rate they faced if taking out
Listen — Fraser Nelson on what the budget means: listen to ‘Podcast: The View from 22 on Budget 2014’ on Audioboo
Today’s announcement of childcare subsidy, up to the value of £2,000 per kid under the age of 12, is welcome news. As The Spectator argued last week, this is perhaps the smartest single move the Chancellor can make – too many highly-skilled women want to work, but cant afford to as they’d face Europe’s highest
Today’s Sunday Times has news which would be laughable, if it were not to plausible. That George Osborne intends to pour some more petrol on the property market fire next week by extending his discredited Help To Buy equity loan scheme – in effect, a flagrant example of politicians using taxpayers’ money in an attempt
Ed Balls has announced today that he’d scrap even the tiny tax break that George Osborne is planning to offer next year, thus drawing another dividing line with the Tories. Cameron’s proposed tax relief is not about promoting marriage, or favouring any lifestyle over another. He wants to make the government more marriage-neutral. That means
[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_13_March_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Toby Young and Fraser Nelson discuss the last stand of Michael Gove”] Listen [/audioplayer]Tristram Hunt seems delighted today that Britain’s first profit-seeking school has been deemed ‘inadequate’ by Ofsted. The scores of council-run failing schools, several in his Stoke constituency, don’t seem to be worthy of his ire. But when a free school
For those who missed Dominic Cummings, recently departed Michael Gove adviser, on BBC Radio 4’s World At One, here’s the extraordinary transcript which confirms what Coffee Housers will have feared. He didn’t give an interview, but responded to the BBC’s questions (below) about Nick Clegg’s plan to give free school meals to all school pupils
Normally, we wouldn’t blog about a journalist moving jobs — but Tim Montgomerie is an exception. He is an actor in, not just an observer of, Britain’s political drama which is why it’s significant that he has decided to step down as opinion editor of The Times, to do other things (as yet undefined). Normally,
Will David Cameron send his kids to a state secondary school, as Michael Gove is doing? Today’s papers are following up James Forsyth’s suggestion that Cameron will slum it as well. But this story takes, as its premise, the ludicrous notion of a binary divide between private and public. In fact, anyone lucky (and, let’s
Meet Gemma Worrall, the latest unlikely worldwide star produced by social media. She is a 20-year-old beautician from Blackpool, now famous for tweeting ‘Why is our president Barraco Barner getting involved with Russia, scary.’ Cue 7,000 retweets, publicity from Australia to Brazil, and the inevitable vicious attacks. Haters have come thick and fast, she says, describing
Another day, another hole blown in Alex Salmond’s case for breaking up Britain. The IFS has today published its estimates (based on the OBR’s) for Scottish oil and gas revenues, and they’re less than half those of the SNP administration in Edinburgh. Salmond forecast oil and gas revenues of between £6.8 billion and £7.9 billion
listen to ‘Fraser Nelson on Britain’s 2014 Eurovision entry’ on Audioboo
When Barack Obama warned Vladimir Putin that “there will be costs” for violating Ukrainian sovereignty, I doubt the Kremlin worried too much. The Syria crisis taught is all about Obama and his ‘red lines’. This is a president who recoils at the idea of any new entanglement, whose attention is on the Pacific rather than
Any government can set out on a journey of reform – the question is whether they can stay on course upon hitting turbulence. The coalition is entering this phase now. Its flagship reforms, universal credit and free schools, are encountering difficulty. We all know about the welfare problems, but not much attention has yet fallen
If David Cameron were to divide Europe up, he’d make some crude distinctions. There would be the basket cases, like Italy, Spain, Greece, France — examples, by and large, of how countries should not be run. Then there’d be the former Soviet bloc, sceptical about Brussels because they recently escaped a remote, controlling bureaucracy and don’t
[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_27_February_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Fraser Nelson and Stephen Booth discuss Cameron’s Northern Alliance”] Listen [/audioplayer]For a Prime Minister seen to have no real interest or clout in Europe, David Cameron is doing pretty well – and far better than this morning’s newspapers suggest. He has built around him an alliance of reformers, which I describe in my
It’s that time of year again, where The Spectator‘s circulation figures are out – and our success continues. In October, I announced that we had more than one million unique visitors in a month. This week, we passed the 1.3 million mark with more than 3.2 million pageviews — something even I didn’t expect. Here’s how
How many FTSE 100 chief executives support Labour? How many FTSE 250 chief execs back Ed Miliband? Difficult questions for Chuka Umunna, Labour’s Shadow Business Secretary, in his outing on the BBC’s Sunday Politics today. Labour’s plan to jack up the top rate of income tax to 52 per cent (up from 47 per cent) has
Compare and contrast. We have Chris Smith, chairman of the Environment Agency, whose shortcomings can now be seen covering 23,000 acres of Somerset. And yet, when visiting yesterday, he did not say sorry (the word he used instead was ‘proud’). He says he sees no reason for him to resign, even when it is clear
