Michael Simmons is The Spectator's economics editor
The welfare bill currently unsustainably stands at £314 billion. It is forecast to reach nearly £380 billion by the end of the decade. Rumoured Labour cuts, set to be announced as part of the Spring Statement on 26 March, have just been reported by ITV News and include plans for £6 billion of welfare cuts.
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On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Having returned from Washington D.C., Harry Cole reads his diary for the week (1:16); Zoe Strimpel reports on the Gen Z fliers obsessed with maximalising their air miles (5:37); Michael Simmons argues that Scotland is the worst when it comes to government waste (12:00); reviewing Quentin Skinner’s Liberty as Independence, Nigel
No country in the UK receives more public money per head than Scotland. An extra £2,200 is spent on every person living there than in England – and £1,900 more than the UK average. Yet public services north of the border are falling apart. Take education. Scotland spends more per pupil than anywhere else –
‘He was bad on trade, very bad on trade,’ said Donald Trump ‘with due respect’ to Ronald Reagan in a broadcast from the White House. As the President went on, the Fox News coverage included a ‘Dow Watch’ ticker, which showed the markets in freefall. Trump was speaking to confirm that 25 per cent tariffs
The number of young people not doing anything with their lives has hit its highest level in 11 years. Figures released this morning by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) on 16- to 24-year-olds not in education, employment or training – so-called NEETs – show that the number has reached just under one million in
Average gas and electricity bills will rise by £111 a year in April after the regulator Ofgem announced an increase to the energy price cap. The 6.4 per cent hike means the average dual-fuel household bill will hit £1,849 annually. The rise is more than anticipated, with analysts at Cornwall Insight predicting that bills would
When I was at Edinburgh University a decade ago, a girl with a thick Surrey accent stopped me as I walked back to my room in halls. ‘Rah, have you been to the reeling society?’ she asked. ‘What makes you think that?’ I replied. ‘You’ve acquired a slight limp.’ ‘It’s the cerebral palsy, luv.’ They’re
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On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Hugh Schofield asks why there is no campaign to free the novelist Boualem Sansal (1:26); The Spectator’s arts editor, Igor Toronyi-Lalic, reacts to the magazine’s campaign against frivolous funding and, continuing the campaign, Michael Simmons wonders if Britain is funding organisations that wish us harm (8:00); Lisa Haseldine reflects on
Rachel Reeves is having to borrow more money than even the worst estimates expected. Figures on the public finances, published this morning by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), show that in the financial year to January we borrowed over £118 billion. This is £11.6 billion more than at the same point in the last
Frivolous state funding isn’t only going to chancers, the plain lucky and the devious, but also to those who would see Britain – and the West – come to harm. Just over a year ago, the National Secular Society (NSS) compiled a dossier for the Charity Commission which called for 44 charities that had ‘fuelled
Britain’s workers have experienced strong pay increases for the third month in a row. Figures on the jobs market, just released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), reveal that pay rose 6 per cent in the final three months of 2024 – the fastest pace of pay growth in over a year. Strip out
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This week: The Spectator launches SPAFF The civil service does one thing right, writes The Spectator’s data editor Michael Simmons: spaffing money away. The advent of Elon Musk’s DOGE in the US has inspired The Spectator to launch our own war on wasteful spending – the Spectator Project Against Frivolous Funding, or SPAFF. Examples of waste range from
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It’s a double celebration for Rachel Reeves today. Not only is it her birthday, but the UK economy grew by 0.1 per cent in the last three months of 2024, according to the Office for National Statistics’ latest report. December, when the economy expanded by 0.4 per cent (the market consensus had been 0.1 per
All too often, the Prime Minister recently lamented, Britain’s public servants are happy languishing in the ‘tepid bath of managed decline’. There is, however, one area in which Britain’s public servants are dynamic, innovative and world–leading: at spaffing gazillions of pounds of taxpayers’ money on wasteful projects which are variously inane, insane and indefensible. The
Nigel Farage’s Reform party are now out in front at the top of The Spectator data hub’s poll tracker. The latest update to our poll of polls puts Reform one point above Labour – on average – at 25 per cent of the vote with the Tories in third place at 22 per cent. A flurry of
More migrants have illegally crossed the English Channel since 1 January than in any previous year for this period. So far in 2025, 1,344 migrants were detected crossing the Channel in small boats between 1 January and 4 February, beating the previous record of 1,339 in 2022. The figures published by Border Force – and tracked daily
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On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Loyd Grossman pleads to save Britain’s cathedrals, as he reads his diary for the week (1:31); Unity Mitford is a classic case of aristocratic anti-Semitism says Tanya Gold (7:47); looking ahead to another Strategic Defence Review, Harry Halem warns that Britain is far from prepared for the era of AI
The Pope hates gossip. In his Christmas message to his Vatican advisers last year, Francis warned that it is ‘an evil that destroys social life’. It’s not the first time he’s attacked rumour-spreading. He once compared gossips to terrorists because ‘he or she throws a bomb and leaves’. The Holy Father’s condemnations are of particular
One million people will migrate to the UK every year this decade. The result: the UK population will grow by nearly five million. Population projections, released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) this morning, show Britain’s population rising from an estimated 67.6 million now to 72.5 million in the middle of 2032 – driven
For nearly a decade, the Chinese Communist Party has censored Winnie the Pooh, owing to internet memes comparing the slightly rotund President Xi Jinping to the cheerful yellow bear. So, what happens if you ask China’s new budget AI chatbot, DeepSeek, about him? Computer says no. But how rigorous were DeepSeek’s creators? When we asked
