Yesterday

23 Nov 2022

Tuesday

22 Nov 2022

Monday

21 Nov 2022

Saturday

19 Nov 2022

Friday

18 Nov 2022
Britain needs its missing workers back

Amid all the economic gloom at the moment, the unemployment figure is one bright spot. It is just 3.6 per cent, down from 3.8 per cent this year, and close to a historic low. But, as I say in the Times this morning, even this glimmer of hope is tarnished.The low unemployment number disguises how many people have left the labour force: more than 20 per cent of working-age Brits are economically inactive, meaning they are neither in work nor looking for it. More than five million are claiming out-of-work benefits. Even in the coming recession, unemployment won’t exceed 5 per cent, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility. (Remember how in the 1980s, unemployment went into double digits). There are, according to the Office for National Statistics, more than a million vacancies in the economy.

Britain needs its missing workers back

Thursday

17 Nov 2022
Three ways Hunt’s Autumn Statement will be judged

The government expects its Autumn Statement to be judged on three tests. First of all, how do the markets react?The decisions announced today by the Chancellor Jeremy Hunt mean that the government will be issuing £31 billion less in gilts – in other words, in borrowing – than expected after the mini-Budget. The initial market reaction to this has been positive. However, the new fiscal rule – to have debt falling as a percentage of GDP by the end of the five-year forecast period – is still relatively loose. Hunt and Sunak are relying on their credibility and their willingness to make difficult choices to reassure the markets.  Second, will the Statement be seen as fair? Even if the mini-Budget had not led to a spike in borrowing costs, it still would have been a hard sell.

Three ways Hunt’s Autumn Statement will be judged

Wednesday

16 Nov 2022
Nato to meet amid uncertainty over missile that hit Poland

Uncertainty still surrounds what happened with the missile that struck the village of Przewodów in Poland, six miles from the Ukrainian border, which killed two farm workers last night. President Joe Biden has said that the missile’s trajectory means it is ‘unlikely’ it was fired from Russia. At the moment, it is unclear whether it was a missile fired by Russian forces in Ukraine, one knocked off its course by a Ukrainian interception – or a Ukrainian air defence missile gone astray. There are reports this morning that the initial US verdict is that it was probably a Ukrainian air defence missile. But there is no getting away from the fact that if Russia was not loosing off missiles, this incident would never have happened – and there would not have been two deaths on Nato soil.

Nato to meet amid uncertainty over missile that hit Poland

Tuesday

15 Nov 2022

Monday

14 Nov 2022
Has the next cold war been put on hold?

The Biden-Xi meeting at the G20 seems to have been relatively productive, and has at least improved the lines of communication between the two superpowers. The Chinese readout has them declaring that the relationship is ‘not what the international community expects from us’.  The first in-person meeting between Biden and Xi since Biden became president does seem to have moved US-China relations on from the depths they fell to after Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan. In a sign of the relative détente, the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is expected to visit China in the New Year. But the aggressive Chinese language about the status of the island is a reminder of how problematic this factor remains to the relationship.

Has the next cold war been put on hold?

Friday

11 Nov 2022
Was Kwasi Kwarteng to blame for the mini-Budget fallout?

In his interview with Tom Newton-Dunn of Talk TV, Kwasi Kwarteng is clearly right about one thing: his sacking hastened the end of the Truss premiership. Sacking a Chancellor is a dramatic, and risky, move for a Prime Minister at the best of times. But when the Prime Minister and the Chancellor are known to have been in lockstep, it is particularly risky. Truss could never answer the question of why, if Kwarteng had to go over the mini-Budget, she did not.  What is also right is that Kwarteng was more prepared to talk about spending cuts than Truss was. If the mini-Budget had just been his, it would almost certainly have included the tax cuts but would also have had a greater emphasis on spending restraint – whether that would have been enough to reassure the markets without more specifics is uncertain.

Was Kwasi Kwarteng to blame for the mini-Budget fallout?

Thursday

10 Nov 2022
What Liz Truss got right

Soon after Kwasi Kwarteng’s not-so-mini-Budget, I found myself in conversation with former aides to David Cameron and Boris Johnson respectively. They were both irritated by the way Liz Truss was being praised as a ‘true Tory’ in some Conservative circles, compared with her more cautious predecessors. One of them remarked, as the other nodded, that people will soon ‘find out there’s a reason why we didn’t do those things’. Sure enough, the mini-Budget collapsed spectacularly and cost Truss her premiership. One of her mistakes had been simply to reject what had gone before, rather than to try to understand why compromises had been made. Her year-zero approach was one of the things that led to her being ejected from office so quickly.

What Liz Truss got right

Wednesday

9 Nov 2022

Tuesday

8 Nov 2022

Monday

7 Nov 2022

Friday

4 Nov 2022

Thursday

3 Nov 2022
How to balance immigration and jobs

Immigration is now at the top of the political agenda in a way that it hasn’t been since the vote to leave the European Union in 2016. Two factors have propelled it up the list, one very real (the small boats arriving across the Channel) and the other theoretical (economic modelling). The market reaction to Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-Budget made the Office for Budget Responsibility’s next forecast all the more important. In an attempt to increase economic growth, Liz Truss wanted to formalise a more liberal immigration policy. She wanted to show the OBR that her policies would produce decent growth, but her tax cuts would not be enough to do this. So she thought more immigration would help to increase GDP figures, as it had in the Labour years.

How to balance immigration and jobs

Wednesday

2 Nov 2022
Sunak and Starmer clash over ‘broken’ asylum system

Short questions are always best at PMQs – and Keir Starmer’s first one was very short indeed. He asked Rishi Sunak if the asylum system is broken as the Home Secretary had said – and if so, who broke it? (I wonder if Starmer got the idea from Nick Robinson’s interview with Sunak over the summer, in which he used a very similar device.) Sunak responded by arguing that Labour had voted against measures that would help deal with the problem and accused the party of having no plan to tackle immigration. But the Tories need to show that they are gripping this problem. The situation is now such that changes to the facts on the ground are needed, rather than empty rhetoric.After PMQs came news that No. 10 is reviewing every pledge that Sunak made during the summer leadership campaign to see if they are compatible with the new economic circumstances.

Sunak and Starmer clash over ‘broken’ asylum system

Saturday

29 Oct 2022

Friday

28 Oct 2022

Thursday

27 Oct 2022