Recovery could still be extinguished by Washington’s antics October 3, 2013 THINGS are either going very well or they are going very badly, depending on your point of view. The fact that it is possible to take such diametrically opposed views of the global economy is extraordinary, an unmistakeable sign of the extreme uncertainty facing the international financial system, courtesy of the preposterous shenanigans of American [...]
Cameron must now translate his vision into concrete action October 2, 2013 THERE is, of course, a place for soundbites. David Cameron’s speech yesterday had those in spades; some were even pretty good. The Prime Minister spoke up for the profit motive, for enterprise, hard work, improved standards in education and called for a land of opportunity. He defended business from the vicious attacks of Ed Miliband, [...]
US politicians need to grow up before growth is shut down October 1, 2013 IT is time for Americans to decide: do they want to be a social democracy, Eurozone style, with high levels of tax and public spending, or do they want to be a small state society, with low taxes and low levels of public spending? The partial government shutdown and the political warfare between Barack Obama [...]
Nice ideas, but chancellor’s plans are smudged by fine print September 30, 2013 FISCAL responsibility is back – or so the chancellor would like us to believe. While the Tories shamefully backed Gordon Brown’s irresponsible policy of running budget deficits during the boom years, they have learnt the lesson the bitter way. George Osborne is at pains to convince sceptics he wants not just to reduce the deficit [...]
Help to Buy isn’t the answer to the Conservative predicament September 29, 2013 WITH just 20 months to go before the general election, the Tories need to get their skates on. While many London-centric, private sector employed middle class professionals see Ed Miliband as an unelectable joke, the rest of the country disagrees. YouGov puts Labour 11 points ahead, suggesting a 100 seat majority for Miliband’s party, partly [...]
Time is running out to save capitalism from the capitalists September 26, 2013 CORPORATE Britain has a big problem. It has lost the PR wars. Even though firms create wealth and jobs and the tax revenues that pay for the public sector, as well as invent and produce products and medicines that improve our lives, they are, as a group, held in low regard. I write this with [...]
Britain’s ability to attract so much foreign capital has saved us September 25, 2013 IF you want to understand why it is so vital for the UK to remain an open economy, look no further than our front page story on who now owns British firms. For the first time, more than half of all the shares in UK-listed companies – 53.2 per cent, to be precise – are [...]
Miliband’s lurch to left is a recipe for disaster September 24, 2013 WE NOW know what Labour’s strategy to win the next election will be: shift to the left, bash business, stoke envy and jealousy, attack the City and come up with a raft of populist policies. It might even work. New Labour is well and truly over, an experiment now deemed an obsolete, almost shameful failure [...]
Labour’s plot to hike corporation tax is short-sighted nonsense September 23, 2013 WHAT, exactly, does the Labour party think it is doing? It wants to hike – yes, hike – corporation tax if it is elected in 2015, the latest of a long list of utterly destructive policies unveiled in recent days. The idea is that this will “pay” for a freeze in business rates on small [...]
What Germany’s shock election results mean for UK politics September 22, 2013 RULES are there to be broken in politics, like in everything else. It is often said, when discussing the UK, that there is no way the Conservatives can increase their share of the vote at the next general election. By 2015, they will have been power-sharing for five years, and have presided over austerity as [...]