Daft planning rules are pushing up the price of food in shops January 7, 2013 IF you travelled abroad over Christmas, you will have noticed that goods in shops are often cheaper than in the UK. A uSwitch survey cited by the Institute of Economic Affairs shows that a food basket costs roughly a fifth more in the UK than it does in Germany, France and the Netherlands. Once again, [...]
What we really need is to reintroduce capitalism into banks January 7, 2013 REGULATORS are a bit like retired generals, always refighting the last war. It will take another economic catastrophe before we find out for sure whether the global banking reforms, agreed at Basel yesterday, are truly fit for purpose. I’m not optimistic – no centrally planned, crude attempt at making a complex system safer ever works [...]
We need an export-led revolution to save the UK economy January 3, 2013 HAPPY New Year, dear readers. Let me begin my first column of 2013 with a plea to economists, policy-makers, commentators, politicians, financiers, business folk and everyone else who wants more growth and jobs. Please, please, spend less of your time obsessing about fresh ways to subsidise mortgages, pump prime the economy with more quantitative easing [...]
Editor’s Tribute December 18, 2012 AFTER an extremely successful debut appeal a year ago, we are delighted to be able to announce that our second Christmas Appeal has raised £1,025,718 for a very deserving charity. As you know, the money will go to Opportunity International, our chosen partner for the appeal, and help it in its wonderful job of providing [...]
Decline in homeownership is the result of bonkers red tape December 11, 2012 AS ever, the census is chock-a-block with fascinating statistics, including about the major demographic shifts that this country is undergoing. London has become a European version of New York, a cosmopolitan, global melting pot. It also reveals a number of worrying trends. Just 64 per cent (14.9m) of households owned their own home in 2011, [...]
Buoyant central London is in an economic world of its own December 10, 2012 IF you work or live in central London, you could be forgiven for not believing that the UK remains stuck in a nasty stagnation, let alone at risk of a triple-dip recession, as Vince Cable intimated yesterday. The shops are full, the tubes jam-packed and new skyscrapers are being built; Fortnum and Mason, the department [...]
How Londoners are driving away from the rest of Britain December 9, 2012 THOSE of us who work or live in London often have rather different habits than the rest of Britain. Transport is a case in point. No less than 51 per cent of the distance travelled every year by UK residents is as a car driver, and another 27 per cent as a car passenger. Rail [...]
Careful, chancellor: there is good austerity and bad austerity December 6, 2012 THERE are many reasons why the economy is underperforming. One of them is that George Osborne has been dishing out the wrong kind of austerity. Don’t get me wrong: the chancellor is right to want to cut the deficit by 9.2 per cent of GDP. But the speed and composition of the plans are wrong. [...]
It’s business as usual as Osborne fiddles December 5, 2012 WHEN expectations are low enough, anything short of a disaster is inevitably hailed as a good performance. That, I’m afraid, is the best way of looking at George Osborne’s Autumn Statement, and the main reason why so many Tory MPs were happy last night. There were no massive, pasty-tax style blunders; all of the bad [...]
A case of lies, damn lies and our rocketing national debt December 4, 2012 GO on, take the quiz. You know you can’t wait, so here goes. Which of these statements do you believe to be most accurate: a) the coalition is planning to cut the national debt by £600bn between 2010 and 2015; b) it is planning neither to reduce or decrease it; or c) the coalition is [...]