Conservative party conference 2015: Why the Tories’ infrastructure plans won’t cut the mustard October 5, 2015 Party conference season is in full swing, and infrastructure is at the top of the agenda for good reason. The announcement to restart the electrification of the two key railway lines last week, coupled with the chancellor’s four-point infrastructure plan announced at the opening of the Conservative party conference, show this government’s commitment to overhauling [...]
Conservative party conference 2015: George Osborne’s tax credit reforms are flawed – and his party is beginning to realise it October 5, 2015 Having won a majority, and with Labour’s new leader polling worse than any in history, one might have expected a jubilant Conservative party conference. But scratch beneath the surface in Manchester, and there’s great concern about the recent Budget’s changes to tax credits. With The Sun newspaper now campaigning against the cuts (having waxed [...]
Corporate tax is changing – but new rules will only work if there is worldwide cooperation October 5, 2015 Pressure on governments around the world to tackle corporate tax avoidance and make sure multinationals pay their “fair share” is mounting. The OECD’s Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) proposals, announced this week and set to be presented to G20 finance ministers on Thursday, have been specifically designed to combat this. In the making [...]
As George Osborne poaches policy from the opposition, have the Tories now won the centre ground? October 5, 2015 Laura Swire, director at Hanover Communications, says Yes George Osborne not only parked his tank on Labour’s lawn; he disembarked, helped himself to their porridge and then settled himself into bed. Labour has spent months telling the nation (the parts of it on Twitter anyway) that anybody who believes in prudent financial management or a [...]
Today’s tech Goliaths can’t rest on their laurels – The City View October 5, 2015 Rentpath. Web.com. PSINet. Wavo Corporation. Netcom On-Line. iStar Internet. Not exactly household names, are they? But these organisations were some of the biggest listed internet companies in the world, just two decades ago. According to research by venture capitalist Mary Meeker, they were all in the top 15 at that time, but have now been [...]
Putin will fail in Syria: The West must take a step back October 4, 2015 I feel as if we are in a time warp. To read right-wing commentators over the past few days, you would think the Cold War is back on – only this time we are losing. To hear them talk, we are living in a new age of Russian power. A triumphant Russia is calling the [...]
Why City Giving Day showed us just how much of a triumph the Square Mile really is October 4, 2015 Guildhall yard is pretty nippy at 8am. The wind whistles through the gaps in the buildings and there’s no sun to warm the paving stones. But on Wednesday last week, no-one noticed any of that – we were all too involved in the carnival of community work that was City Giving Day. We had businesses. [...]
The proto-Corbyn years of the 1970s were awful: We must fight what remains of them October 4, 2015 During the late 1990s and early 2000s, think tanks such as the IEA had a difficult time. We were told that the argument for the market economy had been won. A so-called neo-liberal hegemony had been created, and even a Labour government had accepted free markets. Meanwhile, water was being poured into the foundations [...]
List One Poultry? The government must not allow it October 4, 2015 One Poultry, the sand-coloured monolith standing on the junction opposite the Bank of England, has always been a building that has divided opinion. Prince Charles was relatively generous in likening it to a 1930s transistor radio. Others have been far less kind, and it regularly features in lists of London’s ugliest buildings. It’s [...]
With Europe at the top of the Tory party conference agenda, is Cameron’s EU renegotiation doomed to fail? October 4, 2015 Steven Woolfe, economic spokesperson for Ukip, says Yes. Really, is there actually a UK-EU renegotiation going on? You’d never have believed it from the news reports from Europe’s capitals, indicating that they have seen no official, written demands from the Prime Minister about which terms he wants to renegotiate. This in itself is emblematic of [...]