How London can smash through the brick ceiling limiting housing supply April 9, 2014 OVER four days, 300 people queued in a field by Heathrow to buy a home. It was 1964, and for £50 people could fulfil their homeowning dream in the soon-to-be-built suburb of Sunbury-on-Thames. The first 187 people did. Those odds don’t feel dissimilar to those faced by Londoners in today’s booming property market. The answer [...]
Letters to the Editor – 09/04 – Student migrants, Stamp duty, Best of Twitter April 8, 2014 Student migrants [Re: It’s a national scandal that Britain is driving away foreign talent, yesterday] Lord Bilimoria hits the nail on the head. The government’s ridiculous net migration target has had the perverse effect of forcing the Home Office to tighten up the rules on international students, who are presumably the very migrants we should be [...]
Blueprint for Brexit: Why post-EU prosperity isn’t unthinkable April 8, 2014 IT WOULD be easy to think that the debate about Britain’s membership of the EU has been done to death. Yet there has been relatively little serious discussion about the alternatives to EU membership – an urgent issue given the possibility of an in/out referendum in 2017. Outlandish claims that exit would be utterly catastrophic [...]
Why only a liberal vision will prepare Britain to compete globally April 8, 2014 HOW CAN Britain prepare to compete with fast-growing emerging economies? Jeremy Browne thinks he has the answer. Race Plan, released yesterday, is refreshingly radical for a book written by a former Lib Dem minister. Browne argues that Britain must not only learn to cope with globalisation, but embrace it wholeheartedly. And it is only through [...]
How Britain can unlock private capital for infrastructure April 8, 2014 WALK into China’s state planning agency in Beijing and you can pick up a 40-page guide to potential investment opportunities in the UK. That may seem like a small thing in itself, but it's yet another smart move by a commercially-savvy Treasury team bent on banging the drum for inward investment. Chinese investors have never [...]
Letters to the Editor – 08/04 – Stamp duty reform, Crowdfunding rules, Best of Twitter April 7, 2014 Stamp duty reform [Re: Why it’s time to focus on the real cost of the housing crisis, yesterday] The government should switch payment of stamp duty to when someone sells a property, not when they buy. First-time buyers could use the money towards a deposit, and those in the middle of a chain would not [...]
How QE has harmed the economy April 7, 2014 LET ME begin with a confession. I admire former Fed chair Ben Bernanke for undertaking quantitative easing (QE) back in 2008. It was a brave decision, which involved taking a bold step across an unknown monetary horizon. It was also the right decision for the time, as it prevented the money supply from collapsing – [...]
The real reason you should be depressed by political soundbites April 7, 2014 POLITICAL sound-bites can be excruciating. They hang around for a year or two before disappearing when they become untenable. Who can forget Labour’s “too far, too fast”, or the Conservatives’ “global race”? With just over a year to go before the general election, you’ll be depressed to hear the current offerings look entrenched. The Conservatives [...]
It’s a national scandal that Britain is driving away foreign talent April 7, 2014 THE NEWS that the number of overseas students at UK universities has fallen for the first time in almost 30 years is little less than a national scandal. When migrants are responsible for founding as many as one in seven UK businesses – according to the Centre for Entrepreneurs – and our companies struggle to [...]
India votes: Just three hurdles stand in the way of economic renaissance April 6, 2014 IT’S A heretical truth, but most elections don’t matter very much. This year, for example, for all the bells and whistles, the Turkish presidential contest, the European parliamentary elections, and even the US mid-terms will change little, leaving unaltered their governments’ economic and political trajectories in the world. In the case of Turkey, the recent [...]