Come back non-doms, all is forgiven April 10, 2025 I write this sitting in the morning sunshine in a cafe in central Milan, where I’m one day into my new life as a beneficiary of their special tax regime for high net worth individuals, meaning that in exchange for a mere €200,000 a year I can protect my overseas sources of wealth and income [...]
If you think this government is pro-business, let me sell you Tower Bridge April 9, 2025 As the government continues to develop its response to Trump’s tariffs and the changing global economic order, the Prime Minister’s muddled thinking is troubling me. We now know that he wants to simultaneously “unleash” British business whilst “sheltering it from the storm,” like a parent who implores his child to “run, but not yet, and [...]
Trump’s trade war is a test for Starmer – I fear he’ll fail it April 8, 2025 Keir Starmer declared yesterday that we’re now living “in a completely new world.” He’s not wrong; Donald Trump has cut to shreds the established economic order and flung the pieces into the air. At this stage, where those pieces will land is anyone’s guess. So, Starmer is right to sense a moment. But what will [...]
Week in Business: Will Donald Trump’s trade war blow up the UK economy? April 3, 2025 Liberation Day, Independence Day, the greatest day in American history? Or the end of the global economic order and the start of a dangerous new world? In the end it was classic Trump, sometimes reading from an autocue as if for the first time, sometimes veering off script in erratic directions, calling out supporters in [...]
Tesla pays the price for Elon Musk’s politics April 3, 2025 People do strange things when passions are running high. Take the brave protester in Bristol, who last month felt he had to take a stand against the Bond villain/visionary entrepreneur (delete as appropriate) Elon Musk. Armed with an anti-Musk poster and a large metal pole, he set about smashing up a parked Tesla in an [...]
Are we all just winging it, all the time? April 2, 2025 There aren’t many decade-old Guardian articles that still resonate with me, but I can recall (and often revisit) a 2014 column by Oliver Burkeman. He was writing in response to the latest example of institutional failure that week (something to do with the bungled sacking of the New York Times editor) and he was able [...]
Labour’s own policies undermine their ‘welfare to work’ agenda April 1, 2025 The government has made many mistakes since coming to office, but the Chancellor deserves some credit for not breaking her fiscal rules at the first opportunity. The demands from various groups (and various wings of her own party) for more borrowing or exempting certain measures from the fiscal rules were ruthlessly ignored at the Spring [...]
Week in Business: Trump’s tariffs add insult to injury after Spring Statement March 27, 2025 City AM Editor Christian May casts his eye over the Chancellor's Spring Statement and asks whether Donald Trump has just derailed her agenda.
The Spring Statement takes us back to square one March 27, 2025 It might not have been a Budget, but the Chancellor may well wish that it had been. Constrained by her fiscal rules and her own insistence that yesterday’s statement would not constitute a major event, Rachel Reeves was left shuffling the few cards she held in search of a better hand. The search was in [...]
If the world really has changed, Chancellor, then drop your tax hikes March 26, 2025 Rachel Reeves has one of the most demanding, high profile and exhausting jobs in the country, and so – at the very least – we should forgive her for taking some freebie tickets to a Sabrina Carpenter concert. She’s had very few good weeks since entering office and the least she deserves is a good [...]
