Ten bold ideas to fire up the British economy August 13, 2026 City AM is about to take its traditional two-week break from printing the newspaper. Very French of us, I know. Don’t worry – the team’s not going anywhere and the website, app, newsletters and studios will continue to fire on all cylinders. But since this is the last Editor’s Letter I’ll pen before we fire [...]
The City is awash with talk of an early general election August 12, 2026 Every month since January 2025 we’ve run a nationwide survey of UK voters, with our polling partners Freshwater Strategy. The latest set of results, our 20th survey of voters’ attitudes, landed on Monday and I’ve been going through the data. Here’s an interesting development: For 19 consecutive months we’ve asked voters whether they felt the [...]
Burnham should go on a ‘cost of doing business’ tour August 11, 2026 An alarming note from one of the City’s top economists warns that October’s Budget could see taxes rise by almost the same amount as they did last year when Rachel Reeves cooked up £26bn worth of fresh hikes. Ruth Gregory, Deputy Chief UK Economist at Capital Economics, suggests that higher taxes “perhaps worth up to [...]
‘Social value’ procurement rules are an absurd waste of time and money August 6, 2026 Procurement is not a sexy topic, but stay with me here. The public sector spends around £400bn a year buying goods and services from the private sector. You can imagine the scale: NHS equipment and Ministry of Defence gear, police cars and IT infrastructure, immigration processing centres, security guards, construction projects and fax machines. It’s [...]
What Burnham could learn from BP’s pragmatism August 5, 2026 In 2020, BP unveiled a “major, necessary step in support of our purpose to reimagine energy for people and our planet.” The new strategy – “performing while transforming” – would see the firm “significantly scale-up our low carbon energy business” as part of a commitment “to become a net zero company by 2050 or sooner [...]
What are we to make of John Healey? Time will tell. August 4, 2026 Who exactly is in charge of this government’s economic policy? In a bid to find out, I’ve tasked two of our journalists to hit the phones, mooch around the bars of Whitehall and track down Westminster’s new power brokers. I’ll let you know what we find out, but he fact that the answer to this [...]
It’s hard to picture a more nightmarish vision of our AI future than this July 30, 2026 The optimistic case for AI is clear: incredible scientific breakthroughs, life-enhancing productivity gains and universal access to knowledge. What’s not to like? But items on the other side of the ledger weigh a little heavier: the erosion of jobs, the flattening of knowledge, unstoppable cyber attacks and social rupture. Elon Musk still thinks there’s a [...]
Silly season is upon us but politics will get serious soon enough July 29, 2026 In May, Reform MP Danny Kruger unveiled a substantial piece of work “setting out Reform’s plans for the centre of government, shaped by the research of the Preparation for Government team.” His 5,000 word article went into huge detail about the structural changes his party intends to make to Whitehall and the machinery of government. [...]
Burnham won’t be bold enough to make devolution shift the dial on growth July 28, 2026 Within a year of Cornwall abolishing the 45p additional rate of income tax and reducing corporation tax to 15 per cent, hundreds of entrepreneurs and businesses, including dozens of major financial and professional services firms, had relocated to the county. The influx of private sector dynamism delivered an astonishing economic boost to a region that [...]
Will Burnham take the pressure off business? Don’t bank on it July 23, 2026 Andy Burnham’s big ambitions come with a big price tag. Our analysis shows a £22bn black hole of unfunded commitments, including the costs of honouring decisions announced in the dying days of Keir Starmer’s government, such as NHS pay rises and the Defence Investment Plan. If you add in the new PM’s other great ideas, [...]
