Economy
The UK economy is suffering worse than most
Last week The Spectator highlighted new data from the OECD that offers a weekly update comparing a country’s current GDP…
Rishi’s nightmare
Fear of inflation is stalking the Treasury
The Covid recovery Budget
Barely a year has passed since Rishi Sunak’s first Budget. Its centrepiece was a £30 billion stimulus designed to calm…
Up Crash
The economy is tanking but stock markets are soaring. Why?
Is there any end to this tunnel?
We should talk about horizons, and the setting of desirable ones. A newspaper gave it a go the other day…
Rapid recovery means no negative rates – and a good time to buy a pub
It’s obvious from the body language of Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey that negative interest rates — much talked…
Amid the mayhem of today, an upbeat tale from 50 years ago
The online fashion retailer Boohoo is buying Debenhams without its stores and staff, confirming the demise of the high street.…
A salute to the ‘inessential’
A common sight across Britain these past ten months has been those rainbow flags fluttering in urban and village streets:…
Capital punishment
Why wealth taxes don’t work
The rise of the super pessimist
Covid isn’t the only thing to have developed a dangerous strain in the UK; pessimism has also mutated and is…
Barometer
Bad service Economic growth fell by 2.6% in November, the month of the second lockdown, compared with falls of 7.3%…
The long road to normality
The government’s most important economic policy is its vaccination programme. The speed at which people are immunised will determine when…
Why 2021 could be the year of economic Armageddon
The British economy is wrapped in bandages – we won’t know whether the wound has scabbed or turned septic until…
The magic money myth
There’s nothing new about ‘new monetary theory’
Ring out, wild bells
Save for those old enough to have lived through the second world war and its immediate austere aftermath, it would…
Barometer
Now and then Were households allowed to mix at Christmas during the plague? Samuel Pepys’s diary entry for 25 December…
Where is the Conservatives’ post-Brexit agenda?
What’s the point of Brexit? We are told it is to take back control, but that is a means to…
More Brexit talks are the worst possible outcome for the economy
Currency speculators at some of the hedge funds in Mayfair may be feeling quietly pleased.Trade experts will be relieved that…
Wealth taxes are not the answer to our financial woes
Today the Wealth Tax Commission, an initiative involving the LSE, has recommended a ‘one-off’ 5 per cent levy on the…
Goodbye to all that
On Saturday night we sat around the kitchen table, my family and I, and had a takeaway from the Turkish…
High and dry
Does it matter that Debenhams and the Arcadia group have gone under this week, taking 25,000 jobs with them and…
The public sector delusion
I wonder how much more money we will have to bung the teachers in order to inculcate within them an…
The aftermath
How can Britain recover post-Covid?
Trump’s story is still not over
The triumphant ululations of the almost unanimous Trump-hating media of America and much of the world did not clarify the…
The wrong reset
The psychodrama in No. 10 is badly timed. The government has used emergency powers to ban meetings, church services and…
