A corporatist economic growth plan that won’t rescue UK Plc October 30, 2012 IT is impossible not to like Michael Heseltine. He is an astonishingly successful individual, a great entrepreneur, a passionate speaker who genuinely cares about the poor, and a man who almost became Prime Minister. The tragedy is that while his goals are laudable the means he wishes to use to achieve them are generally deeply [...]
Frankenstorm: Don’t fall foul of the Broken Windows Fallacy October 29, 2012 THERE are times, fortunately not too often in these days of technological revolution and extraordinary scientific progress, that human beings can but bow to the forces of nature. We may be capable of flying to the moon but there are some natural events that leave us powerless and unable to control events. Everybody with family, [...]
How income tax has become such a nightmare for so many October 29, 2012 WHENEVER you hear a politician promising that a painful measure will be purely temporary, run for the woods, tin hat in hand. The most painful of all policies, the income tax, was first introduced in Britain as an emergency measure to pay for the Napoleonic wars. From the beginning, as Kwasi Kwarteng and Priti Patel, [...]
How income tax has become such a nightmare for so many October 29, 2012 WHENEVER you hear a politician promising that a painful measure will be purely temporary, run for the woods, tin hat in hand. The most painful of all policies, the income tax, was first introduced in Britain as an emergency measure to pay for the Napoleonic wars. From the beginning, as Kwasi Kwarteng and Priti Patel, [...]
Great boost to the economy – but public still feeling pain October 25, 2012 IT is not every day that the British economy gives us cause to celebrate, so we should all make the most of yesterday’s excellent third quarter GDP growth figures. The economy bounced back by one per cent compared with the second quarter, which was very good going by any measure. The figures need to be [...]
Coalition must not become complacent on economic growth October 24, 2012 UNLIKE some commentators, I don’t think David Cameron did anything especially wrong yesterday. He hinted at Prime Minister’s Question Time that the economy was improving; he didn’t leak the GDP figures. The statistics will be published this morning; so there is little point speculating about them. But it is worth noting that when the Prime [...]
Why Mervyn King’s defence of the politics of QE fell short October 23, 2012 MY biggest worry about quantitative easing (QE) is that it has blurred the distinction between monetary and fiscal policy. The Bank of England is financing a substantial share of the government’s expenditure – and the majority of its budget deficit – by buying gilts using freshly-minted money. There was a time when the monetisation of [...]
Why Mervyn King’s defence of the politics of QE fell short October 23, 2012 MY biggest worry about quantitative easing (QE) is that it has blurred the distinction between monetary and fiscal policy. The Bank of England is financing a substantial share of the government’s expenditure – and the majority of its budget deficit – by buying gilts using freshly-minted money. There was a time when the monetisation of [...]
Europe will become ever less relevant as century progresses October 22, 2012 ONCE again, the political establishment is debating Europe, and what Britain’s place in it should be. To me, the answer is straightforward: Europe will become increasingly irrelevant to the global economy as the century progresses, a tragic development which will see one of the world’s great civilisations increasingly marginalised culturally and geopolitically. Those who still [...]
We need to do more to encourage firms to spend in the UK October 22, 2012 THIS is the week Britain will finally exit its double-dip recession – or at least, so we must all hope. Barring the most extraordinary upset in the history of British economic forecasting, figures out on Thursday will show that the economy grew at least a little during the third quarter, making up some of the [...]