Economy

Just what were business leaders expecting when so many of them sucked up to Labour before the 2024 general election? Only Keir Starmer’s party, 121 of them declared in an open letter, could deliver Britain’s full economic potential. They swarmed around Rachel Reeves like drones around a queen bee. Richard Walker of Iceland even turned up to the party’s manifesto launch to praise it for its economic plans. They are not cheering now. Only 17 of the 121 who signed the 2024 letter are currently prepared to restate their support for Labour. The rest are moaning – many of them anonymously – that they are being killed off by hikes in employers’

The Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, made plenty of bold promises for her planned mansion tax when she announced it last year. It would be a victory for social justice. It would create a fairer housing market. And it would raise the money the government needs to fund public services. How has that worked out in practice? It turns out that Reeves’s levy on homes worth more than £2 million is already costing hundreds of millions before a penny of the new tax has even been collected. There shouldn’t be any surprise about that. Wealth taxes, which is what the mansion tax amounts to, always backfire. This is just the latest example. 

Few questions in economic history generate more heat than the one that seems, on the surface, most straightforward: Did European rule in Asia and Africa make colonised peoples poorer? The intuitive answer – of course it did – has animated a long tradition of scholarship stretching from Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery (1944) to Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1974). At its core, this tradition advances a surplus-transfer thesis: that imperial powers systematically extracted value from subordinated territories, concentrating wealth in the metropole while deepening poverty at the periphery. If true, this would neatly invert the predictions of economic convergence theory, which holds that poorer countries should, over time,

Nigel Farage told Radio 4 this week that he had ‘made a mistake’ in trying to pursue pro-family policies, concluding that this is simply ‘impossible in modern Britain’. The Reform leader might be forgiven for thinking so. The moment Reform moved into this territory with a pledge to end the two-child limit (among working British families it was later clarified), the politics curdled. Britain has, in practice, built a ‘hostile environment’ for family life Voters have long suspected any proposed softening of the cap introduced in 2017, and quite rightly on the grounds of fairness. But still more so at a time when welfare budgets are running away and working

In a relief for mortgage holders, anyone with a job and the government, the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) has voted 8–1 to hold interest rates at 3.75 per cent. That is despite rising inflation thanks to the Iran war, which is likely to hit Britain worse than almost anywhere else. Had it not been for the war and the disruption to energy supplies through the Strait of Hormuz, April was to be the month when the Bank of England finally met its 2 per cent inflation target. Instead, prices are shooting in the wrong direction as energy costs feed through to the wider economy – most notably

If the energy giant BP’s change of direction over the last year could be summed up in a single phrase, it would be ‘Back to Petroleum’. It has cut its investments in wind and solar power, scaled back its targets for renewables, and brought in new management more familiar with rigs and pipelines than climate change conferences. Today we see the first results of those efforts with a huge increase in profits for the company. BP’s strategy, it seems, is paying off. A quarter of a century ago, under its former CEO Lord Browne, BP snappily rebranded itself as ‘Beyond Petroleum’. It seemed a smart enough move at the time.

Wes Streeting has said women have been treated like ‘second-class citizens whose voices don’t matter’. ‘The blunt reality is the NHS is failing women and girls on even the most basic measures of healthcare,’ he added. The Health Secretary’s new women’s health strategy promises £72 million. The problem is that his new men’s health strategy promises £79 million. The gap is small, but quite enough to put him in trouble. Athena Lamnisos, CEO of a gynaecological cancer charity, has deployed herself across an eager press to protest the inequity. ‘Acknowledgement is not enough,’ she has said. ‘Ring-fenced funding is what we need.’ £7 million is an NHS rounding error, but