Economy

Is there any word more laughably misapplied than ‘tsar’? We have already had an ‘antisemitism tsar’ and now we are going to have a ‘value for money’ tsar. Had you suggested to a Russian peasant that their monarch was value for money I suspect you might have ended up floating on the Neva River alongside Rasputin. Admittedly, that is not David Goldstone’s official title – we are supposed to call him Chair of the Office of Value for Money. But he does come with a CV that includes involvement in all kinds of public projects associated with tsarist excess. He was in charge of the delivery authority for the London Olympics, which

After the Office for Budget Responsibility’s assessment of the Budget was published on Wednesday, the cost of government borrowing started to rise. Yesterday, those costs hit their highest levels this year, with the 10-year gilt yield peaking just over 4.5 per cent and the five-year gilt yield exceeding 4.4 per cent, before settling slightly by the end of the day.  Labour need this trend to stop. The further borrowing costs rise and the pound falls, the more expensive Reeves’s Budget becomes, as investors demand a higher return for lending to the UK. Moreover, the longer jitters persist, the more certain it will seem that markets have not bought Labour’s fiscal

The UK economy may end up growing a bit faster by the end of this decade than the Office for Budget Responsibility expects – but if it does that will be no thanks to Rachel Reeves’s Budget.  The OBR’s projections are unambitious. This is their summary: ‘Having stagnated last year, the economy is expected to grow by just over 1 per cent this year, rising to 2 per cent in 2025, before falling to around 1½ per cent, slightly below its estimated potential growth rate of 1⅔ per cent, over the remainder of the forecast. Budget policies temporarily boost output in the near term, but leave GDP largely unchanged in five years.’

‘No plan for the economy’ is the charge being made against the government, as Conservatives take to the airwaves following the Budget. The problem is that, in this case, the charge is simply untrue. Labour do have a plan for the economy. It is called securonomics: a worldview set out in some detail by the Chancellor herself in the Spring during her Mais Lecture. And as Paul Mason put it earlier in the year in this magazine, securonomics constitutes a ‘coherent, well founded’ plan for the economy, rooted in a ‘clear political philosophy’. Securonomics will make Britain more lethargic, more risk averse Securonomics, at its most basic level, is a

‘Fixing the Foundations’ is the phrase the Labour government wants in your head after the Budget. But the thin gruel for dealing with the challenge presented by our ill-health and disability benefits system suggests those words don’t count for much. Apart from the defence of the realm, there is nothing more foundational to society than the way it treats its most vulnerable and most disadvantaged. Some people are, through no fault of their own, not able to work. Its the duty of the government to ensure that a safety net is in place to help these people; it must balance this by ensuring that the system is fair to the

No sombre music accompanied Rachel Reeves’s Budget, nor was there a reading from Corinthians. Yet, those details aside, one point is surely clear: Labour’s first Budget in 14 years was a requiem for entrepreneurial Britain. The four decades from the Thatcher reforms of the early 1980s, that turned the UK into one of the best places, at least in Europe, to start and build a company, are now officially over. Britain’s economy will be a lot poorer thanks to the Labour government. In Labour land, entrepreneurs might as well not exist True, the Budget might not have been quite as bad as some of the advanced speculation suggested. Even so,