Economy

Is the Green party the most controversial force in British politics? It’s certainly giving Reform a run for its money. In the past few months, the Greens have suspended a former London Assembly member and two-time London mayoral candidate after he lamented that colleagues had denounced the Cass Review. After the local elections, one councillor sparked outrage by shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ to celebrate his victory. At the weekend, it was reported that three candidates for the party were no longer standing amid suggestions they made racist comments. What do traditional Green voters – those primarily driven by environmental concerns – make of these developments?   Now there’s the backlash to their scandalous maternity policy. In

There is a very big problem with Jeremy Hunt’s Family Home Tax Guarantee, though which he promises a Conservative government would not increase the number of council tax bands, carry out a council tax revaluation, cut council tax discounts, impose capital gains tax on sales of main homes or increase the level of stamp duty. It reminds voters of all the times that the Conservatives have jacked up property taxes in the past 14 years. No-one paid more than 4 per cent on any sale. George Osborne soon changed that When David Cameron become Prime Minister in 2010, stamp duty was levied at 1 per cent on homes sold for between

My colleague Ross Clark has shown how the Tories cooked up that £2,000 figure. They worked out the total cost of what they think Labour will do, using standard HM Treasury costings. Then, they divided that by the number of in-work households (18.4 million). This is a subset of the 21.4 million total UK households, so no pensioners or workless households. By choosing a smaller denominator, you concentrate the increase and conjure up a scarier figure. Then they quadruple-counted. So they took each year’s estimate for tax rise and then added them together over four years and – presto! – you end up with £2,000. But let’s apply a similar method to

So, we have a little more flesh on the bones of Labour’s energy policy, with the party giving more details of Great British Energy, the state-owned company it wants to set up to invest in wind and solar energy. But there are still gaping holes in Labour’s promise to decarbonise the electricity grid by 2030 – and save consumers money in the process. First to note is that Labour seems drastically to have toned down the claims as to how much its energy policies will supposedly save consumers. Until today it was claiming that it would save us ‘up to £1,400’ a year. Given that under Ofgem’s price cap the

When the Bank of England finally delivers an interest rate cut, can the Tory party take credit for it? Rishi Sunak thinks so. ‘We are the party who has committed to bringing down inflation, which is a necessary condition for bringing down interest rates,’ he told the Times in an interview published today. ‘And I think people can see we have delivered that.’ Of course no politician is in a position to promise or deliver a rate cut. That decision sits firmly with the BoE’s Monetary Policy Committee, who this month voted to hold the base rate 5.25 per cent for the six time in a row. But to be fair to

Junior doctors will be staging yet another walkout in the week running up to the election: five days in total, from 27 June to 1 July. It is the 11th walkout since March last year, as the union insists they will not settle for less than a 35 per cent pay raise. The dates are no coincidence: there is no moment more politically fueled than the run-up to polling day. This gives more weight to the government’s argument that these strikes have always been political in nature, and certainly resulting in political consequence: the NHS waiting list rose by roughly 500,000 after Rishi Sunak pledged to get the waitlist falling,

Speaking to business leaders in the East Midlands this morning, Rachel Reeves delivered a fairly uncontroversial speech. In her first major address since the election was called last week, the shadow chancellor insisted that Labour is the ‘natural party of British business’ (a point bolstered by today’s letter signed by over 100 business chiefs endorsing Labour). She said she wanted ‘to lead the most pro-growth, pro-business Treasury our country has ever seen’ – who could argue with that? She then went on to restate her commitment to fiscal discipline and a promise to make the numbers add up. While the dig at free markets won’t have been everyone’s cup of tea, it was

Another day, another big policy pledge from the Tories – and this time it’s a pitch for the grey vote. Rishi Sunak is pledging to cut tax for pensioners. A Conservative government would increase the personal allowance for pensioners in line with the Triple Lock by introducing a new age-related allowance. It is being billed as the ‘Triple Lock Plus’ whereby both the state pension and their tax-free allowance rise in line with the highest of earnings, wages or 2.5 per cent. As things stand, tax thresholds are being frozen for three years – which would not only drag five million more into higher tax bands but mean the basic

What is Labour’s tax-and-spend agenda? This is an outstanding question the party needs to answer before polling day – and Labour seems to know it. That is presumably why shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves sat in the BBC One hot seat on the first Sunday of the election campaign. ‘I totally agree I have to show the sums add up’ Reeves told Laura Kuenssberg this morning.  But what will be done to make that possible: higher taxes, more borrowing, or a reduction in spending? Unsurprisingly, Reeves did not want to make firm commitments in most of these areas. The shadow chancellor did commit though once again to not raising certain taxes.

This morning, Ofgem announced another reduction in the energy price cap from July. The new cap on the unit price of energy should see costs fall by another 7 per cent, taking £122 off the average household bill. And it didn’t take long for both the Tories and Labour to try to swing the news in their electoral favour. Only two days into an election campaign, the government will want to claim credit for today’s news: an opportunity to remind voters what successive Conservative prime ministers did to protect people from higher energy costs (of course, the Energy Price Guarantee was a large part of the reason markets rebelled against

It more than doubled its sales. It unveiled a new line of microchips. It promised to keep rolling out new products for the next few years. In the end, Nvidia, the chip manufacturer, delivered the kind of blockbuster results that traders and investors had been waiting for. Yesterday’s ‘Nvidia Day’ (as the company’s quarterly results days are now known on Wall Street) turned out to be better than even the most bullish investor could have hoped for. There is just one snag. The company is now powering the bull market. If anything goes wrong with its turbo-charged expansion, it will bring equities down with it. It’s great for the moment