Economy

 The future trajectory of the Chinese economy is a subject for doctoral theses rather than casual column items. But the advent of the Year of the Dragon, at last weekend’s Lunar New Year, was greeted with such pessimistic commentaries that the natural contrarian should ask whether the consensualists are getting it wrong: maybe the dragon is merely marking a pause before martialling its mighty resources for the next transglobal burst of fire? The negative narrative goes like this. In spite of deflation in consumer prices, Chinese shoppers are frightened of spending. Despite central bank interventions aimed at boosting asset prices, the property market is crashing after the collapse of the

The collapse of the retail chain The Body Shop marks a new low in the sorry tale of Britain’s shops and their struggle for survival. The brand was put into administration by private equity firm Aurelius only a few weeks after it had been acquired from its former owners Natura & Co for £207 million. The demise of The Body Shop could see the loss of its 199 shops across the UK and an uncertain future for nearly 2,000 employees – but sadly it is only the latest in a long line of big retail closures. Only last month, Lloyds Pharmacy entered liquidation owing nearly £300 million to its creditors.

Britain’s worklessness crisis is getting worse. This morning the ONS released figures showing that 1.3 million are on unemployment. But that figure masks a welfare crisis that politicians are doing little to address. Unemployment only covers those actually looking for a job – the real problem is how few are. The true benefits figure goes unpublished and is buried in a password protected DWP database. Every three months the database is updated and we track the results on The Spectator data hub. It was updated this morning and shows the number claiming out-of-work benefits has hit some 5.6 million people. The increase is being driven by those in the Universal Credit (workless) category

It wasn’t so long ago that Orsted was being held up as an example of how oil and gas companies should handle the transition to clean energy. In 2009 the then-DONG (Danish Oil and Natural Gas) announced that it was going to turn around it business so that instead of earning 85 per cent of its money from oil and gas it was going to earn 85 per cent of it from renewables. It was an early mover in offshore wind – and, at least for some years, shareholders were richly rewarded. The share price marched upwards from around £19 in 2014 to a peak at £100 in early 2021. Increasing your money

What will Labour’s flagship promise be going into the next election? There’s a policy vacancy, now that the party plans to ditch its pledge to spend £28 billion a year on green investment.  This is not your average U-turn. This has been Labour’s big offering for more than two years. Yet today, Keir Starmer will ditch the headline figure for good – though his party still plans to usher in other parts of their proposed ‘Green Prosperity Plan’.  By abandoning the £28 billion promise, Stamer is putting to rest what had become a contentious topic within his own party. The spending promise – which shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves first committed to

Who cares about economic forecasts, which have proven to be about as useful as sticking a pin in a chart, blindfolded? But given their prominence when they foresee the UK economy performing less well than the EU, it provides a little balance to note when it is the other way around. A little over a year ago the OECD, like the IMF, was pessimistic about the UK economy, predicting that it would shrink by 0.4 per cent in 2023, and just about creep back into growth in 2024. ‘UK faces worst downturn of any advanced economy, OECD says’ was how the BBC reported it. The only bright spot was that,

I was on BBC1’s Question Time with Kate Forbes in Glasgow last week in which she was oddly loyal to the SNP government. She seems to have been the only member of Nicola Sturgeon’s government not to be deleting her WhatsApp during Covid and I suspect she’s appalled at the way Sturgeon & co placed secrecy at the heart of their Covid response. She said on Question Time that the way to grow Scotland’s economy was to attract people to come and work there. I put to her that having the highest tax rates in the UK (as Humza Yousaf has chosen to do) didn’t exactly scream “come to Scotland!”.

The Bank of England (BoE) has held interest rates at 5.25 per cent for the fourth time in a row. This is no big surprise: with inflation ticking back up slightly on the year to December (rising to 4 per cent) – continued trade disruption in the Red Sea last month is expected to have some impact on prices – it was unlikely that the Monetary Policy Committee was going to start a rate-cutting spree so early in the year. Instead, the hints are in the language used by the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) in its report. Markets were looking for clear indication that rate cuts are coming. The BoE has delivered this,

It is one of those occasions when you don’t need to wait for tomorrow’s newspapers to know what will be inside. There will be the usual photographs of empty supermarket shelves, along with the message ‘It’s Brexit wot done it’. Never mind that there are always some gaps on supermarket shelves and that the blockades on French motorways (as that country’s farmers demonstrate their deep commitment to the single market) are bound to impact on some supply chains. The reason for the gaps, it will be asserted, is that from today animal and vegetable products imported to Britain from the EU will require a veterinary certificate. From 30 April consignments will also be

What a shame we are not still in the single market, seamlessly exporting our lamb and whisky so it can be enjoyed in the finest restaurants in Paris. Or rather so that it can be burned and poured over the A1 autoroute. French farmers have blockaded roads with tractors and haystacks, set lorries on fire and are now threatening to re-enact the Siege of Paris by cutting off food supplies to the capital. They are protesting against red tape, environmental policies and what they say are cheap imports. And no, it isn’t just UK farmers whom they don’t like exporting food to Britain. Over the past week, they have attacked lorries

As an English teacher and sixth form tutor, I spend a lot of my time at the moment celebrating and comforting students as they hear about their UCAS offers. I try to reassure them when they are disappointed – which many of them were last week in particular, when Cambridge offers came out – that the system is flawed and far from always fair. Many of them this weekend will have realised just how unfair it can be, as a Sunday Times investigation revealed that British universities are paying tens of millions of pounds a year to recruit lucrative overseas students with far lower grades than those required of UK applicants. Up

I worry that my Burlington Bertie life in London’s West End offers a misleading picture of the real economy. Yes, boutiques and brasseries are busy, but what’s it like in outer boroughs and distant provinces? To take a single morning’s headlines, on the plus side there’s upbeat trading news from ABF, the grocery and Primark discount clothing retailer, which reaches consumers everywhere; and a prediction that energy prices will fall 16 per cent by April. On the negative, warnings that ‘more than 47,000 companies are on the brink of collapse’ (from insolvency specialists Begbies Traynor); and that world trade faces a second wave of Red Sea disruption even if Houthi

Should we be bothered that Hinckley C nuclear power station has run even further over budget (the latest estimate is £35 billion, nearly twice that quoted when the project was given the go-ahead in 2016) and that its completion date has been put back yet further, to 2031? After all, the whole point of offering French energy giant EDF a guaranteed ‘strike price’ at the then juicy rate of £92.50 per megawatt-hour (at 2013 prices, rising with inflation) was supposed to be to transfer financial risk to EDF and its financial backers. ‘It is important to say that British consumers won’t pay a penny, with the increased costs met entirely

Christine Lagarde, the president of the European Central Bank, has one of the most glittering CVs in European politics. The ex finance minister of France, and former managing director of the International Monetary Fund, earns £365,000 a year for running the show at the ECB. But is she any good? An internal poll of staff at the Bank, leaked to the press, suggests not. It found that more than half of employees rated her leadership of the organisation as either ‘poor’ or ‘very poor’. Her own people reckoned she put self-promotion ahead of the institution (‘Quelle surprise’ as they would say in her native country), pushed an irrelevant political agenda,