Economy

Over-50s could deliver pizza. They could try their hand at Uber driving. Or they could put in the occasional shift at the Amazon warehouse. Mel Stride, the work and pensions secretary, won’t have done his political career any favours this week with his suggestion that retired people who are struggling to make ends meet could earn extra cash in the gig economy. But whether voters in the leafy shires like it or not, Stride is spot on: many pensioners can, and should, work part time and they can’t be too fussy about what jobs are available. The Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is probably already wondering how quickly he can fire

Enough said about the fall of Dame Alison Rose; more than enough about the second coming of Nigel Farage. But one question remains: what happened to the Governor’s eyebrows? In former times, the fate of errant bank chiefs was unequivocally a matter for the Bank of England. Careers were sunk or salvaged by a twitch of the governor’s supercilia. When Bob Diamond of Barclays was under fire in 2012 after the rate-fixing scandal and the Barclays board tried to save him by offering the head of chairman Marcus Agiusinstead, the then governor, Mervyn King, ordered Agius to unresign and fire Diamond – while the chancellor George Osborne denied any part,

The current government will do almost anything to avoid reforming welfare or the NHS. Last month, we were informed school leavers might be allowed to train as doctors without a traditional medical degree in an ill-conceived cosplay scheme. And it was reported yesterday that GPs may be encouraged to refer patients to life coaches, rather than issue sick notes, to help people get back into work. Between the starts of 2019 and 2023, the number of economically inactive working adults with depression or anxiety jumped by 40 per cent to hit 1.35 million. There are 400,000 more people on long-term sickness than before the pandemic. Yet rather than hiring more

Most people will not see their estates subject to inheritance tax. Still, most people oppose the principle of the tax altogether. New polling from Ipsos confirms, once again, how loathed the death tax is: 23 per cent of people perceive the tax as ‘fair’ (tied for the lowest ranking, alongside stamp duty). Meanwhile 43 per cent of people see the tax as ‘unfair’ (the highest ranking, even more hated than income tax paid by the lowest earners). It won’t go down well, then, that almost 50,000 additional households are expected to be dragged in to paying inheritance tax, nearly four times the expected increase according to HMRC forecasts seen by the Daily Telegraph.

If you want a laugh, I recommend an article which appeared in the March 1998 issue of Scientific American, ‘The End of Cheap Oil’. In it, oil geologists Colin J Campbell and Jean H Laherrere used terribly clever models to tell us that global oil production would peak around 2004-05, after which we would be trying to rely on an ever-dwindling, ever more expensive supply of oil, with huge consequences for the global economy. Campbell was so sure of his thesis that three years later he formed the Association for the Study of Peak Oil, coining a new term which would be thrown about over the next couple of decades.

When Dame Alison Rose was a frontrunner for chief executive of NatWest in 2019, I described her as ‘sensible’ and ‘unspun’ and said I hoped she’d get the job. That view was based partly on personal impression and partly on a prejudice of mine, expressed consistently since the 2008 crisis, that women often make better senior bankers than men, being less prone to macho risk-taking. Rose has now yielded to political pressure and resigned over her role in the false reporting of the decision to ‘exit’ Nigel Farage as a customer of NatWest’s subsidiary, Coutts. But this column has never been in the business of following the baying crowd in

Not for the first time in his colourful life, the perennial rebel Nigel Farage has the establishment on the run. This time it is the financial establishment and its media allies. The former Ukip leader has already garnered apologies over conduct or coverage from NatWest, which owns Coutts bank, the high-profile podcaster and former BBC man Jon Sopel, the BBC’s business editor Simon Jack and the chief executive of BBC News Deborah Turness. Farage is currently circling NatWest chief executive Dame Alison Rose in the manner of a hungry shark who has scented blood in the water. Not his, but hers. Dame Alison appears to be Farage’s prime suspect in

It will trash the brand. It will alienate its core users. And relaunching and rebranding a failing business almost never works. As Elon Musk drops the Twitter blue bird and swaps it for an X, we will hear plenty of arguments about why the world’s second richest man has made another critical commercial mistake. In fairness, some of them have a point. Yet Musk’s critics are making a mistake by missing the real purpose of the new name. X only exists to kill off Twitter. The rebrand was announced in a typically haphazard way. As of today, Twitter will be known simply as X. It was Musk’s boldest move yet

Two by-election defeats have made it a miserable morning for the Tories, even if they did manage to cling on in Uxbridge. But they’ve had better-than-expected news on another front. This morning’s update from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) reveals that public sector net borrowing has come in lower than what was forecast at the March Budget: £18.5 billion in June, compared to the Office for Budget Responsibility’s (OBR) prediction of £21.1 billion. Borrowing last month was £0.4 billion less than the year before, while interest payments on government debt saw a huge drop: from £20 billion last June down to £12.5 billion this June. Don’t be fooled: these are still

Today and tomorrow’s strike by NHS consultants underlines how industrial action has become the preserve of the well-paid. The consultants appealing for public sympathy were, according to NHS figures, paid a mean basic salary of more than £97,000 in the year to March. On top of this they received mean overtime and bonus payments of close to £30,000, bringing their total mean earnings to more than £127,000. Yet not all of these were working full-time. The mean basic salary for full-time staff was more than £105,000. And of course, on top of this they have been offered a pay rise of 6 per cent – which they have rejected. The

Nigel Farage has been cancelled by his bank because their reputation risk committee doesn’t approve of his political views and has branded him a ‘chancer’ and ‘grifter’. This matters to him because, having been cancelled by one bank, it is almost impossible to get an account with another – you are obliged upon opening a new account to reveal if you have ever been turned down or thrown out of a bank before.  Reputation risk has become all the rage in recent years as companies, governments and individuals scramble to protect themselves from the fate suffered by trial by media and powerful regulators. PR firms and management consultancies charge high fees to