Money

This week, 17.5 million people on various benefits including the state pension and disability living allowance will receive a £10 Christmas bonus. It’s about time though, that Keir Starmer played Scrooge and finally abolished the bonus altogether. For, unlike their Dickensian forebears, poor pensioners this Christmas won’t be going without food or warmth. In fact, they have more than enough of both. When the Christmas bonus was introduced by the Tory minister Keith Joseph more than 50 years ago, the basic argument was that pensioners needed the money to cope with that year’s soaring inflation of 7.1 per cent. Although believing £10 did not go far enough, the Labour politician

I think we will look back on this week as one of the most pivotal of this government. It was the moment when Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves revealed themselves. This week’s Budget showed clearly what Reeves’s revealed preferences are – and what they are not When we were all trying to work out what Theresa May really thought about Brexit, her chief negotiator Oliver Robbins privately told his team they should be guided by her ‘revealed preferences’. This week’s Budget showed clearly what Reeves’s revealed preferences are – and what they are not. Growth is not, as the government keeps claiming, its top priority. Growth was downgraded for every

When the ubiquitous Green party leader Zack Polanski was on the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg show singing the praises of wealth taxes last month, he said something that got my spider-sense tingling: ‘This isn’t about creating public investment, we can do that anyway, we don’t need to tax the wealthy to do that.’ On the face of it, this is a slightly odd thing to say. Other lefties, such as Richard Burgon MP, have argued that a wealth tax could be used to give more money to Our Precious NHS or remove the two child benefit cap. Polanski is right to say that we can have more ‘public investment’

After the frenzy of the Commons, comes the poring over the fine print. Rachel Reeves’s Budget is being studied across Westminster, following a chaotic lunchtime in which the OBR’s response was uploaded online an hour before her speech. That speech was heavily pre-briefed, with few real surprises. Taxes were hiked by £26 billion – though not as much as last year’s £32 billion. The level of fiscal headroom has been doubled to more than £22 billion. Growth will be up this year from 1 per cent to 1.5 per cent – but down from earlier projections by 2029. ‘The Chancellor is relying heavily on tax rises towards the back end

Why are so many young adults not in education, employment or training? The latest statistics show that almost one million 16 to 24-year-olds are unemployed, or ‘Neet’, to use the inappropriately cheery-sounding acronym. Fractionally down on the previous quarter, this is still close to a ten-year high. The number of Neets has been consistently above 900,000 since early 2024, peaking at 987,000 – around one-in-eight young people – earlier this year. Falling out of education and employment in your early twenties can have a devastating impact. More than half a million of those who are not currently working or studying have never had a job. Neets face not just financial

Refugees could contribute £266,000 each to the UK economy: that’s the claim made by the Together with Refugees coalition and the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union in a report that says ‘fair and humane changes to the asylum system’ could benefit Britain. Unfortunately, something isn’t quite adding up. Spectator Verify has investigated, and we’ve found that not only is the £266,000 figure highly dubious, but that it’s reasonable to believe the policies proposed could have a significant net cost to the economy. The report makes no secret of the fact its proposals are extremely expensive The report, ‘Welcoming growth: the economic case for a fair and humane asylum system’, proposes

Andrew Bailey recently claimed that the Bank of England has saved the government £125 billion. The Bank’s governor was responding to criticism from Reform deputy leader Richard Tice that the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street has cost taxpayers a fortune. Just weeks earlier, Reform leader Nigel Farage questioned the very idea of central bank independence, suggesting he might replace Bailey if he became prime minister. So is the Bank of England too independent for its own good? Independence, once a shield against politics, has become a licence for technocracy The concept of central bank ‘independence’ has certainly morphed into something it was never intended to be. Independence wasn’t about granting unelected officials

Rachel Reeves billed her £38 billion in tax increases last year – the biggest tax-rising Budget since Black Wednesday – as a ‘one and done’ approach. As she prepares to deliver her second Budget in three weeks’ time, the Chancellor is set for a ‘rinse and repeat’ strategy, as she tries to wring similar sums from taxpayers. Reeves is increasingly expected to hike income tax by 2p next month. The Chancellor has informed the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) that a rise in personal taxation is one of the ‘major measures’ that she will announce later this month, according to the Times. The Budget watchdog will assess the impact of her

The Bank of England has held interest rates at four per cent. The Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) voted five to four in favour of maintaining the rate. There had been some speculation that the Bank might consider a cut to pre-empt some of the harshest measures expected in this month’s Budget, but the rate-setting committee chose to align with market expectations, which had widely anticipated a hold. Alongside the rates announcement, the MPC released their quarterly Monetary Policy Report which set the blame for inflation squarely at the Chancellor’s door. ‘Unusually large increases in administered price, such as Vehicle Excise Duty, and sewerage charges, are currently estimated to account for

Like the John Lewis Partnership he used to run, Sir Charlie Mayfield, who has just completed the government’s ‘Keep Britain Working’ review, comes across as terribly nice and civilised. It’s just a shame he can’t quite bring himself to put the boot in and deal properly with the problem of mass worklessness he correctly identifies. Had the job been given to a more ruthless business operator – perhaps someone from Amazon, Aldi or one of the other businesses which is steadily devouring John Lewis’s lunch – government might actually have a hope of a workable solution. Mayfield all but ignores the real problem: it has become far too easy to

That Britain has the least generous state pension in the G7 should be recognised for what it is: good news. The fact that it won’t be celebrated tells us a lot about the mismatch between policy and politics around pensions in the UK. The nature of Britain’s state pension isn’t an accident or a failure. It’s the product of deliberate design. For the past three decades, British policymakers have chosen to provide retirement income largely through private saving rather than tax-funded state benefits. They’ve done so quietly, but rationally. The alternative would be to copy France – a country that still treats the state pension as a social guarantee and