Economy

In what Communities Secretary James Brokenshire described as 'the biggest change to the private rental sector in a generation', the government has announced a ban on so-called 'no-fault evictions' of tenants by their landlords. 'By abolishing unfair evictions, every single person living in the private rental sector will be empowered', Brokenshire claimed. The Prime Minister said that 'Millions of responsible tenants could still be uprooted by their landlord with little notice, and often little justification […] This important step will not only protect tenants from unethical behaviour, but also give them the long-term certainty and the peace of mind they deserve.

IN ASSOCIATION WITH The “era of austerity is over,” the Chancellor proudly declared in his Autumn Budget on 29th October 2018. In the increasingly labyrinthine world of British politics, a lot has changed since this bold pronouncement: the Government has been defeated on critical legislative votes by margins of historically significant proportions; the Prime Minister has survived a vote of confidence in her leadership; 16 ministers have resigned; and MPs from both Labour and the Tories have formed the breakaway “Independent Group.” Needless to say, this has all occurred against a backdrop of profound uncertainty over the ultimate outcome of the negotiations over the UK’s departure from the European Union.

IN ASSOCIATION WITH Given the United Kingdom’s forthcoming departure from the European Union, few of us who follow the Chancellor’s Budget announcement closely were expecting 2018’s offering to be anything other than cautious, and so it came as little surprise that, once again, Philip Hammond has steered away from making any grand gestures. The unconventional timing of the speech – it was moved from the usual 12:30 slot on a Wednesday, after PMQs, to 15:30 on a Monday – meant that the day’s stock market session had closed when Hammond finished speaking, and so there is little to say about the reaction of the financial markets.

‘Uncertainty is draining investment from the UK, with Brexit having a negative impact on eight in ten businesses,’ says Carolyn Fairbairn of the CBI. OK, let’s pause for a chorus of ‘She would say that, wouldn’t she?’ But even if we shade off for ‘scaremongering’, her survey (of 236 firms) is bleak: ‘44 per cent of businesses with contingency plans intend to stockpile goods… 30 per cent intend to relocate production and services overseas… 15 per cent intend to move jobs…’ And I’ve seen no rival surveys that contradict the gist of it. So what can Monday’s Budget do to make business feel better?

UK spirits are key to our economy. Take, for instance, Scotch; sold in 200 markets worldwide, it supports 40,000 jobs and is our single biggest food and drink export, with 39 bottles exported each second. Or how about gin? The UK exported half a billion pounds of gin in 2017; a figure that could top £600 million this year, with markets including the USA, Australia, and Europe growing rapidly. The UK accounts for 67 per cent of all gin traded around the world, in what is a booming category. At Pernod Ricard, we employ more than 2,000 Britons, exporting the likes of The Glenlivet, Chivas and Beefeater to 160 countries globally, and selling to pubs, bars, restaurants and retailers across the UK.

Some jerk know-nothing writes in an unreadable American newspaper that Greece is back — Athens, actually. He would, he’s an American who probably thinks that the lack of starving beggars in the streets à la Calcutta in the 1920s means we’re back. Have another hamburger, asshole, and stick to Trump-bashing. I knew Athens before it went down, and the city’s not back, just we rich, who are back for the summer. Take my friend Irene Pappas, wife of a Golden Dawn Member of Parliament, who edits a national newspaper. She has three children, all doing brilliantly in their schools, but lives on her salary of €1,050 a month. I wish that some of those people I hear complaining about their lot lived on such a sum.

Contrary to the impression given by Jason Mitchell, Venezuela does not have a socialist economy (‘Maduro’s madness’, 25 August). It has a ‘mixed’ economy (and therein lies some of its problems; such as food hoarding by private companies hostile to the regime). The private sector is large, and involved in numerous sectors within the economy; food distribution, pharmaceuticals and so on. The US sanctions against Venezuela have always been about regime change, and these sanctions amount to a blockade of the country. US and European banks have refused to handle Venezuelan payments for medical supplies, and pharmaceutical companies have refused to issue export certificates for cancer drugs — therefore stopping them being imported into Venezuela.

This piece first appeared as the leading article in The Spectator.  Economies run on confidence — as Franklin D. Roosevelt observed when he told Americans, in his first inaugural address during the depths of the Great Depression in 1933, that they had ‘nothing to fear except fear itself’. If that confidence is lost, if people collectively start drawing in their horns, squirrelling money away because they fear turbulent economic times ahead, then recession can all too easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy. No serious economist would dispute this theory. The puzzle is why the UK economy, riddled with Brexit anxieties, is in such good health. The Dutch prime minister said we were ‘collapsed’.

Should we place faith in a survey, conducted in June but published this week, that says London is still the world’s pre-eminent financial centre? Yes, in the sense that no one challenges that long-standing claim as of today; no, in the sense that complacency would be a huge mistake while every financial firm operating in the City, the West End and Canary Wharf is busy making contingency plans for a bad Brexit outcome.

Would a cashless world be a better place, morally or fiscally? Matthew Taylor, in his relatively uncontroversial review of work practices and the ‘gig economy’ published on Tuesday, proposed that the £6 billion ‘cash in hand’ economy of payment for window cleaning, gardening, leaflet distributing and similar simple tasks should be regularised and brought into the tax net through the use of apps and other digital payment platforms. Would that really be a good thing? The first point to be made is that it’s probably going to happen anyway over the next decade — at least if we go the way of Sweden. There, cards and phones are almost universally used, even for the smallest transactions.

The UK economy is not in good shape. We invest a lower proportion of our GDP every year than almost anyone else, which is the main reason why our productivity is almost static. We have deindustrialised to a point where we do not have nearly enough to sell abroad to pay for our imports. We have a chronic balance of payments problem financed by selling assets and borrowing from abroad. As a result, both as individuals and as a nation we are getting deeper and deeper into debt. What growth we have is driven by consumption, financed by asset inflation rather than by exports and investment. On almost every measure, inequality is growing.

Ah, butter. Salted, unsalted, English, French, garlic, spreadable, straight from the fridge - just thinking about the many forms of butter make me salivate. Then there's what to pair it with - crumpets, teacakes, toast, jacket potatoes. The list goes on and on. So it comes as a blow to learn that butter is selling at record prices. Forget those low fat and faddy diets, butter is now a 'big trend globally'. That's according to Michael Oakes, a dairy farmer and spokesman for the National Farmers' Union. He told Radio 5 live this morning that one major driver is the decision by McDonalds to use butter in it products again, eschewing substitutes like vegetable spread.

‘Fred Goodwin off the hook again,’ declared the Scottish Daily Record. That neatly summed up one strand of sentiment behind the RBS Shareholder Action Group’s battle for compensation for losses incurred in the bank’s £12 billion rights issue in 2008 — preceding its £45 billion taxpayer bailout, in which any remaining shareholder value was largely wiped out. Investors who believe they were misled by RBS’s directors and the rights-issue prospectus have been campaigning for their money back ever since.