Government

When you pay £8 for fish and chips, where does the money go? That's the question one restaurant has been busy answering after a customer left a two-star review on Facebook. It wasn't that there was anything wrong with the food – in fact it was 'lovely' and the staff were 'amazing'. But Debbie Davies still felt the need to complain to Oxton Bar and Kitchen over the price for the meal – £8. Happily, staff at the restaurant were happy to provide clarity: 'Ok Debbie. Where do I begin? Out of that £8, our nasty government is charging you 20% vat which we collect by law on their behalf, so we’re left with £6.66.

For anyone considering a career in economic forecasting, the Bank of England’s inflation report for August 2007 ought to be required reading. A graph illustrating its Monetary Policy Committee’s ‘best collective judgment’ of annual economic growth two years ahead is fixed around a central prediction of 2.5 per cent, with extreme boundaries of 0.8 per cent and 4.2 per cent. But after two years, economic growth was running at –5.6 per cent, and the economy had just completed its fifth consecutive quarter of negative growth. The finest minds of Threadneedle Street could not see two years ahead.

It is not usually feasible to put the great and good of the financial services industry together in a room and get them to agree on anything. Typically, they squabble like alley cats, arguing about everything on and off the agenda, even  the state of the weather. Occasionally, blows are traded. Yet a few days ago, I witnessed something of a financial miracle taking place in a swanky restaurant (1 Lombard Street) in the heart of the City of London. Fourteen individuals, representing different areas of the pensions industry, actually agreeing on a pensions agenda that the next government should follow. I was taken aback as I chewed furiously away on my vegetarian sausages while swallowing gallons of black coffee. Miracles, not misselling, in the City of London? Whatever next?

The government has made good on its Autumn Statement pledge to introduce a new ‘market-leading’ bond through National Savings & Investments (NS&I) – it’s just a shame the market is still in the doldrums. The Investment Guaranteed Growth Bond will pay 2.2 per cent to savers depositing between £100 and £3,000. Launching the NS&I bond on Tuesday, economic secretary to the Treasury Simon Kirby said: 'With its market-leading rate of 2.2 per cent, the Investment Bond will provide a valuable boost for savers who have been affected by low interest rates.' The Treasury also pointed out that the average three-year fixed-term product has a rate of 1.24 per cent so 'the new offering is significantly higher than others currently on the market'.

If you've ever rented a property, chances are you've a horror story or two up your sleeve. I remember the north London flat with mushrooms growing in the shower. Then there was the house in the south of the city with mildew on the bathroom walls. And the landlord who refused to return my deposit because I had a cat - despite telling me months earlier that pets were no problem. So I welcome the news that local authorities are to be given powers to crack down on rogue landlords who shirk their responsibilities. Under government rules, which came into force yesterday, landlords who commit a range of housing offences could be subject to fines of up to £30,000 (as an alternative to prosecution).

An email from the high-minded Carnegie Endowment, marking the triggering of Article 50 and the 60th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, speaks of ‘The Closing of the European Mind’. ‘The cult of the protective sovereign nation-state,’ it goes on, ‘will not provide convincing solutions to 21st-century challenges, which are inherently transnational.’ This is true, in a way. Lots of modern challenges cannot be solved by the nation-state alone. But is there anyone — even including the ‘Anywheres’ defined recently by David Goodhart — who would be happy to inhabit a space completely unprotected by a sovereign state?

Young people, their faces pressed against an estate agent’s window, gaze at all the lovely homes they’ll never, ever be able to buy. That’s the image the communities minister Sajid Javid conjured up while unveiling the government’s long-awaited housing white paper week. This snapshot of young housebuyers' despair was meant to symbolise a broken housing market where, on average, house prices are nearly eight times average salaries. 'If we don’t act now,' the communities minister said, 'a whole generation could be left behind'. So what did the government propose in its white paper for England, initially intended for publication late last year and then in January 2017?

Back in the 1980s, when I was embarking on a lifetime of sweat, toil and tears in order to bring home the bacon, I lived in a pensions desert. I couldn’t see, feel or feed one (a pension, that is) for miles around. During this decade, against a backdrop of privatisations, a rampant Prime Minister (Margaret Thatcher), Michael Jackson’s Thriller and Madonna’s virgins, I was privileged to work for four employers. A major chartered accountancy practice, a big and little publisher and a now defunct building society. Not one offered me the opportunity to save into a company pension.

If conspiracy theorists turned their attention to the economy rather than, I don’t know, aliens or Hillary Clinton, surely it would not take long for them to notice the peculiar rise in the tax take from VAT. VAT sounds innocuous enough, perhaps because no one really knows why it is there or what 'Value Added' actually means. But it’s not really innocuous. To a government that makes much of its supposed generosity on income tax through, for example, increasing personal allowances, VAT is becoming the back door money spinner du jour. VAT has all the hallmarks of a brilliantly unfair tax. Unlike income tax, it is often invisible or well hidden.

The exchange of letters this week between Mark Carney and Philip Hammond made it very clear who the supplicant was. The Governor of the Bank of England informed the Chancellor of the Exchequer that he was prepared to extend his term by one year. Carney pointed out that while the personal circumstances that had made him want to limit his term to five years had not changed, this country’s circumstances had. So he would be here a little longer. Things had seemed very different a few weeks ago, when Theresa May bemoaned the consequences of the Bank’s monetary policy in her party conference speech. ‘A change has got to come,’ she had warned. ‘And we are going to deliver it.

We’re continually assured that government policies are grounded in evidence, whether it’s an anti-bullying programme in Finland, an alcohol awareness initiative in Texas or climate change responses around the globe. Science itself, we’re told, is guiding our footsteps. There's just one problem: science is in deep trouble. Last year, Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, admitted that "much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue." In his words, "science has taken a turn toward darkness." Medical research, psychology, and economics are all in the grip of a 'reproducibility crisis.' A pharmaceutical company attempting to confirm the findings of 53 landmark cancer studies was successful in only six instances, a failure rate of 89pc.