Rishi sunak

This week Boris Johnson is expected to announce an end to the national lockdown. However, with a return to normal still far away with the UK to move back into a stricter form of the three tier system, good news remains limited for the time being. That’s also the case with the Chancellor’s spending review. When Rishi Sunak gets up at the despatch box on Wednesday to announce his funding decisions, there will be hints of the difficult decisions he and Johnson face in the coming months and years as a result of coronavirus spending. Sunak and Johnson must decide whether to implement tax rises in this parliament, or fight the next

Some Tory MPs are hoping that Dominic Cummings’ departure from Downing Street will bring with it a vital lift to Boris Johnson’s premiership. Other Tory MPs have made up their minds about Boris already. Either they think he was always a flawed character whose only use was winning them the 2019 general election, a job long since passed; or they have been turned off by any number of things that have transpired in 2020. Basically, some Conservative MPs will be disappointed in 2021 when Boris turns out to be Boris; others are past caring. In spite of this, it seems almost certain that Boris Johnson remains in Number 10 for

It’s not axiomatic that taxes must rise to pay for the pandemic, if you seriously believe the surge in growth, jobs and prosperity that will follow the rollout of a hyper-efficient national vaccination programme will generate sufficient revenues for Rishi Sunak to stabilise the public finances, albeit at the highest level of debt ever seen in modern times. On the other hand, the Chancellor is surely pondering this question: in the current mood of public gratitude for the NHS and government support for the economy, there must be taxes I can tweak that won’t lose sackloads of Tory votes and might chip the peak off the debt mountain — so

Lockdowns are designed to temporarily delay the spread of the virus – but at what cost? This was the line of questioning that kicked off yesterday’s evidence session for the Treasury Select Committee, scrutinising the work HM Treasury has conducted in relation to lockdown. Chair of the committee Mel Stride asked Clare Lombardelli, Chief Economic Adviser to the Treasury, to comment on specific economic analyses conducted around lockdown restrictions, ranging from the closure of pubs, gyms and restaurants to ‘circuit breakers’ and working from home directives. It was quickly revealed that no analysis has been done. Stride’s interest stemmed from Sage meeting minutes dated 21 September, which referenced a ‘package

England has only been back in national lockdown for a matter of hours and already economic support packages are rolling in — not for the duration of this lockdown (furlough was already confirmed until 2 December) but for the months to follow after the country exits lockdown. Chancellor Rishi Sunak has abandoned a return to the jobs support scheme when lockdown ends — which sees the majority of financial costs fall on the employer — and instead decided to extend the furlough scheme across the UK in its most generous form. Furlough will run until March 2021 at least, with the government paying 80 per cent of workers’ wages for

The Bank of England has told commercial banks to prepare for the possibility of negative interest rates. This last hypothetical spanner in the toolbox of monetary stimulus — since rates are stuck close to zero anyway and quantitative easing through bond-buying programmes has diminishing effects — sounds weird and worrying but has already been in use in Europe for some time. Its intended effect is to push the commercial banks to lend more to business by penalising them for depositing cash with central banks. But what on earth does it mean for personal savers? The fact is that all monetary policy since 2008 has been designed to stimulate moribund economies

When Rishi Sunak was appointed Chancellor in February, he must never have imagined that his first address to the Conservative party conference would be made to an empty room. Nor would he have expected to have his entire speech dominated by a pandemic. Yet in his short, direct address, Sunak barely strayed from Covid-19. He reminded the public of the government’s vast interventions to curb the impact of the virus — and hinted at what steps might be taken in future as the Treasury deals with the aftermath of our six month spending spree. In a run-down of the many schemes — and billions of pounds — directed towards the crisis so

Home More than a quarter of the population of the United Kingdom (three-fifths of the Welsh, a third of the Scots and two-thirds of those in northern England) were put under harsher coronavirus restrictions. Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, amid a flurry of local lockdowns, found himself unable to state the coronavirus restrictions suddenly imposed on the north-east. He said ‘six in a home, six in hospitality’ could meet, though the law said that members of different households could not meet at all indoors. Universal laws, brought in by statutory instruments, prohibited eating or drinking in bars, restaurants or clubs after 10 p.m. In cities such as York and Liverpool,

The UK economy is no longer hibernating; it is ‘adjusting’. Today’s measures announced by Chancellor Rishi Sunak are designed to help an economy expected to limp through the coming months, quite painfully in certain areas, hopefully on its way to recovery. But are they enough? The role of the government and the employer has switched: the six month jobs support scheme will see the state contribute to workers’ wages if needed, but now the employer will be paying over 50 per cent of the costs, with the government paying 22 per cent. The critical difference is that employees must be working in order to receive the subsidies: a minimum of a third

It has been a long few months for the Prime Minister, who has seen both his personal and his party’s poll-ratings take a hit, as the government struggles with the coronavirus pandemic. However, there is one Tory whose popularity continues to buck the trend. Step forward Rishi Sunak. The Chancellor of the Exchequer appears to be able to do no wrong in the eyes of many, as he has splashed the cash to help Britons get through lockdown. Having made a bold stroke early in the crisis with the furlough scheme, which has cost over £30 billion so far, Sunak’s latest move is the introduction of ‘Eat Out to Help

A truism is emerging that the Tories’ massive public spending has left Labour politically with nowhere to go. This quasi-social-democrat version of conservatism supposedly leaves all of the opposition’s attacks on the Tories blunted – if there’s a Conservative government spending big, what does Labour have to offer? There is another way of looking at this, however. The current Chancellor’s spending plans could result in a perfect storm for Labour at the next election – a chance for Starmer to attack the Tories from both the left and the right. From the left, Labour can claim that they will spend money in a more ‘caring and thoughtful’ manner, something their