Andrew Lilico

In her Budget speech today, Chancellor Rachel Reeves will have four goals. Two political – keeping her own job and keeping Keir Starmer in his as PM – and two economic – avoiding a financial crisis and getting the economy going. Her chances look poor on all of them. In the latest polling by Lord Ashcroft Polls, 76 per cent of voters expect the Budget to make them personally worse off, versus only 2 per cent who expected it to make them personally better off. Even amongst Labour voters, only 8 per cent expect the Budget to make them better off. As to making the country as a whole better off, only 11 per cent of voters expect the Budget to do that, with 72 per cent expecting it to make the country worse off. According to Opinium, 78 per cent of voters expect the Budget to be unfair.

Keir Starmer's 'reset' talks between the UK and EU are continuing. Having agreed in principle to renewing the post-Brexit diplomatic and economic relationship in May, there is now negotiation over the details. Naturally enough, some of these negotiations concern money – and specifically how much the UK will pay to Brussels. Many EU programmes require funding for complex administration – the processes and institutions agreeing, detailing and enforcing common rules – and set-aside funds to deal with contingencies. Obviously the UK isn’t seeking to rejoin the EU as a whole, so its participation in these programmes will be circumscribed and, accordingly, any financial contribution it makes will be likewise less than that of EU member states overall.

After Donald Trump’s Liberation Day, the US now imposes far and away the highest tariffs of any developed country in the world. In the process of doing so Trump has completely rejected the cornerstone of the World Trade Organisation: the ‘most favoured nation’ principle whereby tariffs have to be the same on all countries you don’t have an explicit trade agreement with. He has also cast aside the US’s system of free trade agreements – for example, imposing tariffs on Australia despite there being a decades-old Australia-US agreement removing tariffs. His reasons for doing this reflect his dissatisfaction with the way the international financial order has worked for many years.

With the Huw Edwards court case complete – and the disgraced BBC News presenter given a six-month prison sentence, suspended for two years, after he admitted charges of making indecent images of children – attention has returned to the fact that he could still receive a £300,000-a-year BBC pension. Many are horrified by this. There have been demands that some way should be found to withhold payment from Edwards. I disagree. Imagine if we did decide that those convicted of crimes such as Edwards' have no property rights A pension is part of the remuneration we receive for work done. It isn’t some extra perk or discretionary bonus handed to us if we have behaved well. Payment of a pension is a contractual obligation.

Almost everyone is aware of the concept of peak hours pricing. If you buy a train ticket to travel during rush hour it costs more than at other times. Few people object to this. Indeed, most of us think it helps. It means that people who don’t need to travel in that period will pick another time instead, so there’s space on the train for the people that do need to travel then. Peak hours pricing is just one very simple example of what economists call ‘dynamic pricing’ or ‘surge pricing’ – a system in which the prices paid vary according to how much demand there is. Dynamic pricing has become the latest object of suspicion following its high-profile use in the allocation of tickets for the Oasis reunion tour.

As the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) announces its interest rate decision today it has the chance to reverse the damage caused by its interest rate hikes. Rates have been fixed at 5.25 per cent since last August and the Bank has stubbornly refused to cut them. We're all paying the price. Those final rate rises were clearly an error The truth is that inflation is lower and has fallen much faster than the Bank used as its justification for raising rates. In August, the Bank’s model indicated that, even with interest rates raised to 5.25 per cent, inflation would be 5 per cent last year. It was actually 4 per cent. As late as November last year, the Bank forecast that it would be the end of 2025 before inflation returned to 2 per cent.

The week’s Autumn Statement was quite pessimistic about the growth outlook of Britain. The accompanying OBR analysis forecast growth will be below 1.5 per cent on average over the next five years, and even by the end of the period the growth in potential output is only up to 1.75 per cent. And on this the OBR is much more optimistic than some other forecasters, most notably the Bank of England. I think that’s wrong and growth is likely to pick up. That presents an opportunity for an incoming Labour government. Labour has spotted the potential here, announcing its own plan for growth. But it could be a lot better. Let me explain how. First let’s see why current analyses are too gloomy. Growth has been slow in the UK since the Great Recession.

Markets are nervous and they are right to be. The government has announced a huge, open-ended package of energy subsidies expected to cost over £100 billion but that could cost over £200 billion if energy prices rise and stay high. At the same time, the Bank of England is making large losses on its QE bond-holdings as government bond prices fall as an automatic result of current and future-expected interest rate rises – by some estimates costing potentially another £200 billion. This leaves a possible £400 billion hole in the nation’s finances. The government says it will spell out how that will be paid for in November.

New Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s first ‘fiscal event’ was always going to be quite provocative and exciting. But in the end it went quite a lot further than expected. Far from pulling back when faced with the practicalities of being in office, Truss’s new administration did everything it had signalled, controversial or not, then threw in some even more controversial policies just for good measure. The centrepiece is the huge energy price package. The government estimates that this will cost £60 billion over the first six months.