Fraser Nelson is a Times columnist and a former editor of The Spectator.
We learn this morning that George Osborne is planning a tax cut for the middle class, by raising the earnings threshold for the 40p tax. Of course, this was raised automatically in the Labour years (in line with RPI inflation) and even tricksy Gordon Brown never billed it as a tax cut. It’s only a
Let’s face it: George Osborne’s pledge to save £12 billion from welfare over two years was never really credible. He never told us where the savings would come from, and it seemed as if he didn’t really know. So tonight’s news, that the Chancellor has cut this to £8bn and given himself an extra year (or two) to make the full £12bn, is
It’s Budget day tomorrow, and as James Forsyth put it recently, George Osborne will never have a better time to do bad things. The Labour party is a complete mess, the quality of scrutiny will be pretty ropey. So if he’s going to pull a fast one, now’s the time. Gordon Brown’s budgets were famous
In a landslide vote, the Greeks have said ‘no’ to the latest EU bailout deal – and, perhaps, to the Euro itself. Alexis Tsipras will stay as Prime Minister, and treat the result as a mandate to negotiate a better deal. But that’s not how the Germans see it: their economic affairs minister, Sigmar Gabriel, has just told the Tagesspiegel newspaper
We learn today that George Osborne will say in his Budget that he’s using the fines he’s collected from bankers to build a memorial to terror victims. I find this juxtaposition rather odd: why link terrorism to banking? Why not just be honest: that any memorial will be funded from the the same tax pool
‘They are just as you hope they’d be,’ said my colleague Damian Thompson midway through our readers’ tea party today. I knew what he meant: we were actually getting to meet the people we work for, the people we imagine when we’re commissioning or writing stories. You build up a fairly clear idea what they’re
‘Hello. I’m lesbian threesome,’ the young lady tells Taki. ‘And I’m Mongolian rampage,’ says the young man beside her. We’re at Jeremy Clarke’s book launch in the Spectator’s back garden, to which he invited a dozen Low Life readers chosen for submitting the best stories of drunken debauchery. Some were summarised in Jeremy’s column last
In today’s Observer, Will Hutton unwittingly highlights the poverty of the inequality debate in Britain. Gifted writers like him bang on about private schools the whole time rather than look at the far greater problem: inequality within the state system. He devotes a column moaning about the schools which, I suspect, will supply a good
For most of my adult life, I’ve heard people say that Scots are – politically – different to the English. Not small differences, but fairly fundamental ones. This never rang true to me; I grew up in or around military bases which bring families from all over the UK together and never noticed any difference.
“Inequality has gotten much worse in the United Kingdom,” declared the Nobel laureate Joe Stiglitz when he was on Andrew Marr’s Start the Week last month (clip below). It’s one of those things that ‘everyone knows’ which is (to put it politely) not supported by the data. The latest inequality data came out today, taking
The Labour leadership contest is compulsive watching for conservatives with a taste in schadenfreude. Jeremy Corbyn’s inclusion reminds everyone how the party may have succeeded in expelling the electable Blairites, but not the unelectable lefties. Corbyn pulled out of being interviewed by Andrew Neil for BBC Sunday Politics today, citing a last-minute emergency. But we were treated to Diane
Pluscarden Abbey, just outside Elgin in northeast Scotland, is one of the most beautiful places in Britain. But to those who have visited in winter over the years, it has also felt like one of the coldest. After the war, when Benedictine monks arrived to restore what was a medieval ruin they slept with no roof, let
Reports of deflation’s death are exaggerated – sure, the CPI index has risen from -0.1pc in April to +0.1pc in May. But many important things are still getting cheaper: food, for example, costs 1.7pc less than this time last year. And the prices of larger-ticket items, the so-called ‘consumer durables,’ fell an average 2.6pc in May – the sharpest year-on-year
There should always be celebration when a sinner repents, and so it’s great to see George Osborne’s belated conversion to the cause of budget surpluses. As the above graph shows, he has not seemed in a rush to hit surplus himself – giving him many more years of increasing the national debt. James Forsyth summed
As the Chancellor prepares his post-election Budget, he faces an obvious opportunity. Throughout the last general election campaign, we heard from a great many people advocating higher taxes. And it’s not all vindictive: many, like the writer Polly Toynbee, would actually be liable for a higher tax on the 1pc. A significant number of wealthy people in Britain
Summer’s coming, and we’re looking for some specialist research help at The Spectator. We like to answer the questions other publications don’t, which means digging beyond the available social data and widening the parameters for debate. And we’d like some help, ideally from a specialist. You could be a PhD student looking for a few hours’ extra
So when Nigella Lawson popped up on television to give Britain’s results, what had Britain decided? The UK vote is a 50/50 split between jury and televoting – and the Eurovision authorities have just given the breakdown. They show that British televoters went for the cute, joyful Lithuanian duet. Our second choice was Poland, whose rather lovely Monika Kuszyńska did pretty
“Over the past five years, Britain has produced some of the biggest chart-topping acts on the planet from Adele to One Direction, Ed Sheeran, Sam Smith. But in nearly two decades, it has failed to produce a single winner of Eurovision.” – BBC 1 News, 24 May 2015. That’s one way of putting it. Another way is
‘Let me give you a Californian hug,’ says Steve Hilton, and I try my best to give him a Scottish one. We have met a few times before. He served as David Cameron’s chief strategist and his job was to keep out of the headlines and newspapers. In government, he took on a near-mythical status
“I’m the change candidate,” said Andy Burnham, settling down to the consolidation phase of his leadership bid. Chuka Umunna is out, so he is now the bookies’ favourite. He faces a conundrum: the brains of Labour want to tack to the centre, the money (ie, the unions) want to keep it to the left. So
