John O'Neill

For almost two decades the productivity puzzle – the precipitous and ongoing drop in the growth of value that workers create – has had economists scratching their heads and chancellors tearing their hair out. It has meant permanent deficits, ballooning debt and falling budget headroom. Rachel Reeves said she would start to change that by fixing Britain’s economic foundations and getting the country growing again. But as the figures kept disappointing, the OBR reduced its expectation for the usual rate of productivity growth from 1.3 per cent to 1 per cent and Reeves lost her job before she could prove the doubters wrong.

Keir Starmer has set out his timetable for leaving office less than two years after winning a landslide 174-seat majority. He was voted in on a promise of change but failed to deliver it. He said his election would ‘stop the endless Conservative chaos’ but delivered Labour chaos instead. Election Starmer was elected in a loveless landslide, with the biggest gap between the share of votes won and share of seats won in post-war history. Labour got 9.2 million votes. In 2017, Jeremy Corbyn got 12.9 million. Popularity plunge His popularity soon fell – lower than any recent prime minister’s, and faster than any except Liz Truss. What made him so unpopular?

On Friday, news came that Mohammed Fahir Amaaz and Muhammad Amaad will not face a third trial for assaulting PC Zachary Marsden at Manchester Airport in a brawl which was shown – in part – in viral social media clips almost two years ago. The brothers were accused of causing actual bodily harm but two juries failed to reach verdicts on the charge and CPS said ‘any further retrial in these circumstances would be highly exceptional’. On Talk TV yesterday, Reform deputy leader Richard Tice said the decision ‘beggars belief’. Some online commenters have suggested the brothers were let off entirely. What happened? In July 2024, viral footage showed Fahir Amaaz being kicked in the head by PC Marsden while he was lying on the ground in a car park at Manchester Airport.

After ten months in office, Keir Starmer has promised to ‘finally take back control’ of migration – but what's his record so far? We don’t yet have the key figure for net migration (that’s due in ten days’ time), but other more timely data shows that the Prime Minister is failing to live up to promises he made before the election. This failure is most obvious on small boats. Starmer said he would ‘smash the gangs’ to stop small boat crossings. It hasn’t worked: record numbers are crossing the Channel. Some 11,574 people have made the journey so far this year, 25 per cent more than in the same period last year. Since the general election, just under 35,000 small boat migrants have arrived.

Last week the National Institute of Economic and Social Research said Britain ‘would be one of the countries most affected’ by Donald Trump’s proposed tariffs, with growth cut by 0.7 percentage points in year one, 0.5 percentage points in year two, and inflation 3-4 points higher. But research from Oxford Economics today suggests the impact would be ‘limited’, even in the worst-case scenario.  During the election campaign, Trump suggested putting tariffs of 10 or 20 per cent on all imported goods – except those from China and Mexico, which would be stung with 60 or even 100 per cent rates. At the moment, average UK tariffs on goods from the US are 2.2 per cent and US tariffs on goods from the UK are 3.3 per cent.

Having squandered the Conservative majority, Theresa May is coming under pressure to resign. It's not just from Jeremy Corbyn and opposition parties: Tory MPs are calling for her to go too, with Anna Soubry first out of the blocks this morning. So if she does resign (perhaps after the ‘period of stability’ she's called for) who might take over? Douglas Carswell says it's a straight fight between David Davis and Boris Johnson: https://twitter.com/DouglasCarswell/status/873054521068408832 But who do the bookies fancy? Although she won in Hastings and Rye, with a small majority of just 346, Amber Rudd has been written off by PaddyPower. They agree with Carswell: Boris is the 3/1 favourite, with Davis behind him on 10/3. Other prospective candidates trail behind.

Recent opinion polls have given the Conservatives bigger leads than they've had in years. So what if today's polls were June's General Election results? According to Electoral Calculus, Labour would lose 47 seats and the Conservatives would gain 51. The SNP may have a clean sweep in Scotland – and it still looks too early for a Lib Dem recovery. The net result? The Conservative majority would rise from 13 to 112 – plunging Labour into another leadership crisis.

Norbert Hofer has just conceded defeat in Austria’s presidential election after exit polls and interim results showed him losing by 47 per cent to 53 per cent. Victory goes to Alexander Van der Bellen, the 72-year-old former Green party leader. He has said the election result sends a message ‘to the capitals of the EU that one can win elections with high European positions.’ The last time Hofer lost to Van der Bellen, in May, his margin of defeat was just 0.4 per cent, or 31,000 votes. His right-wing populist Freedom Party brought an appeal and Austria's Constitutional Court ordered the election to be run again. But this time, Hofer seems to have lost by at least 300,000 votes.

We are ‘in uncharted territory with, effectively, a blank sheet of paper’ in front of us – and that means ‘there might be’ a way that Scotland could stay in both the UK and the EU after Brexit, Nicola Sturgeon said on the Andrew Marr Show this morning. So England and Wales would get what they want and Scots what they want – except for the two-in-five Scots who voted to Leave. But Ms Sturgeon had no suggestion as to how such a plan might work in practice, because it wouldn't work in practice. Scotland voted in 2014 to stay in the UK, and the UK voted in June to leave the EU. And EU countries including Spain and France don't want to give Scotland the choice to stay in.

Will Jeremy Corbyn have a shadow cabinet by the end of the day? By 9am there have already been two departures. As Isabel said on the our Coffee House shots podcast last night, a lot of Labour MPs think the mood of the membership has shifted after the EU referendum and they think this vote of no confidence could be coming at the ideal time. In the early hours of this morning Jeremy Corbyn sacked shadow foreign secretary Hilary Benn. Benn had been calling fellow members of the shadow cabinet to ask whether they thought he should call on Corbyn to stand down as leader; and whether they would join him in resigning were he to refuse.

The betting markets are all-but-ready to crown Boris Johnson as the next Conservative leader. After it became clear that Leave had won, the implied chance of Johnson succeeding David Cameron spiked to over 50 per cent – while the chance of George Osborne taking over plummeted. But these are the same betting markets that predicted a 14 per cent chance of Leave yesterday – so while this market is fun to watch, you might prefer to leave your money in your pocket.