As it backs the first one to open in 50 years, should the government shift its focus onto grammar schools? October 15, 2015 Phillip Bosworth, the honourable treasurer of the National Grammar Schools Association, says Yes David Cameron said the new Kent grammar school does not change policy. Well, England thinks it should do – as our polls from 2010, 2013 and 2015 clearly demonstrate. More than half of England not only wish to preserve the existing 164 [...]
Labour to City: We’re just not that into you October 15, 2015 This newspaper is not naturally sympathetic to Labour’s new policy direction. Plans for nationalisations, higher taxes and faith in a magical money tree have not gone down well in our editorial conferences. We have, however, kept an open mind. Maybe, just maybe, wiser heads were at work among the chaos of the opposition’s early days. [...]
My modest proposal to make petty regulation unenforceable October 14, 2015 The people of the United Kingdom, United States, and the European Union are all beset by armies of bureaucrats enforcing stupid, pointless rules. By “stupid, pointless rules,” I don’t mean regulations that prevent smokestacks from belching noxious smoke or ensure that coal mine tunnels are safe, but thousands of regulations that are petty in themselves [...]
EU referendum: The cost of the European Union has always outweighed its benefits – but fear could still kill Brexit October 14, 2015 This may surprise you. Right at the outset of our entry into the then Common Market, the economic assessment of UK membership was negative. Flash-forward to the present, and the academic evidence shows that the gains from the Single Market aren’t really sufficient to outweigh all the costs of EU membership. In the early [...]
The war on the driver is a war on freedom – and autonomous cars are part of the problem October 14, 2015 Freedom-hating municipal politicians have it in for the motorist: London has its congestion charge, Dublin is closing off ever more of its urban core, and Paris is now experimenting with sporadically banning all private transport. Young people, faced with turbo-charged costs, onerous restrictions and absurd taxation – not to mention rising housing costs – [...]
As the UK unemployment rate hits a seven-year low, should the Bank of England raise interest rates imminently? October 14, 2015 Andrew Sentance, senior economic adviser to PwC and a former member of the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee, says Yes. There is little indication that the UK labour market is softening. Employment has hit a new high on the data series which goes back to the early 1970s. Vacancies are significantly higher than before the financial [...]
China’s new middle class threatens Beijing October 13, 2015 Credit Suisse has published its 2015 Global Wealth Report. It is one of the most comprehensive tools analysing the distribution and changing nature of wealth across the world. Much of the response to the report has focused on the news that the global top one per cent are still rich and appear to be getting [...]
EU referendum: Twelve more reasons Brexit campaigners have momentum October 13, 2015 A couple of months back, I listed 12 reasons why the positive momentum was with Brexit campaigners, and in closing said I would return to give another 12. Well here we are again and I can tell you that I’m even more upbeat. Here’s why the sun is still shining even though the summer is [...]
Olivier Blanchard’s stopped clock: Integration won’t save the struggling Eurozone October 13, 2015 Olivier Blanchard, the recently retired head of economics at the International Monetary Fund, has something of a track record with his predictions. In 2013, he warned George Osborne that he was “playing with fire” with the UK’s recovery from the financial crisis. Austerity had to be relaxed. We now know that we were actually [...]
Betting on inflation: What we learned from our wager on the character of the UK recovery October 13, 2015 In March 2013, we made a bet via Twitter on what would happen to UK inflation as the economy started to recover. Andrew bet that, within 18 months of one-year GDP growth exceeding 2 per cent, inflation would reach 5 per cent or more. He thought that that would happen because economic recovery would [...]