Everything from the latest opinion polls to the bookies odds points to a crushing defeat for the Conservatives at the next general election. However, if I were a betting man, I would put a few quid on Rishi Sunak remaining in Number 10. For a start, the next election could be as late as January … Continue reading Could a stronger economy still save the Tories?
Category: Politics
Latest misses show the danger of relying too much on OBR forecasts
It is always good to begin with some ‘good news’. The UK government recorded an unexpectedly large budget surplus in January, with revenues exceeding spending by £5.4 billion. This was £5.0 billion better than forecast by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). It would be daft to focus on just one month’s figures, but this … Continue reading Latest misses show the danger of relying too much on OBR forecasts
Did the Truss/Kwarteng mini-Budget really cost the country £ [insert gigantic number here] billion?
Speculation that Liz Truss is about to make to return to frontline politics has prompted a flurry of dodgy claims and daft statistics about the economic cost of last September’s mini-Budget. Here's a quick debunking of the most common. I’ll start with the biggest number: £74 billion (sometimes cited as £73 billion). This appears to … Continue reading Did the Truss/Kwarteng mini-Budget really cost the country £ [insert gigantic number here] billion?
The Autumn Statement (or ‘Revenge of the bean-counters!’)
If you believe that there is a £55 billion ‘black hole’ in the public finances, and if you believe this has to be filled with tax increases and spending cuts in order to reassure the markets, then Jeremy Hunt’s Autumn Statement was a reasonably fair way to go about it. But there are some mighty … Continue reading The Autumn Statement (or ‘Revenge of the bean-counters!’)
Plain-speaking Economics 