There is some good news coming for your electricity bill next week. From 1 October the government is temporarily abolishing the 5% VAT charged on domestic electricity. The Treasury reckons that will save the average household about £45 a year. Unfortunately, on precisely the same day, the energy price cap is going up. From October … Read more
I went to school in Durham. Belmont Comp, then Durham Johnston. Durham High School for Girls was posh. Prim green uniforms. This will be the first year since the late nineteenth century that there isn’t a new intake at DHS. It closed over the summer, following a takeover by a Chinese education company. There are … Read more
Football is exciting. Accountancy less so. The transfer window has closed and Premier League clubs are once again spending extraordinary amounts of money on footballers, over £3 billion. That follows more than £3 billion spent in summer 2025 and just under £2 billion in 2024. £1.29bn (43%) of that money was transfers within the Premier … Read more
Commonwealth nations are pressing King Charles for some form of reparations for slavery. This is a question that isn’t going away. Predictably, outraged online right-wingers are outraged about this. But there are really two separate questions: should Britain pay reparations for slavery? And, if so, how? The first question should be the easy one. Britain … Read more
A few years ago I proposed Chadwick’s laws of Government: I was working for a DWP quango in 2010, and sitting on the commercial board of DWP. It was the age of austerity, and Osborne proposed huge cuts to Government to free up money for tax. I would be the first to admit that Government … Read more
The funeral 8th May 1980. The funeral of Josip Broz Tito, President of Yugoslavia. From Moscow came Leonid Brezhnev, General Secretary of the Soviet Union; from Washington, Vice-President Walter Mondale and the President’s mother, Lillian Carter. Margaret Thatcher came for Britain, Helmut Schmidt for West Germany, and from the other Germany came Erich Honecker. President … Read more
Last week I published a blog based on interviews with Iain Carlisle or the Grand Orange Lodge, and Doug Beattie, MLA. While talking to Iain Carlisle of the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland, he used a phrase I hadn’t heard before. “Economic unionists.” He wasn’t talking about people like himself. For Iain, Britishness is historical, … Read more
Another week, another set of shop closures.Retailers and restaurant owners complain about rising costs, newspapers publish photographs of boarded-up shops, and inevitably somebody blames the Government. There is some justification for this. In April 2025 the National Living Wage increased by 6.7%, from £11.44 to £12.21 an hour. At the same time employers’ National Insurance … Read more
I spent over a decade working in Government commercials. From outsourcing deals to NHS PFI. I was even a member of the DWP commercial board for a few years. There is one part of Government commercials which puzzles me: The Government insists that Britain exports very little military equipment to Israel. At the same time, … Read more
Andy Burnham and Treasury Death Grop aren’t the hot new indie band coming out of Manchester. It is a central part of the our new Prime Ministers strategy. He has declared war on one of Britain’s oldest institutions. Not Parliament, the Bank of England or Whitehall civil servants. His target is the Treasury. For decades, … Read more