Oct 26
This Sunday, we will all go through the ritual of putting our clocks back by one hour. I’ve always believed that this is a mistake, and that – at the very least – the UK should stay on GMT+1 through the winter. There seems to be an even stronger case for moving the clocks forward during both the summer and the winter. Read more
The return to growth in the third quarter (when GDP expanded by 1.0%) will be particularly welcome to the government. Ministers will breathe a sigh of relief at the ending of the “double dip” recession, and are entitled to enjoy the discomfiture which today’s figures will cause to Ed Balls and his fellow ‘borrow and spend’ merchants. They should not, however, allow this modest up-tick to obscure the need both for supply-side reform and for capital investment. Read more
In his conference speech today, David Cameron is expected to warn that Britain faces “an hour of reckoning”. “Sink or swim”, the Prime Minister will warn. “Do or decline”.
Regular readers of our research will recall that we said something remarkably similar last summer, when we published Thinking the unthinkable, the concluding report of our ‘Project Armageddon’ analysis of the true scale of the challenges facing Britain. Read more
No-one should be too surprised by the IMF’s latest downgrade of growth expectations for the UK, which certainly accords with projections that have informed our research for a long time now. But the downgrade – to contraction of -0.4% this year, and growth of +1.1% in 2013 – does highlight (embarrassingly, since it coincides with the Tory conference) the twin problems faced by the government. These related problems are low (indeed, at the moment negative) economic growth, and the emergence of clear evidence that the deficit reduction strategy is being blown a long way off course. Read more
For understandable reasons, attention in the Eurozone has focussed on the difficulty that some governments are having with refinancing sovereign debt, and on the need to shore up vulnerable banks. Read more
