Universities are failing us: they’re expensive, ill-equipped and entrench ‘left-behind’ towns in the UK
A record number of students have applied for university, with just over 300,000 submitting applications, according to UCAS. This represents 44 per cent of the entire year group, up 10 per cent on what was then a new record total in 2020. One of the main drivers has been the uncertainty the pandemic has created […]
Boris Johnson has sown dangerous ambiguity over Covid rules with mixed messaging for Freedom Day
Sixty years ago, Daniel Ellsberg, as a graduate student at Harvard, wrote a now-seminal paper on behavioural economics. The conclusions of “Risk, ambiguity and the Savage axioms” pose a fundamental challenge to the conventional economic model of rational choice, as well as the Government’s current Covid strategy. Despite its seemingly esoteric nature, an experiment carried […]
Rishi Sunak vs Boris Johnson: to spend or not to spend?
Rishi Sunak has directed his energy into recasting the Treasury back to its traditional role – the guardian of the public finances. The Chancellor notched up a substantial victory after education recovery tsar, Kevan Collins, resigned earlier this month, after his demand for £15 billion for catch-up programmes in schools was beaten down to a […]
Boris Johnson’s political capital to extend Covid restrictions is waning as more Brits are vaccinated
Millions of Britons piled into social gatherings up and down the country to watch our boys notch up a notable triumph over the Croatian football team on Sunday. We will never know for sure how many of these were compliant with the current Covid regulations, but it is a fair bet that a sizeable minority […]
Student loans perpetuate a broken financial system, it’s time for them to go
Whitehall is preparing for a major tussle over student loans, with the Treasury increasingly concerned about the growing burden and its impact on the nation’s finances. The principle of a student loan seems simple: take one out to cover the cost of your time at university and pay it back when you start to earn […]
Longer lockdown based on hypotheticals would come with serious economic costs
The penny is finally beginning to drop. The health service’s focus on giving absolute priority to the treatment of Covid-19 generates costs and problems on a massive scale. Chris Hopson, chief executive of NHS Providers, has warned of the huge pressures on the NHS from the backlog of non-Covid cases. Many of these are life-threatening […]
Businesses face a fresh tipping point of staff shortages and wage hikes
For years, inflation has not been an issue. Since the late 1990s, annual inflation in the UK has averaged 2 per cent, with a peak of just over 4 per cent. In the US, there was a similar story, with even less variability. This is in stark contrast to the 1970s and 1980s, when the […]
Scientists’ dire warning of thousands of deaths from Indian variant is a dangerous abuse of public trust
The epidemiologists are at it again. The Indian variant of the Covid virus has resurrected their projections of doom and gloom. The scientists who advise the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) have said the full lifting of lockdown on 21 June could lead to 1,000 deaths a day and no fewer than 10,000 hospitalisations […]
To level up, Boris Johnson needs to build homes in satellite towns
A key priority for the government is to revive the fortunes of Britain’s old industrial towns. Boris Johnson promised to bring jobs and skills directly to these areas, so people no longer need to leave in order to prosper. The economic revival of regional cities in the past two decades or so has put even […]
It’s time to give Scotland and Wales a dose of financial reality and rethink the Barnett formula
Subsidies continue to flow from the English taxpayer to the devolved nations of the UK. Boris Johnson is reportedly considering a further massive programme of infrastructure spending to convince the Scots of the benefits of being in the Union. The so-called Barnett formula, put together in the 1970s, already ensures that Scotland always gets more […]
