IAIN MACWHIRTER | The Scottish Labour Party has come into line with the other major parties in support of borrowing and tax-raising powers for Holyrood.
Reading your recent cover line ‘Busy doing nothing?’ on the Tories’ alternative economic strategy, I was rather looking forward to what I thought would be a forensic analysis from Policy Exchange of...
COLIN TALBOT | The Cabinet secretary believes that mandarins’ crisis management abilities will mitigate the effects of the recession on the civil service.
MIKE THATCHER | Taxpayers in England and Wales are far from happy. Not only are their jobs on the line and their homes at risk of repossession, but they also face council tax increases equivalent...
PHILIP JOHNSTON | In normal times, the Budget would be taking place in under a fortnight. The second week in March has become the Treasury’s favoured date over the years, to the annoyance of MPs...
MIKE THATCHER | Blink, and you might have missed it. This week the Conservatives launched Control shift, their long-trailed green paper on returning power to local communities. It generated only a...
HELEN DISNEY | Being in charge of welfare-to-work in a recession is something of a poisoned chalice. Nevertheless, the Conservative Party this week made the government’s welfare task even grimmer...
MIKE THATCHER | The disgraced bankers hauled in front of the Treasury select committee this week knew the role they had to play. They were to offer heartfelt apologies and then prepare for a...
MELISSA BENN | The tone was positively Churchillian: ‘Britain can beat this… just like we’ve beaten everything else this world has thrown at us. We’ll win by pulling together, not by facing the...
IAIN MACWHIRTER | When the Scottish opposition parties defeated the minority government’s budget, you would have expected them to push home their advantage, not rush to save both the Bill and the...
MIKE THATCHER | This week’s extreme ‘snow event’ temporarily distracted attention away from that other extraordinary and exceptional mishap – the complete meltdown of the economy.
MIKE THATCHER | Another week, another bail-out. But this time it was the car industry that benefited from a government desperate to be seen to be doing something as the economy collapses.
