Fiona writes about the economy. She builds her own spreadsheets and trusts them slightly more than anyone quoting someone else's.
On the Today programme this week, Kemi Badenoch was asked what happens to the people her housing benefit cuts land on. "Without national security, there aren't going to be any benefits," she said. "We're all going to be in danger, far more people
On the first day of September, David Lammy stood up as Foreign Secretary and announced restrictions on trade with West Bank settlements. It read like a decision: a minister, a microphone, a policy with his name attached. It wasn't quite that. Behind the announcement sits a Trade Remedies
Reform UK
Robert Jenrick stood on a stage in Birmingham and promised to be careful. Reform UK, he told the conference, would cut £80bn of public spending within five years, and would do it "in a careful way, not a cack-handed way." He wants tax cuts too, starting with a
Reform UK
Friday morning at the NEC in Birmingham, delegates were queuing for photographs with a cardboard cutout of Nigel Farage while, somewhere off camera, James Orr and Dan Jukes were clearing their desks. Two senior Reform UK officials, gone within hours of a Channel 4 broadcast, over a sum that would
At his party conference on 5 September, Nigel Farage told the hall that a Reform government would make Parliament sit "24 hours a day, for six days a week" until it passed the laws it wanted. If the House of Lords didn't like those laws, he
Reform UK
At a fringe event in the Birmingham NEC, under conference-hall strip lighting, Robert Jenrick promised £80bn of spending cuts over five years and pledged to do it "in a careful way, not a cack-handed way." The number breaks down like this: £50bn from welfare, £10bn from net zero,
fiscal policy
On Tuesday morning the yield on a 30-year UK government bond hit 5.89 per cent, the highest since March 1998. That is a niche instrument, mostly bought by pension funds, rarely touched by the Debt Management Office in a single auction, and it is also, this week, the reason
On a Tuesday night in March, in a leisure centre function room in Guildford, seven ward councillors voted 4-3 to reject 214 homes on a scrubby field behind the retail park. The applicant had offered thirty per cent affordable, a new roundabout and £1.2 million toward a school extension.
At the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow this summer, Andy Burnham and John Swinney were photographed shaking hands, both smiling for the cameras in matching dark suits, one in a tartan tie for the occasion. Off camera, according to reports of the meeting, Burnham told Swinney that a second independence referendum
housing
Matthew Pennycook stood up this week and announced that mayors across England will get the power to overrule local councils on planning applications above 150 homes, above 15,000 square metres of commercial space, or above 30 metres tall — roughly ten storeys. These are not garden-extension numbers. They are small-town
housing
A quarter to a third of everything central government spends in Britain never passes within touching distance of a ballot paper. That is not my number; it is Bristol University Press's, from a study of arm's-length bodies, and it means quangos now handle a bigger share
Here is the scope of it. Any scheme of more than 150 homes, any tower over 30 metres — roughly ten storeys — or any 15,000 square metres of office and retail space can now be lifted clean out of a council's hands and decided instead by a mayor.