fiscal rules
On Tuesday morning the yield on the 30-year gilt rose ten basis points to 5.89%, a level last seen in March 1998, when the Chancellor of the day was Gordon Brown, the Bank of England had just been handed its independence, and nobody in Whitehall imagined that three decades
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
public finances
July is supposed to be the good month. Self-assessment taxpayers settle up by the 31st, HMRC banks the windfall, and for four weeks a year the public finances look almost respectable. This July, provisional ONS figures put self-assessment receipts at a record £17.1 billion, the highest July haul since
housing
England needs roughly 300,000 new homes a year to keep pace with demand, has managed it exactly once since 1969, and last year the total came in around 170,000 — a shortfall the trade press reports and the political class shrugs at. Every time a local scheme collapses, the
devolution
Central government in this country collects more than 90p of every pound raised in tax. The OECD average is 53p. Britain is not merely centralised, it is an outlier among outliers, the kind of number that should embarrass a Treasury official into silence at a dinner party and somehow never
housing
Andy Burnham stood outside Downing Street on Monday and told the country he would "bring back hope," which is the kind of sentence you say when you don't yet have a housing number to say instead. He is Britain's sixth prime minister in a
Treasury
Denis Healey was in the VIP lounge at Heathrow on 28 September 1976, gin and tonic in hand, waiting for a flight to the IMF annual meetings in Manila, when someone told him the pound was falling through the floor. He turned round, went back to the Treasury instead of
defence
John Healey signed off Labour's Strategic Defence Review in June, promising the biggest shift in British military thinking for a generation, then spent the following weeks watching the multi-year spending plan meant to fund it slide from "imminent" to "in due course" to nowhere.
defence spending
In July 2024, Rachel Reeves published a Public Spending Audit and found £22 billion of unfunded resource pressures sitting across government, with no minister having voted for any of it in the ordinary sense. The Ministry of Defence's response was to be told, along with everyone else, to