

Here it comes again. Whoever Andy Burnham chooses to be his Chancellor of the Exchequer will face the same challenge as all their predecessors since Gordon Brown: producing ‘fiscal rules’ to reassure the City they will be prudent holders of the nation’s…
American political strategist James Carville wryly observed that, rather than being reincarnated as US President or the Pope, he wanted to come back as the bond market because it can intimidate anybody. The hard truth behind his quip is the…
Labour’s bonfire of the quangos is barely smouldering so far. The run-up to last month’s ‘Spring-Statement-that-honestly-wasn’t-an-Emergency-Budget’ included a big anti-red tape fanfare, with lots of worthy rhetoric about tackling bureaucratic complexity and regulatory risk-aversion. But it always starts this way,…