The UK government borrowed £127.9bn between April and June for tackling the coronavirus pandemic, taking the total government debt to £1.98 trillion. The difference between spending and tax income was more than double the £55.4bn borrowed in the whole of the previous year. The borrowing in June was lower in May at £35.5bn, as…
The Chancellor Rishi Sunak says the hospitality sector has been particularly badly hit and announces a Temporary cut to VAT on food, accommodation, and attractions from 20 per cent to 5 per cent from next Wednesday until January 12th, 2021. He also announced a new job retention bonus for employers to bring back furloughed staff,…
In 1959 contraception was finally made available to unmarried women in the UK, Helen Brook a family planning pioneer said “To think that at last women could be in charge of themselves, decide for themselves. Women were really going to be free.” Six decades later are women really free as pay inequality is entrenched in…
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson tells MPs that restaurants, pubs, hairdressers and hotels will reopen in England from 4 July as the 2m social distancing rule is being reduced to 1m plus. In Hotels empty minibars, buffet-free breakfasts and regular deep cleaning are among the measures being introduced by one of the biggest operators in…
The Avery’s most lasting legacy was the inadvertent triggering of a new model for the global economy. Henry Every was the seventeenth century’s most notorious pirate as the British government offered enormous bounties for his capture alive or preferably dead. Every’s most lasting legacy was the inadvertent triggering of a major shift in the…
Trade conflicts caused by governments promoting the interest of the elite at the expense of workers. Across the world, the rich have prospered while workers can no longer afford to buy what they produce have lost their jobs, or have been forced into higher levels of debt. The class wars of rising inequality are a…
The UK has passed 300, 469 confirmed Covid-19 cases, as the average number of deaths from Covid-19 over the last seven days is now 144 compared with 435 on May 18. Britain faces a Tsunami of job losses despite hundreds of thousands of furloughed employees getting back to work. MPs were told that jobs were…
The Office of National Statistics said there had been a record fall in the number of job vacancies and as much as 600, 000 workers on UK payrolls lost between March and May, after six weeks of lockdown in the UK. Over nine million workers have been furloughed. “The slowdown in the economy is now…
In Martin Sandbu’s The Economic of Belonging, a innovative and pervasive new approach to economic policy that addresses the symptoms and causes of inequality in Western society fuelled by populism and the frustrations of the disenfranchised, make a case to win back the left behind -those abandoned as economic jetsam by the rising tide of…
The UK economy The UK economy is likely to slump by 11.5 per cent in 2020, outstripping falls in Germany, Spain, Italy, and France, according to OECD who found that the UK’s largely service-based economy had been badly hit by the government’s lockdown restrictions. The service sector, which includes financial services, hospitality, and tourism…