There’s been a lot of hot air over the past week about what the government and Labour are calling Britain’s "dependency" on migrant labour. But if there is a dependency, it’s one of their own making. Chronic underinvestment in training and skills, lags in technological advancements, declining apprenticeships along with poor pay and working conditions mean that employers have had little incentive to invest in a British workforce. The result is there are many jobs that Brits are unwilling or unable to do, and migrants have long been filling the gaps.  The bedrock of the UK’s liberal market economy is labour flexibility, and successive governments have relied on migrant workers to provide this: New Labour created it and the Conservatives have happily ...

Just after the Conservatives’ latest emergency budget, in which they managed to raise taxes to record heights, @CutMyTaxUK, a low-tax campaign I’m helping, tweeted an explanation of why Labour could become the low-tax party and wipe out the Conservatives. Some of my Labour-supporting friends retweeted it and just a week later up pops Sir Keir Starmer in the Telegraph suggesting Labour will indeed cut taxes. "I want taxes to come down for working people. They've been really clobbered time and time again, whether that's on income tax, whether it's National Insurance or council tax," he said. "The highest tax since the Second World War – this really is anti-Conservative stuff,” he helpfully pointed out. Indeed, it's worth noting that it is not set in ...

This week the Prime Minister responded to a direct question about whether changes to migration policy might help to address labour shortages by talking about those arriving in small boats across the Channel. This is an attempt at misdirection. And the government’s kite-flying about a “crackdown” on foreign students appears to be another one.  Almost certainly, both attempts are doomed. As British Future, the equality think tank, has repeatedly pointed out, most people don’t think of foreign students as “immigrants” at all. They are certainly not top of anyone’s concerns on the topic, except perhaps a xenophobic minority who object to people – even relatively well-off and well-educated ones –coming here from “poor countries” like India and Nigeria. That restricting foreign students is self-defeating from ...

Black Friday has always been an exercise in spin. America’s annual sales bonanza allegedly first earned its name from the traffic congestion as crowds raced to begin their Christmas shopping. Dismayed by the negative associations, retailers later claimed the term referred to the day companies’ profit margins finally entered “the black” (as in turned positive, having previously been “in the red”). Before I sound like too much of a humbug, I should note that sales can of course be a welcome thing, especially in these cash-strapped, inflationary times. There are large, useful purchases that discounts make affordable. And there are the gifts that Christmas culture demands, especially for kids. I’ve personally got my eye on a vacuum cleaner. But as Black Friday ...

The anti-growth coalition – among whose most fearsome stormtroopers have always been sections of the Conservative Party – is on the march. Having seen off Boris Johnson’s planning reforms and Liz Truss, they’re now gunning for the Levelling Up Bill. If Theresa Villiers, Bob Seely and the other MPs backing their amendments to the legislation get their way, they will all but kill the current planning system stone dead. Every mechanism through which local councils and central government can force through what little housebuilding we currently achieve will be broken. The long-term impact of such a move would be to demolish the foundations for future Conservative governments. The current toxic cycle, where working-age voters are trapped in house-shares and lose an inordinate ...

When the Dutch Football Association launched "One Love" two years ago, the campaign was given an international slogan adapted from a Nelson Mandela quote: “Football has the power to unite people.” That a symbol so simple – a heart filled with colour stripes designed to represent the gamut of diversity in the game – could now prove so divisive on the global stage suggests sport might not be such a common language after all. Thoughts of despondency arrive as regularly as goalless draws in the early days of this World Cup. The Fifa president Gianni Infantino’s head-scratching attempt at a show of allyship in his pre-tournament press conference (“Today, I feel gay… Today, I feel disabled”) has been followed not just ...

As the old saying goes, there are two certainties in life: death and taxes. In the case of the erstwhile president of the United States, it looks as if the latter might just signal the start of the former.  On Tuesday (22 November) the US Supreme Court issued an unsigned decision without any dissents that the Treasury Department is free to hand over Donald Trump’s tax statements to an eager House Committee that has been asking for them since 2019. Tax returns often reveal a lot about a politician and how relatable they are to the American public. In 2010 Mitt Romney filed taxes for $21.7m and only paid a 13.9 per cent tax rate because most of his income came from investments, ...

With total predictability, the announcement of new rail strikes in the approach to Christmas has been met with attacks on the trade unions. “Mick Grinch” was the not-very-original headline aimed at the RMT leader Mick Lynch. One Sun reporter tweeted that Lynch gave off “pure evil, lazy work shy vibes”.  But far from being the villains, trade unionists are at the front line of the fight to protect incomes. We all need them to win. The inescapable fact is that people are entering into an unprecedented and sharp decline in their living standards. After Jeremy Hunt’s fiscal statement last week, Paul Johnson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies described the outlook in the Office for Budget Responsibility's accompanying report as “simply staggering”. ...