The new Italian government looks set to cause shock waves across Europe. The two parties promise mass deportations of immigrants and huge increases in public spending. Both the social and the economic policies of the Italian coalition clash directly with those of the European Commission, and Germany
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The Trojans had to beware of Greeks bearing gifts. In the same way, politicians need to be suspicious of petitions signed by economists. The vast majority of the UK economics profession backed Project Fear, which predicted a rise in unemployment of half a million by the end
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Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, hit the headlines at the weekend, claiming that Marxism could once again become a prominent political force in the west. Automation, it seems, may not just destroy millions of jobs. For all except a privileged minority of high-tech
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Last week’s Spring Statement by chancellor Philip Hammond has led to predictable calls to “abandon austerity”. With massive hyperbole, Labour accused him of “astounding complacency” in the face of what they claimed to be the worst ever public funding crisis. The facts are rather different. Far from
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Tomorrow, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) will publish its latest estimates on how much the UK economy grew between October and December 2017, compared to July to September. Last month, the ONS thought that there was an increase of 0.5 per cent. The economy cannot be
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A strong thread in the acres of print about the Carillion debacle is that the private sector should not really be involved in infrastructure projects. The public sector would, apparently, do it better. Readers who experienced life under the nationalised rail and telephone systems might be forgiven
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Companies and service providers are no longer allowed to charge customers for using a credit or debit card. The new law came into effect last Saturday. The economic secretary to the Treasury, Stephen Barclay, trumpeted: “rip-off charges have no place in a modern Britain and that’s why
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There has been a great deal of crowing in metropolitan liberal circles over the report of the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), published with the Budget last week. The OBR revised downwards its projections for GDP growth for each of the next five years. Annual average growth
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Are members of the Labour Party frontbench experts in doublethink? The concept was invented by George Orwell for his novel 1984, written in the 1940s as a critique of the Soviet Union. Masters of doublethink can hold, for purposes of political expediency, two opposing opinions at the
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Karl Marx famously wrote: “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce”. The phrase might well have been coined with Catalonia in mind. Generalissimo Franco began a military coup against the elected Spanish government in the Canary Islands in 1936. The battle spread across Spain, and
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