For the first time for a long-time, someone with some positive, non-binary (in the old sense) ideas to get us out of our current economic, low or no growth mire. The head of the CBI rightly says that we shouldn’t just be choosing between Truss Taxcuts and Hunt Austerity, although he does point out the 19% to 25% Corporation Tax hike in April will take us from 3rd to 17th in tax competitiveness, worse still as the investment incentive is also going. A couple of other sensible highlights. We have a labour shortage, and if we’re not going to fill it with immigration we need top-notch healthcare to get back the huge numbers not working through illness; and great child- and adult-care so that more parents and carers can go back too. And what happened to the Green Industrial Revolution? We have to try to be good at, if not best at something, and that really is, or could be the future. If he could take the pay cut, I’d put Tony Danker in No.11 today. We’d certainly get a bit more than videos about coffee cups.
“UK wages grow faster than expected in the last quarter of 2022”
So here’s the dilemma for the Bank of England. Do they push up interest rates further, pushing firms to cut jobs, pushing down the amount others still hiring need to pay to get and keep staff, and so pushing down inflation.
