Greg Clark is Financial Secretary to the Treasury and MP for Tunbridge Wells. Follow Greg on Twitter. The Harvard economist Ricardo Hausmann has shown that most of the differences in income and wealth creation between nations can be attributed to how complex their economies are. Broadly speaking, poorer countries make simple things that everyone else can […]
Greg Clark is Financial Secretary to the Treasury and MP for Tunbridge Wells. Follow Greg on Twitter. Home ownership in Britain fell during the last decade for the first time in nearly 100 years. This is despite the fact most people still aspire to own their own home. It is an understandable aspiration: a well-supplied home […]
Greg Clark is Financial Secretary to the Treasury and MP for Tunbridge Wells. Follow Greg on Twitter. It won’t come as any surprise that a leftwing firebrand like Owen Jones doesn’t think much of Government policy. More surprising though is his take on Labour Party policy: “Labour’s current muddled message would take several confusing paragraphs, […]
Greg Clark is Financial Secretary to the Treasury and MP for Tunbridge Wells. Follow Greg on Twitter. Three weeks ago I wrote about Labour’s refusal to say whether they would borrow beyond the Government’s plans or not. As I said, this is an extremely basic question about economic policy – and the Official Opposition really ought […]
Greg Clark is Financial Secretary to the Treasury and MP for Tunbridge Wells. Follow Greg on Twitter. The success of Britain’s financial services industry matters to all of us. Together with the associated business services sector, it employs two million people up and down the country. Furthermore, it contributes one pound out of every eight of all the taxes paid in Britain. That […]
Greg Clark is Financial Secretary to the Treasury and MP for Tunbridge Wells. Follow Greg on Twitter. Last weekend, George Osborne and I represented the United Kingdom at the European Finance Ministers summit in Dublin. Before the summit began, the finance ministers of the Eurozone countries met to approve formally their agreement to give financial […]
Greg Clark is Financial Secretary to the Treasury and MP for Tunbridge Wells. Follow Greg on Twitter. Homes: we all need them, there aren’t enough of them and building more of them would provide a welcome boost to the economy. Unfortunately, the last Labour government left us with the lowest peacetime level of house-building since the […]
Greg Clark is Financial Secretary to the Treasury and MP for Tunbridge Wells. Follow Greg on Twitter. Yesterday, the Government responded to Michael Heseltines’s report – No Stone Unturned – accepting 81 of the 89 recommendations made. The former Deputy Prime Minister described the Chancellor’s adoption of so much of the report as “one of the […]
Greg Clark is Financial Secretary to the Treasury and MP for Tunbridge Wells. Follow Greg on Twitter. George Osborne has called it the British Dilemma: how can Britain be one of the world’s leading financial centres without exposing ordinary working people in this country to the terrible costs of banks failing? Let me illustrate both […]
Greg Clark is Financial Secretary to the Treasury and MP for Tunbridge Wells. Follow Greg on Twitter. “The truth,” says Peter Oborne in a typically compelling article for the Daily Telegraph last week, “is that Mr Balls isn’t any good as shadow chancellor.” Oborne adds that “this is an open secret in the Labour Party.” There aren’t […]
Follow Greg on Twitter. Unemployment continues to fall. The latest figures, published last week, showed that the number of people looking for work and claiming unemployment benefits fell by 12,500 in the last month to stand at 1.54 million. Nevertheless, the headline figures must seem remote to the anxieties of anyone who does lose their […]
Greg Clark is Financial Secretary to the Treasury and MP for Tunbridge Wells. Follow Greg on Twitter. Most Tuesdays he will be writing this 'Letter from a Treasury Minister' for ConservativeHome readers. Previous versions of this Letter appeared here. Today twenty cities – from Plymouth to Sunderland, from Preston to Brighton – have been invited to negotiate City […]