Budget 2021: Think tank response round-up

How have think-tanks and campaign groups responded to the Chancellor’s fiscal and economic initiatives?

Britain’s music industry, the EU, the UK – and an early entry for Frost’s inbox

He is well-placed to knock on the doors of individual member states, as the Government and the Union lock horns over free movement.

The Budget should be a big reset moment for post-Brexit, post-Covid Britain. It risks being lost amidst a rush to tax rises.

It will probe whether or or not Sunak can prepare the country for that future – and perhaps succeed Johnson himself, “one fine day”.

Tackling unemployment might finally show us what sort of Conservative the Prime Minister really is

Once the exigencies of the pandemic are behind him, Johnson will be faced with much more straightforwardly ideological policy choices.

The Universal Credit Uplift. Easy in, but not easy out.

There may some ingenious halfway house solution. But it is hard to say how extending it for another year can be avoided.

James Heywood: A £20 blanket uplift in Universal Credit would miss an opportunity for better targeted change

If you enter work, you lose 63p of benefit for every £1 you earn. This acts like a hefty tax on the poor.

If the Government won’t force the Tory shires to build more houses, perhaps it should bribe them instead

It’s time to stop pretending there is any way to solve the shortage without building in the South and face up to what it will take to get that done.

Sunak opts to suck it and see

The OBR’s horrid forecasts of an output implosion and soaring unemployment will do nothing to quell Tory resistance to tougher Covid tiers.

Spending Review 2020: Think tank response round-up

How have think-tanks and campaign groups responded to the Chancellor’s fiscal and economic news?

Nick King: Johnson’s Reset. The Government needs business if it’s to build back better.

The final article in ConHome’s series on the Prime Minister’s Reset Moment – and what should follow from it.

Rosalind Beck: Punishing private landlords is a flawed method to bring about “generation buy”

The grand plan is to drive landlords into evicting their tenants in order to sell. Where would they live?

Alex Morton: How Sunak can save £30 billion a year

The first group of savings are about making the state more efficient, the second about creating a state focused on the core tasks of government.

Three actions that Ministers must take if we’re to live without fear. Or else they and we will be lost.

If the public conversation about lives and livelihoods doesn’t change, we risk being trapped in semi-lockdown semi-permanently.

Caroline Elsom: The Online Harms proposals set us on a course that will threaten freedom, privacy and competitiveness – while being unlikely to make us safer

We wouldn’t want constraints on free speech imposed on the basis of opaque agreements between platforms and politicians.

Profile: Graham Brady, who played a quiet part in deposing May, and now keeps a watchful eye on Johnson

The Chairman of the 1922 Committee’s Executive is an enemy of rule by decree and a stern upholder of parliamentary scrutiny