Round-up of reaction to the Spring Statement

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

Steve Davies: Banning touts would not fix the ticket market

Moves to curb or ban resale would replace it with lotteries and black marketeers without even solving the fundamental problems in the market.

Madeline Grant: Why Giles Coren is wrong to think we have nothing to learn from Austen

Her novels are an insight into the financial and social realities of Georgian and Regency England, and how women navigated them.

Diego Zuluaga: It’s time to let London black cabs set their own rules

Scaling back expensive regulation would allow the cabbies to make the most of their comparative advantages such as the Knowledge and their iconic status.

Think-tanks react to the Budget. Some praise, more criticism…and a sense that the housing announcements didn’t go nearly far enough

“The government should be completely overhauling current restrictions and liberalising our planning system to free up land for houses to be built.”

Terence Kealey: Ministers must not fall for myth-making around school breakfast clubs

They don’t alleviate hunger. It’s mainly middle-class children whose scores improve. And the benefits flow from the socialising, not the food.

Lord Ashcroft’s Conference Diary: The attempt to bribe Fox with a lifetime’s supply of free sugar

Plus: Johnson’s cunning plan. Crisis? What crisis? Paterson breaks into German. And when Green was chucked over a bridge.

Philip Booth: It’s too soon to write off Britain’s newly competitive university system

Right-wing critics of the higher education sector have not given recent reforms a chance to take effect.

Daniel Hannan: Prejudice against fat people is a snobbery of the Left

The underlying motive for this tradition, though now often dressed up in quasi-medical language, is as much aesthetic as sanitary.

Sponsored Post: Derek Webb: The bookies’ trade body desperately attacks the Centre for Social Justice over its FOBT report

My Campaign for Fairer Gambling will continue to press for stakes to be capped at £2.

Freeman’s definitely non-Glastonbury-style Conservative ideas festival

Party Conference is, as he puts it, “increasingly corporate, expensive [and] exclusive”. So here is his first shot at something different.

Sophie Sandor: You want better state schools? Then let them make a profit.

If everyone had the opportunity to attend a private school then, by definition, they couldn’t be elite.

Think tanks’ verdict on the manifesto: a good start on generational justice, but weak on the public finances

The Centre for Policy Studies, Institute of Economic Affairs, Bright Blue, and others give their verdict on the Conservatives’ programme for government.

Julian Jessop: Why holiday prices shouldn’t be capped during school breaks

The industry is highly competitive and can’t afford to subsidise peak-time travel. If prices don’t ration a finite number of packages, something else will.

Philip Booth: Hayek has much to teach the Conservatives

His work provides a firm intellectual foundation for restoring the common law and passing power back to citizens and social institutions.