Plus: Treasury and Work & Pensions lessons. Greenlighters v the rest. Remembering Attlee’s surplus. And: the key question now is “how”, not “what”.
Two extreme versions of what happens next in Britain. Events are more likely to end up somewhere in the middle.
The tax benefits of being self-employed should reflect genuine value added relative to normal employment.
By adapting the Statutory Maternity Pay system, the Chancellor’s Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme will improve the lives of thousands of people.
The Chancellor should make further provision for them. But the vast though necessary expansion of state spending will need emergency powers-type checks.
The theoretical aim of policy then should be bridging over what is hopefully a short pause in activity – eliminating near-term distress for households and businesses.
What about the impact on domestic violence, with everyone stuck in their own homes? And on those with serious but non-life threatening health problems?
The implications of the crisis are such that Johnson and Sunak need not so much to think outside the box as to trample it to tatters altogether.
Plus: As of writing, I’ve had hardly any communications at all from constituents about the Coronavirus.
For the Conservatives to fulfil their promise of “levelling up” the UK, they must create ample employment opportunities.
We lost Putney, but gained loads of poorer seats in the north and midlands. That’s highlighted the tensions.
Yet another failure to keep a clear promise would be deeply damaging, especially in the ‘Red Wall’.
Both kinds of school have a place, and more besides. It needs to be a choice. Education is not ‘one-size fits all’, it’s ‘horses for courses’.
Measuring people’s incomes needs to be part of measuring progress – but we need to be careful, because different measures give different results.
There are now so many of them that the degree itself has less impact on employability – this ensuring that they become less economically valuable.