As Ed Miliband learned in 2015, it doesn’t matter how popular your policies are individually if voters don’t buy into your broader offer.
The Prime Minister should make it clear that on inflation, public spending, and the deficit, hard decisions lie ahead.
The expensive subsidy creates a domestic training bottleneck, whilst this country’s demand for healthcare workers is met through immigration.
A final set of questions relates to whether, if we are going to spend £28 billion to improve economic growth, spending it on the green economy is the best way of doing so.
Ministers would need to honestly confront why we are so reliant on immigrant labour and then start implementing policies to cut that dependency – not at some point in the future, but now.
Whilst this was the largest monthly fall in inflation in over thirty years, it was still below estimates. Core inflation remains high, and interest rates will need to continue to rise.
Rather than try to put the cork back in the bottle post-Covid, the right needs to recognise the home-working revolution is here to stay.
Secular stagnation, resource competition, and great power conflict loom. The era of growing interconnectivity and lowering prices is over; in a hostile new environment, self-sufficiency is everything.
Were Reeves to return to the UK without answers it would leave her open to accusation of engaging in a long-distance publicity stunt.
We need Universal Enterprise, a relaunch of the Enterprise Allowance scheme targeted at women, to bring down our unusually high level of female economic inactivity.
The evidence from the local elections is not that the voters are abandoning the Tories to back Reform or Ukip , but parties of the centre and the left. Their situation is bad, but it can be made worse.
I suggest an “all-monetarist shortlist” for appointments to the Monetary Policy Committee in the near future, to address the collective delusions that blessed us with this current bout of inflation.
The seventh article in a new series on ConHome about how government might be made smaller, taxpayers better off and and society stronger – through strong families, better schools and good jobs.