Tag Archives: Budget

The big announcement in yesterday’s budget was not the cut to stamp duty, additional funds for Universal Credit or some extra cash for the NHS.  The real showstopper was the announcement that the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) had downgraded its growth forecast for 2017 from 2 percent to just …

It is a fairly safe bet that Britain’s Chancellor will stick to the failing Tory plan to cut the deficit by the mid-2020s, and to run a balanced budget thereafter.  It is an equally safe bet that the Leader of the Opposition will respond by calling on the government to …

Among the various announcements in tomorrow’s UK Budget is likely to be an apparently innocuous change to the North Sea tax regime.  The BBC carried the story in about as bland a manner as possible: “The oil industry has asked the Chancellor to consider a tax break which they claimed …