Money news

Martin Vander Weyer says, unhelpfully and inaccurately, that subsidies ‘absurdly’ favour bigger farms. As we look towards life after Brexit, instead of debating the merits of small vs large, the government should incentivise good rather than bad. My family’s farming business, Beeswax Dyson Farming, farms 33,000 acres directly and has invested £75 million in technology, training, soil improvement and environmental stewardship over the past five years. These are hardly the acts of a mere ‘wealthy landowner’, in his dismissive parlance. Subsidies we receive go directly into the activities that they are designed to support but are dwarfed by our own investments. Farmers in the EU receive substantial subsidies. Unsurprisingly, British

Some very clever people are rallying around the idea of a specific NHS tax partly because of what has been called a ‘winter crisis’ in hospitals. It’s an idea that has been around for yonks, but Nick Boles’s book, Square Deal, has kick-started the debate again. He argues for National Insurance to be repackaged as National Health Insurance. This would ‘give the NHS what it needs while removing it from running financial battles in Whitehall,’ he says. Boles makes a strong case, not least as someone who has survived two bouts of cancer thanks to NHS treatment. The key to his piece, I think, is this bit: Currently, we spend

Theresa May likes to boast at Prime Minister’s Questions that mental health spending is increasing. The problem is that this is rather difficult to see on the ground. The King’s Fund today published a report saying the gap between spending on hospitals and mental health widened further in the last year. The think tank even said that there was an increased risk to patient safety in more than a half of mental health trusts because of staffing shortages, and that ‘the government’s mission to tackle the burning injustices faced by people with mental health problems will remain out of reach if things stay the way they are’. The King’s Fund’s

It’s been an awkward week or so for John Humphrys. The Today programme presenter – who is thought to earn over £600,000 per annum – found himself in the naughty corner when an audio surfaced of Humphrys appearing to make light of his colleague Carrie Gracie’s decision to stand down as China editor over ‘pay discrimination’. His comments were met with fury by many BBC colleagues concerned over the corporation’s gender pay gap. So let’s spare a minute to pay tribute the bright spark at the Beeb who decided it would be a good idea to get Humphrys to grill the Guardian‘s Katharine Viner over potential gender pay imbalance at the

Picture a village. It has a grocery shop and a pub. A little down the road you can find a cobbler and a hardware store. A factory manufactures parts for some large concern in a nearby city and local farmers supply their produce to the villagers. There are a dozen taxi drivers, a priest, a few doctors, teachers, nannies and so on. Crucially, there is also a shared idea of what constitutes the good life, a common culture that enables the inhabitants to trust each other – perhaps the most fundamental and most overlooked component of a properly functioning economy. We are looking, in short, at that increasingly endangered social

Predictions of the death of the shop have become as much a ritual of New Year as fireworks and the singing of Auld Lang Syne. The two big retailers which have so far reported on their business over the Christmas period have provided the usual ammunition. Next reported sales up by 1.5 per cent in the 54 days to 24 December (compared with 2016), but only because online sales (which rose 13.6 per cent) offset sales in physical shops (which were down 6.1 per cent). Debenhams had a miserable Christmas, with like-for-like sales falling 2.6 per cent in the 17 weeks to 30 December. It is now thinking of shifting

Whose fault is the current NHS crisis? Today Jeremy Hunt apologised to patients whose operations have been cancelled as a result of serious pressures on hospitals. There are ‘major incidents’ at 16 hospital trusts, and the Royal College of Emergency Medicine is warning that patients who do end up in crowded and chaotic emergency departments ‘are much more likely to have a poorer outcome and even die as a result of their experience’. The Health Secretary said the current situation was ‘absolutely not what I want’, while Theresa May argued that ‘the NHS has been better prepared for this winter than ever before’. The government has not met Simon Stevens’

As is traditional, the new year begins with harrumphing. Railway users appear appalled by the suggestion they pay a greater share of the cost of their journey. The current formula for determining railway fares, introduced by the last Labour government a decade ago, was designed to offer a better deal to the majority of citizens while asking those who benefit from trains – the wealthy, on the whole – to pay a little more.  So you can see why this is unpopular and the kind of thing designed to provoke a run on torches and pitchforks all across suburban England. The wealthy always dislike being asked to pay more; their

Conmen and fraudsters thrive in confusion. And few places are more confusing and opaque than the jargon-ridden world of online advertising. Which is odd really, since the entire social media edifice – Google, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat – depends on it. 2017 was the year of the tech-lash, when people and politicians started to push back against tech-led disruption. But there’s potentially a far more significant threat looming for the tech giants: ad fraud. On one level, online advertising is very simple: you get shown endless adverts as you bounce your way around the net, and an advertiser pays whenever someone either looks at, or – the holy grail! – clicks

Christmas splurge How much extra do households spend at Christmas? — £500, according to the Bank of England. Over the course of December our spending on food increases by 10%, alcoholic drinks by 20% and books 35%. — £645, according to OnePoll (2016), including £117 spent on a partner’s gift. — £796, according to YouGov (2015), including £159 on food and drink and £596 on gifts. This is an extract from Barometer, in the Christmas issue of the Spectator