Financial news

• The Guardian view on low-traffic neighbourhoods: spread the word – these schemes work | Editorial

  10-03-2024 19:25
  
  Rejecting green transport policies was a backwards step by Rishi Sunak. New research proves itIt should be a no-brainer. In a country where 63.8% of adults are overweight, millions of people do not take the minimum amount of recommended exercise, and air pollution is a serious risk to health, encouraging walking and cycling rather than driving short distances is good public policy. All over the world, but particularly in rich, western countries such as the UK, where populations are ageing and he
  
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• Snake oil on steroids: the dishonesty at the heart of Jeremy Hunt’s budget | Richard Partington

  10-03-2024 12:10
  
  Unfunded pledges and election gimmicks – from Tories or Labour – are last thing Britain needsBefore his budget last week, Jeremy Hunt said he knew voters could see through gimmicks. “And we are not going to do gimmicks on Wednesday”. Fast forward and what did the chancellor offer? A tax-cutting budget where taxes were still actually rising, and the promise of more funding for public services grounded in a £20bn austerity drive.Having made very few new pledges that h
  
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• Jeremy Hunt’s budget mixtape is no match for Brexit’s greatest hits | Stewart Lee

  10-03-2024 11:00
  
  Somehow the chancellor omitted to mention the main cause of Britain’s woesOn Wednesday, I watched Jeremy Hunt unveil the budget live on TV, though a carefully coordinated campaign of leaks to client media outlets meant it held little of the excitement it did in the 1970s. Where’s the fun in that? If Hunt’s 2024 budget was a 19th-century Parisienne burlesque artist, she would have walked on stage already naked and then gradually put her clothes back on, to the increasing uninter
  
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• Rishi Sunak and his desperate party needed the budget to be a gamechanger. It wasn’t | Andrew Rawnsley

  10-03-2024 09:30
  
  Whatever the Conservatives try, their huge deficit in the opinion polls isn’t shrinkingThe polls will tighten. The polls will tighten. The polls WILL tighten. This has been the drumbeat banging away in the background of British politics for a year or more. It is the soundtrack when Labour ducks into a defensive crouch despite the opposition’s soaring leads. It is the tune that Tories whistle to themselves rather than surrender to complete despair about what the voters are going
  
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• Spring budget: how Jeremy Hunt’s tax freeze is leaving pensioners out in the cold | Torsten Bell

  10-03-2024 08:30
  
  The chancellor’s choices mark a shift in Conservative policy. For once, older people are not given priorityThe budget hasn’t moved the polls. They never do. But it may mark a change in politics. Why? Because it didn’t prioritise pensioners. The chancellor announced the second 2p reduction in the basic rate of national insurance in just four months, and 4p off NI is a big win for workers, who gain up to £1,500 next year.But the picture of winners and losers is complicated
  
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