Latest news with #KwasiKwarteng
Telegraph
3 days ago
- Business
- Telegraph
Reeves as unpopular as Kwarteng at height of mini-Budget crisis
Rachel Reeves is now as unpopular as Kwasi Kwarteng during the height of the mini-Budget blow-up. New polling shows that the Chancellor now inspires as little public confidence as Liz Truss's chancellor did during the fiscal crisis. Some 51 per cent of voters think Ms Reeves is doing a 'bad job' at the Treasury, according to Ipsos. Just 16 per cent think she is doing a 'good job'. In the aftermath of the mini-Budget in late September 2022, Ipsos found that 53 per cent of the public thought Mr Kwarteng was doing a 'bad job'. He was sacked a fortnight later as Ms Truss scrambled to save her premiership. Ms Truss's mini-Budget, a programme which included £45 billion in tax cuts, led to market chaos after it was announced by Mr Kwarteng in the House of Commons. The resulting turmoil ended her stint in Downing Street after just 49 days. Since she took office as Chancellor in July, Ms Reeves has been criticised for raising employer National Insurance contributions despite a manifesto pledge that National Insurance and income taxes would not rise under Labour. Her early decision to remove the winter fuel payment from millions of pensioners after changing the eligibility criteria has also provoked public ire, with the Government now set to reverse the decision in the coming months. Yet despite Ms Reeves's poor personal ratings, Labour remains the most trusted party on economic affairs. A fifth of voters now say that Labour is the party they trust most to manage the nation's finances, with Reform in second place on 17 per cent. The Conservatives are now ranked third on 16 per cent, despite the economy previously being an electoral strength for the party. The new figures come as separate polling shows a large proportion of Labour voters support the two-child benefit cap despite the Government's plans to scrap it. New figures from pollster Opinium show that 42 per cent of Labour voters, and 44 per cent of voters overall, are in favour of keeping the cap. The Government is considering ending the cap, which prevents parents from claiming tax credits or Universal Credit for their third and any subsequent children. It was introduced into law by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition in 2013 but did not come into force until 2017. Labour's Child Poverty Taskforce, set up to reduce levels of child poverty in Britain, is expected to recommend significant reforms or the total abolition of the cap later this year. The Prime Minister is expected to implement any such recommendations. He has also reportedly committed in private to scrapping the two-child limit during this Parliament. A large majority of Reform voters also support the cap despite Nigel Farage, the party leader, pledging to abolish it. Some 59 per cent of Reform voters support the benefits cap. Mr Farage repealing the cap, along with more tax breaks for married couples, is part of Reform's plan 'to encourage people to have children, to make it easier for them to have children'. James Crouch, head of public affairs and policy at Opinium, said: 'While both Labour and Reform explore scrapping the two-child benefit cap, Opinium's latest polling shows their leadership could be out of step with many of their voters, who simply don't see it as affordable – whatever the rights or wrongs of the policy.'
Yahoo
08-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
The secretive government unit planning to dim the sun
Plans to block sunlight to fight global warming have inadvertently shone a light on Aria, the Government's opaque research arm. The Advanced Research and Invention Agency was set up in 2021 by Kwasi Kwarteng, the ex-Tory business secretary, and was originally the brainchild of Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson's former chief aide. Yet few people on the street know what it is, what it does, or how much taxpayer cash is flowing into its well-financed coffers. Sure, it has a shiny website stocked with techno-waffle promising to help scientists 'reach for the edge of the possible' and foster 'opportunity spaces' but there has been little clarity on its day-to-day operations. This week, we learnt it will spend £56.8 million on 21 'climate cooling' projects, which include looking into the logistics of building a 'sun shade' in space and injecting plumes of salt water into the sky to reflect sunlight away from Earth. 'We're not trying to dim the sun,' representatives from Aria said rather disingenuously at a press briefing, knowing full well that should experiments prove successful, that is their ultimate aim. Prof Mike Hulme, of Cambridge University, pointed out that the experiments were setting Britain on a 'slippery slope' towards mass deployment of technologies that will be impossible to prove are safe, effective and reversible until they are actually in the sky. He warned: '[The sum of] £57 million is a huge amount of taxpayers' money to be spent on this assortment of speculative technologies intended to manipulate the Earth's climate.' Aria has been given an eye-watering £800 million budget to play with, with little to show for it so far, except some off-the-wall ideas, and astronomically high wage bills. Ilan Gur, the chief executive, is being paid around £450,000 annually – three times more than the Prime Minister, while Antonia Jenkinson, the chief finance officer, takes home around £215,000 and Pippy James, the chief product officer, around £175,000. In fact, Aria is blowing £4.1 million a year on wages despite having just 37 staff, with the top four staff at the company pocketing nearly £1 million of taxpayers' cash each year between them. It means essentially Aria is operating like a private company, but doing so on public finances. And it is wading into areas where the private sector would normally dominate. Playing poker with public money In January, it announced it would be giving £69 million to research on neural robots for epilepsy treatment, genetic engineering of brain cells and lab-grown brain organoids. It is also funding an NHS trial to use a brain computer interface that alters brain activity using ultrasound, in the hopes it will treat depression and addiction, as well as investing in synthetic plants and chromosomes. Such sci-fi future-gazing is usually left to billionaire tech bros or big pharma, precisely because the cost is prohibitive and private companies have the resources to soak up the risk. But the Government has given Aria free rein to embark on scientific research that 'carries a high risk of failure' – something that the public sector usually shies away from. The 'high risk, high reward' strategy is reminiscent of Elon Musk's 'fail fast' approach that has undoubtedly brought success at Space X and Tesla. But while Mr Musk had clear objectives, and put $100 million of his own money on the line, Aria's approach feels far more scattergun, as if it doesn't quite know what it is trying to achieve. It is operating like a speculative venture capital fund, essentially playing poker with the public purse. If Britain were booming, maybe this could be justified, but public sector debt is rising and now, more than ever, taxpayers are demanding their money be used wisely. Certainly its latest foray into geoengineering has been met with public incredulity. When sun-dimming experiments were first mooted last month, one Telegraph reader liked it to 'what Hanna-Barbera might have dreamed up to foil Dick Dastardly in Wacky Races'. 'Are these people insane?' asked another. Aria was set up to be Britain's equivalent of Darpa, the US defence advanced research projects agency, which was founded in 1958 by Eisenhower in response to the Soviets launching the Sputnik satellite. Darpa, dubbed 'the agency that shaped the modern world', undoubtedly sparked a wave of innovation, and can claim some of the credit for developments such as GPS, drones, personal computers, the internet and the RNA Covid jab. But unlike Aria, Darpa always stayed well within the purview of the US department of defence. Aria, in contrast, sits in a shady no-man's land, in charge of eye-watering amounts of public cash, but with little genuine accountability to the public, for all its talk of transparency and consultation. No heads will roll if its costly speculations prove worthless and it is exempt from freedom of information requests, a fact that the Liberal Democrats warned is 'nothing more than an attempt to save the Government's blushes the next time they opt for a 'high risk, no reward' project'. Aria was created in the denouement of the pandemic, when fast, agile science helped Britain create a vaccine and find crucial treatments for Covid. Then the country was operating with a vast emergency war chest. Now it is struggling to empty its bins. Many people may be thinking perhaps now is not the time for such blue sky thinking. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Telegraph
08-05-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
The secretive government unit planning to dim the sun
Plans to block sunlight to fight global warming have inadvertently shone a light on Aria, the Government's opaque research arm. The Advanced Research and Invention Agency was set up in 2021 by Kwasi Kwarteng, the ex-Tory business secretary, and was originally the brainchild of Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson's former chief aide. Yet few people on the street know what it is, what it does, or how much taxpayer cash is flowing into its well-financed coffers. Sure, it has a shiny website stocked with techno-waffle promising to help scientists 'reach for the edge of the possible' and foster 'opportunity spaces' but there has been little clarity on its day-to-day operations. This week, we learnt it will spend £56.8 million on 21 'climate cooling' projects, which include looking into the logistics of building a 'sun shade' in space and injecting plumes of salt water into the sky to reflect sunlight away from Earth. 'We're not trying to dim the sun,' representatives from Aria said rather disingenuously at a press briefing, knowing full well that should experiments prove successful, that is their ultimate aim.
The Independent
03-03-2025
- Business
- The Independent
Massive bonuses for bankers are back. So be it – Britain needs their taxes
Bankers' bonuses are back – and they're booming. The City 's financial giants have been handing out more free shares than most stockbrokers could handle (and bucketloads of cash, to boot). Welcome to the banking casino 2.0, where the roulette wheel always lands on black and the slot machines are looser than America's gun laws. Brexit got rid of the requirement to impose the EU's bonus cap, which limited payouts to no more than a banker's basic salary or twice that if shareholders approved as they mostly did. Kwasi Kwarteng tore up the old rules – you may also remember that he was chancellor at the time of the disastrous Truss mini-Budget, which pushed mortgage rates and bond yields (interest rates) into the stratosphere – and bonuses duly soared. HSBC moved from two times to ten times a basic salary for its bonuses, and HSBC is a relative skinflint as far as these things go. Top American banks operating in London moved to 20 or even 25. HSBC's overall bonus pool last year amounted to $3.8bn (£3bn), a smidgeon ahead of the previous year. At Barclays, which also has a big investment bank, it jumped by 10 per cent to £2bn. All that lucre will buy a lot of flash cars, fine wine, racehorses, or whatever high-end toys take the fancy of those receiving the really big paydays. The Guardian reported that the top-paid employee at HSBC made between €19m and €20m (up to £16.6m) while the Barclays equivalent won a payday to the tune of between €17m and €18m (£14.8m). While these institutions' CEO pay packages are reported down to the last penny, financial institutions don't have to give the same details about their top-paid employees, who are often not board members. For the record, Barclays CEO CS Venkatkrishnan made £10.5m so he's not exactly going hungry. HSBC said that its decision to rejoin the bonus party was to afford it the 'flexibility to reward extraordinary individual performance delivered by a small number of employees'. Stop me if you've heard that before. But you know what? So be it. This may cause a few eyes to blink, given the criticisms I've thrown at these sorts of awards in the past. Don't get me wrong, they remain highly questionable and I wonder whether the shareholders who pony up the funds for the bankers to bet with see any benefit. People understandably get cross when nurses and teachers struggle to meet their mortgage payments while City fatcats are showering in champagne. Many question the morality of a society that rewards those who play dice on the financial markets many times more than those who save or enrich the lives of its children. But here's the thing: These banks and their well-paid employees pay an awful lot of tax and, right now, that money is badly needed. According to the City of London Corporation – which is the local authority for the Square Mile – and lobby group TheCityUK, the financial and professional services sectors pumped a combined £110.2bn into the exchequer in 2023. That amounts to 12.3 per cent of total receipts: more than the annual education budget and over half the health budget. Right now, the coffers are bare. The Treasury's cashbox is all but empty and the chancellor's headroom, if she is to stay within the framework of her financial rules, has all but evaporated. Without the contributions of its banks and bankers, the UK would be flat broke. It would be in the international equivalent of debtors' prison, with government bonds rated as 'junk' and the nation facing up to the prospect of going cap in hand to the IMF, something which last happened in the 1970s. Needless to say, loans from that august institution tend to come with very unpleasant T&Cs. Brexit put those revenues at risk by delivering a severe blow to the City that tarnished the financial centre's erstwhile shine. Companies don't want to list here. European financial centres have been snapping at London's heels and stealing its business. But the end of the bonus cap meant the City could at least offer something that the likes of Frankfurt, Dublin, Paris or Amsterdam cannot. The consultations taking place on further easing banking regulations make me feel queasy. Since the financial crisis, we've had a global pandemic followed by an energy price shock not to mention all those wars. But we should not allow those events to overshadow all those stories about hedge fund managers looking into buying sheep in anticipation of a global economic collapse and an economy based on barter emerging from the wreckage. Britain also spent billions bailing out banks that were too big to fail: banks which were scandalously allowed to socialise their losses. The truth, however, is that we live in the here and now. The world has turned and Britain finds itself in dire need of cash to fund its creaking public services and to improve its crumbling infrastructure. So suck it up, buttercup, because all those new doctors we need to fix the NHS? The nurses too. And the teachers while we're at it. They're going to need paying. The bonus boys and girls, and the City, can help with that so long as they pay what they owe. Making sure that they do so would be just the thing to focus on.
BBC News
17-02-2025
- Business
- BBC News
Surrey: Spelthorne entrepreneurs offered chance to win £4k prize
Budding entrepreneurs in Surrey have been offered the chance to win £4,000 to help launch their winner of the Spelthorne Business Plan Competition will also receive a package of mentoring and in its 11th year, the competition is being run by the Spelthorne Business Forum (SBF) after previous leader, former Spelthorne MP Kwasi Kwarteng, stepped chair Tracey Carter said the forum was "honoured to take the reins of this incredible initiative and build on its legacy". Spelthorne residents aged 16 and over are invited to apply, with entrepreneurs set to pitch their ideas at a Dragons' Den-style final in Sunbury on Friday 27 Carter added: "The competition embodies the entrepreneurial spirit of Spelthorne, and we look forward to working with passionate local businesses to help their ideas flourish."Submissions can be made from 17 February until 14 April, 2025.
