Hints and tips:
...Anderson last year told local Tory activists in Cambridgeshire: “Now there is a political party that begins with an R that offered me a lot of money to join them....
...The R-word now hanging around Rishi Sunak, which she was quick to exploit....
...Its chief economist James Richardson will serve as interim chief executive until a permanent appointment is made....
...Anderson, in a leaked recording published by the Sunday Times, told Tory activists he had been offered “a lot of money” to join “a party which begins with an R”....
...“Sunak’s big claim is that he knows how to run the economy, but if the ‘R’ word is being discussed in an election year, that’s very bad for him. We want to fight the election on the economy.”...
...“The economics are looking better but this is a frustrating political narrative,” admitted one Tory official....
...Ben Zaranko, at the Institute for Fiscal Studies think-tank, said cuts to the civil service and a larger portion of the R&D budget “won’t be enough” to fund the defence spending pledge to 2030....
...Both by-elections were triggered by problems for the Tory party....
...In 1959, Labour MP Barbara Castle accused Harold Macmillan’s Tory government of “Teddy-boy economics” — in other words, inherently criminal....
...Behind the counter at Cooper’s Grocers in Selby’s Market Cross shopping district last Tuesday, Julie Richardson was one such voter....
...[R]eal wages grew by an average of 33 per cent a decade from 1970 to 2007, but this fell to below zero in the 2010s. In mid-2023 wages were back where they were during the financial crisis.”...
...Joely Richardson gives a good insight into her mother’s emotions....
...“I’m not sure that this area is as Conservative as you’d think,” mused Jill Richardson-James....
...The 2 percentage point cut to the NI rate from January is a costly pre-election sweetener for voters and Tory MPs....
...Monday UK: 100th anniversary of the first Greenwich Time Signal (aka “the pips”) first used on radio by the BBC Tuesday UK: former prime minister Liz Truss to launch a new political grouping of Tory MPs...
...“Children are the R&D department of the human species — the blue-sky guys, the brainstormers. Adults are production and marketing.”...
...Responding to his decision to step down, Angela Richardson, Tory MP for Guildford, described Raab on Twitter as a “fantastic Surrey colleague” adding that his “constituents will miss his dedication”....
...Both speeches dwelled on the case for boosting R&D and innovation. Many economists agreed with his analysis. The question that some voters might ask is, as Goodman puts it: “What’s in it for me?”...
...Greg Clark, the former Tory business secretary whose “modern industrial strategy” was scrapped in 2021, has welcomed the government’s new approach....
...In 2015, one Tory government privatised the Green Investment Bank; six years later, another Tory government set up a UK Infrastructure Bank to do the same thing....
...More recently, the Tory peer Lord Richard Harrington singled out regulators in his October 2023 report for the Chancellor Jeremy Hunt into how to attract more foreign investment to the UK....
...Lord Michael Spencer, founder of interdealer broker ICAP and a Tory party donor, said: “The UK should maintain corporation tax at no higher than 20 per cent to put us in the most competitive bracket globally...
...And you point out Sunak, you know, talks about the UK being an R&D superpower. This completely underpins that. The question I want to ask you is what would be different under Labour?...
...Many in the tech sector also point out that the Treasury’s decision to scale back the R&D tax credit scheme will cause significant damage to the UK’s tech start-up ecosystem....
...That idea might be supported by the data showing that growth was strong in areas like R&D, legal, advertising and market research, but there were falls in architectural, engineering, scientific and other...
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