The government has announced that the price of a passport will rise to £94.50 for adults, up from £88.50. To justify this, the Home Office has said:

“The new fees will help the Home Office to continue to move towards a system that meets its costs through those who use it, reducing reliance on funding from general taxation. The government does not make any profit from the cost of passport applications.”

Dear Prime Minister,

I am writing to you in my capacity as Director of Public Affairs of the Adam Smith Institute, a leading free market think tank, to congratulate you on abolishing the Payment Systems Regulator.

It’s been a rough couple of days for the US stock market - MAG7 (a combination of the top 7 tech companies) sold off almost $1.7 trillion in stock over the past week. The NASDAQ’s down too, by almost 13% - this is the result of tariffs, something Adam Smith was warning about all the way back in the 1770s.

With the government’s tax on private school fees now firmly in place, we can see whether the official forecasts are true or false. Schools have started to shutter, fees have risen by 14%, not the forecast 10%.

I’ve seen some pretty shoddy data work in my time, but End Fuel Poverty Coalition’s ‘Energy firm “profits” tracker’ (quotations are my own) really takes the biscuit.

The OBR has informed the Chancellor that she has run out of the £9bn headroom granted through tax-rises in the Autumn Budget. So, what are her options?

1776 was a year of new thinking in Scotland and America. Great figures put quill to parchment, declaring that freedom was the route to prosperity - the American revolutionaries wrote the Declaration of Independence and Adam Smith published the Wealth of Nations.

‘Our government is in thrall to private sector greed.’ This is the narrative spun by some tax commentators and outlets like the Ethical Consumer and Paid to Pollute, and given by the mainstream media.