Foreign firms that win defence contracts will have to invest in UK under new policy – UK politics live
The Guardian ·
Wes Streeting says overseas suppliers of defence contracts will need to spend the equivalent amount in the UK Yesterday the Institute for Fiscal Studies (see here ) and the Resolution Foundation (see here ) delivered fairly negative assessments of the budget. But mostly the gloom was triggered by the thinktanks said about the overall state of the economy and the public finances; they were critical of John Healey for deferring difficult choices, but less hostile about the decisions he did actually announce. However, according to YouGov , voters are quite positive. They regard it as one of the fairest budgets for years. The public’s initial reaction to John Healey’s first budget is in some key respects broadly positive, with nearly half of Britons (45%) regarding the budget as being fair, relative to just 20% seeing the measures announced as not fair. This is a notable improvement on last year, when Rachel Reeves’ second budget was declared ‘not fair’ by a near-inverse margin of 48% to 21% . In fact, on this measure, this is one of the most positively received budgets in recent times. In data going back to 2010, only George Osborne’s first budget in 2010 and Rishi Sunak’s Covid budgets of 2020 and March 2021 have been judged ‘fair’ by a greater proportion of Britons (50-55%). Continue reading...