Best of BusinessDesk: Pattrick Smellie's top columns from 2024

Budget 2025’s priority: don’t kill the recovery (First published Dec 16)For all the talk about austerity, the half-year fiscal and economic update is remarkable for its evidence that the Government has not made much of a dent in its spending track at all.Exhibit A is the forecast for “public consumption” – a proxy for the extent to which everything the Government funds is either adding to or subtracting from growth, known as the “fiscal impulse”.In the Budget in May, public consumption was forecast to r...