William Keegan | Beware Rishi Sunak, a small state ideologue posing as a big spender

The chancellor appeared to have learned from the austerity disaster, but a glance beyond the short term shows he has not

Chancellor Sunak made much of his attachment to fiscal prudence in the run-up to last Wednesday's budget - so much so that balancing the books seemed to become a moral crusade.

This worried a lot of people. As that great Treasury permanent secretary of yesteryear, Sir Douglas Allen (Lord Croham) once observed: what matters is not balancing the budget, but balancing the economy.

The empirical evidence suggests that freeports are not a great source of new investment: they merely divert the location of planned investment

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