The government is spending five times as much on refugees in the UK than it allocates in aid to Africa

Donald Trump never did manage to build the wall on America’s southern border. Rishi Sunak may have no better luck stopping the small boats with his plan to put refugees on barges or send them to Rwanda .

But the extent to which governments will go to “defend” their borders shows just how hot a political topic migration has become across developed western nations. Nor is it just the case in the US and the UK. Both Sweden and Germany have seen the emergence of anti-immigration parties in recent years as the number of migrants has increased.

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The blight on living standards makes the case for rejoining stronger every day – and this PM is nothing if not pragmatic

For many years, when asked to speak about the British economy, I used to point out that the influence of technological progress on productivity allowed an average growth rate of 2.25% to 2.5% a year. This meant that living standards could double every 25 years or so. Political battles raged over the sharing of the growth, but on the whole most people gained to some extent.

No longer! Beneath all the fanciful predictions emanating from this tired government come the hard facts from the independent Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), the Resolution Foundation and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. A collapse of investment, with more and more international corporations deciding Britain is no longer the place to invest for a foothold in the European market. And dire forecasts of a 6% fall in living standards in the next two years. Some platform for an election, eh?

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Hailed by Tory MPs as a Brexit benefit, CPTPP membership actually turns the UK into a willing pawn in Washington’s geopolitical game

Tory MPs hailed the UK’s entry last week into the Indo-Pacific trading bloc as a major step on the road to re-establishing Britain as a pioneer of free trade.

It was a coup for Rishi Sunak, said David Jones, the deputy chairman of the European Research Group of Tory Eurosceptics, who was excited to be aligned with “some of the most dynamic economies in the world”.

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After UK narrowly misses recession IoD reports rise in business demand, confidence, hiring and investment in March

Britain’s businesses are reporting a spring surge in order books, boosting hopes that the economy may finally be recovering after flirting with recession late last year.

After official figures showing the UK performed slightly more strongly than originally thought towards the end of 2022, the Institute of Directors said there had been an improvement in demand, confidence, hiring and investment intentions in March.

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Annual rate down to 6.9% this month, with signs of cost of living pressures easing

The eurozone’s annual inflation rate fell sharply in March as plunging energy prices eased pressure on the cost of living across the 20 countries that use the single currency.

Amid signs that upward pressure on prices is easing, the EU’s statistical agency Eurostat said the headline inflation rate dropped from 8.5% in February to 6.9% this month.

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Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news

Encouragingly, UK business confidence has risen to its highest level since May 2022.

The Lloyds Bank Business Barometer, released this morning, has risen this month by 11 points to 32%, helped by rising optimism about the outlook for the economy.

“Business confidence has seen a surge this month with economic optimism and trading prospects bolstering firms. With hiring intentions improving, we may see employment growth picking up in the coming months. Tentative signs of easing wage pressures suggest that businesses’ difficulties in finding staff may have started to ease.

“Although the measures in the Budget were widely trailed, it is yet to be seen what the full impact of the Chancellor’s announcement, along with the surprise rise in inflation and recent increase in interest rates, will have had on business confidence.”

When the numbers were last adjusted the UK economy managed to avoid a technical recession by the skin of its teeth, coming in at 0%, after a -0.2% contraction in Q3.

The rebound in Q4 was helped in some part by a strong rebound in consumer spending due to the Football World Cup in Qatar, and today’s final adjustment will hope that this holds, with personal consumption expected to come in at 0.1%.

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Study commissioned by Guardian details scale of hit to household finances from April

A wave of rising bills and tax hikes coming into effect in April will leave a family on a £50,000 annual income almost £700 a year worse off, according to a study of the damaging effects of the cost of living crisis.

Unions have warned that an increase in the minimum wage will not be enough to offset the pressure on hard-pressed families. Households at the bottom of the income scale will face the hardest squeeze relatively, according a study by the CEBR economic consultancy undertaken for the Guardian.

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Outgoing boss David Malpass says more money needed to combat overlapping crises of war, pandemics and climate emergency

A dramatic increase in financial help is needed to help poor countries meet the $2.4tn (£1.9tn) a year cost of coping with the combined impact of wars, pandemics and climate crisis, the outgoing head of the World Bank has said.

Speaking in Niger, David Malpass defended his record for funding support for developing countries since becoming president of the Washington-based organisation and said further increases would probably be announced at the Bank’s spring meeting next month.

“Development needs have increased dramatically and so should development finance, to help countries such as Niger implement good development policies that support their citizens, boost economic growth, alleviate poverty, maintain peace, and respond to complex global problems.”

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How the special economic areas championed by rightwing radicals undermine democracy

Bertolt Brecht famously advised his allies on the left not to “start from the good old things, but the bad new ones”. It is a maxim that has guided various activist-writers over the years, wherever they have sought to identify and expose the latest mutations and dreamworlds of capitalist development. In recent decades, figures such as Naomi Klein and the late Mike Davis have kept this tradition alive, unearthing the “bad new” innovations, ideas and technologies that are restructuring the world around us on behalf of capital. Klein looked to the US policies rolled out in Iraq or post-Katrina New Orleans in search of an overarching economic logic. Davis mined the cityscapes of Los Angeles and Dubai for clues as to the latest forms of repression and exploitation.

Historian Quinn Slobodian’s fascinating Crack-Up Capitalism is in a similar vein, only with a distinctive twist: his case studies are chosen for having already been explicitly championed by libertarians and neoliberal intellectuals. Anti-democratic and authoritarian cities and regional experiments of the past 45 years – from Singapore to Somalia, from Liechtenstein to Honduras – are scrutinised less for how they function economically, and more for how they fuel the imaginations of reactionaries and market fundamentalists. This is a history of contemporary ideas – specifically those that seek to protect capitalism from the interferences of democratic politics – that is interwoven with a geography of the various territories on which those ideas descended.

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