‘A Double Raid on UK Plc as Overseas Buyers Swoop’ was how the Evening Standard fearfully described both a recent bid by a US-Canadian consortium to buy British manufacturing firm, Tomkins, and the revival of merger talks between France’s GDF-Suez and the UK’s International Power. That news of either deal would have raised eyebrows in alarm a few years ago seems unlikely. And yet how the coalition government reacts to the selling of these British assets to foreign buyers is being watched with close interest....

I fear that the acute financial woes in Greece are but a side-show to a much more serious sovereign debt crisis that threatens to engulf the Eurozone in the months ahead.The lesson of this week’s global stock market jitters is that the UK, whilst proudly standing outside the Eurozone, will not be immune to its political and economic impact...

George Osborne’s month of frenetic activity at the Treasury has provided welcome reassurance to many in the City of London. The creation of the Office of Budget Responsibility is the sort of thing that gets promised in Opposition and conveniently forgotten once an election is behind us! So full credit to the Chancellor for seeing it through. However, such has been the sorry state of economic forecasting over the past couple of years ...

We now know for sure that the nation faces a huge hole in its public finances. So amidst an economic crisis that has opened wider the social divide between the haves and have nots, a rise in capital gains tax to 40% seems to be an especially easy sell...

Mark contributed to the debates following the Queen's Speech, concentrating on the economy and constitutional reform. The following is the full speech he wished to make had there been no time constraints. The shortened version will be in the Speeches section: 'Parliament has returned to a sea of fresh faces, a transformed party political landscape...