Dr Eamonn Butler

I can't wait. Tax Freedom Day is just three weeks away. Add up all the taxes paid by people in the UK – income tax, national insurance, VAT, fuel duty, taxes on alcohol and tobacco, council tax and all the rest. Then work out how long it takes us to earn enough to pay for all these taxes. Then you find that in 2013 the average UK citizen will be forced to hand over to the government everything they earn between New Year's Day and 30th May!

"What austerity?" asks the super-sound UK economic commentator Liam Halligan in the Telegraph.  GDP is down to be sure (6.2% below its pre-crisis peak), and we members of the public are indeed tightening our belts. Not so government. It's belt-tightening amounts to just 2.7% "cuts" over six years. That's after previous Chancellor/PM Gordon Brown expanded government spending by half, from 35% to 50% of GDP. Some "austerity" from our politicians!

Ministers are exploring various proposals to encourage local residents to accept fracking projects, reports the Financial Times. The ideas including offering people cheaper household energy.

Today Britain gets a new welfare system. Well, one tiny part of Britain near Manchester, focused around a single job centre. It is the new Universal Credit system, the brainchild of Welfare Secretary Iain Duncan Smith, who has been thinking about such moves for over a decade.

Our 1984 paper Airports for Sale, by the noted transport economist (and now Irish Senator) Sean Barrett, put airport privatisation on the agenda in the UK. Dr Barrett showed why the six airports of the then British Aviation Authority (Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted around London, and Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen in Scotland) should be sold separately rather than as a unit, so that competition and fresh thinking could come in to the UK's state-run airport sector.

The Newspaper Society, representing a large wodge of UK newspapers, have rejected the Leveson Report plans to regulate them and are publishing their own proposals for self-regulation - backed by a Royal Charter. All power to them.

Easter in Britain is one of the busiest shopping days of the year, with garden centres and DIY stores in particular full of people stimulated by the spring weather – well, when we are not having an Arctic spell – to bring a bit of a new look into their homes and gardens.

But larger stores, like those same garden centres and DIY stores, will be able to open only six hours on Easter Sunday – like every Sunday. Convenience stores can stay open longer, but retail premises larger than 280 square metres are allowed only six hours.

Members of the European Parliament on the Economic Affairs Committee have agreed to introduce legislation to extend the bonus cap on bankers to fund managers as well. This is an indication of the envy, ignorance and economic illiteracy that drives much European policy.

I’ve been working recently on the regulation of banks, insurers and financial advisers. I’ve concluded that these industries are over-regulated, and regulated in the wrong way – which causes more problems than it solves.

There is a strong case for financial services regulation. With many products you can see plainly what you are buying. But buy a pension or an insurance policy and you don’t know if you’ve been sold a pup until it’s time for it to pay out.

The Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards, headed by Andrew Tyrie, wants to electrify the proposed ring fence between retail and investment banking. Regulators should be able to force a complete split of retail and investment banking operations if a bank tries to resist the ring-fencing rules, it says.

We need smaller banks and more competition in banking, yes. But this proposal is a bad idea.