‘Unless you do something now it will be years before we recover.’ This morning those words come from former chancellor Alistair Darling in an open letter to George Osborne, but they could just as easily be from a member of his own backbench, or from Boris.
Darling’s letter, published in the Sunday People, accuses both Mr Osborne and the Bank of England of having ‘given up on any plan for growth’. ‘Your policies since 2010 simply haven’t worked, you need another plan – call it plan B, call it whatever you like,’ he writes. He’s essentially saying the same thing as Boris Johnson did this week, but using slightly more polite words than ‘pussyfooting’: expansion of London’s aviation capacity, more houses, replacing power stations and investment in rail. He also calls on the Bank to halt quantitative easing, clearly worried as Coffee House readers are that it is pumping more money into the economy without regard to how effective – or even damaging – this policy is.
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