Politics

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Wednesday

9 Dec 2009

Just in case you missed them… | 9 December 2009

It’s been a busy day on Coffee House. Here’s a selection of our PBR coverage, in case you missed them the first time around: Fraser Nelson dissects Alistair Darling’s growth forecasts, and reveals the spending cuts hidden in the PBR. James Forsyth wonders whether Labour have u-turned on defence spending, and says the Tories should attack the national insurance increase. Peter Hoskin highlights one thing to remember today, and says the PBR was bad for the country and bad for Labour. Mark Bathgate asks: who much more will Darling need to borrow? Neil O’Brien unveils a whole batch of Brownies. Andrew Haldenby reveals what to do if you can’t tax

James Forsyth

Has Labour u-turned on protecting defence spending?

Back in July, Lord Mandelson added defence to health and education as an area of spending that Labour would protect from cuts. But looking at page 97 of the Green Book, defence is conspicuously absent from the list of areas of public spending that are protected in 2011-2012 and 2012-2013. The only areas mentioned are NHS spending, schools, sure start, policing and overseas aid. As some of these are only receiving funding increases in line with inflation, it seems reasonable to assume that everything else – including defence – is likely to be cut in real terms. (There is a commitment to spend up to £2.5 billion from the

James Forsyth

An unhealthy dependence

Few columnists are read more carefully in Conservative circles than Danny Finkelstein. He is extremely well connected in the Cameron circle and enjoys something of a mind-meld with George Osborne. Danny’s column today is the argument for sticking to the modernising message. It does, though, contain one significant criticism of the party, its dependence on David Cameron. This Cameron dependence has been a problem for a while. But the leadership itself must take most of the blame for this. They have used Cameron for almost every announcement that they view as important and that has sent a message to the media that if it doesn’t come from Cameron the

Fraser Nelson

The end of spending

So Alistair Darling today repeated the same trick he used in April’s Budget – referring only to rising “current spending”, so as to hide the full extent of Labour’s spending cuts. Current spending is only one component of total spending, and when you add in some of the other components – as we have done in the table below – the cuts become clearer. The table shows that next year is the last year of any real rise in spending. From 2011, spending either falls or flattens out. But the cuts will be even deeper than the table reveals. This “total spending” figure is all we could work out from

James Forsyth

The Tories should attack the national insurance increase

After a tricky few weeks for the Tories, the PBR has come of a bit of a relief for them. It is generating far more bad headlines for the government than good ones. The Standard’s splash on the national insurance hike is a taste of what the coverage is going to be like for Labour tomorrow. One point the Tories should be hammering home is that the national insurance hike is a far more significant tax rise than the tax on bank bonuses. The one-off tax on banks that pay sizable bonuses will only raise £550 million while in 2010-11 the various national insurance changes will cost taxpayers more than

Fraser Nelson

Don’t worry about the tax on jobs

I’m not that worked up about the National Insurance increase. Sure, a tax on jobs is the best way to choke a recovery – but this is only due to come in April 2011 by which time Darling will be collecting the royalties on his memoirs. It only matters if the Tories support it, which (I hope) they won’t. It is a wee gesture, to help calm the bond markets. The only fiscally significant mive in this budget is the £550m they intend to raise from inheritance tax. The giveaways are all planned from April next year – ie, they are little exercises in forcing the Tory hand. Extension of

Lloyd Evans

In his comfort zone

Today we saw just how tricky the game can be for opposition leaders. The government sets the parliamentary agenda and holds the keys to the war-chest. Cameron’s attempts to upset the PM looked diffuse and repetitive. On Afghanistan he offered support. On Kelly he flannelled about some footling detail of parliamentary timing. And on ministerial pay he drew attention to his gravest difficulty, namely that the pre-budget report was coming up next. Brown never looked in difficulty and he cruised easily towards his Six O’Clock sound-bite. ‘The opposition leader has lost the art of communication but not alas the gift of speech.’ A poor day for Dave. Nick Clegg did

Fraser Nelson

In a world of their own

As I suspected, Darling has cooked the figures by laughably unrealistic growth forecasts. He is predicting a sustained economic sprint that will mysteriously come to Britain the April after next. Table B1 of the PBR shows that he expects 3.25% growth every year for a whole four years: from April 2011 to April 2015. How does this square with what the real world thinks? I blogged earlier what HM Treasury’s independent forecasts have to say. Robert Chote from the IFS has just been on TV saying the good news is that the structural deficit isn’t as big as it used to be. Little wonder, when you can concoct growth forecasts

Peter Hoskin

Bad news for the country, bad news for Labour

Abandon hope all ye who enter here. While we mostly knew what to expect from Darling’s PBR, it’s still surprising just how uninspiring, how thin and how insufficient it is in the flesh. It’s pretty much a bad news budget for anyone you could mention. Bad news, of course, for the bankers who will be hit by the hazily outlined bonus tax. Bad news for public sector workers, who are already smarting at the frozen pay rise they’ll have to accept in a few years time. Bad news for anyone who cares about the state of the public finances, which look just as grim, if not worse, as they did

Peter Hoskin

One thing to remember today

As you can probably imagine, plenty of Labour folk are getting excited about the PBR today. They regard it as a chance for their party to harden their rise in the polls, and hasten the Tories’ descent. But Danny Finkelstein strikes a necessary note of calm over at Comment Central. As he puts it, a Budget in which the government has to ‘fess up to the horrible state of the public finances is hardly going to do much good for them. To Danny’s analysis I’d add one supporting fact: that rarely, if ever, in recent times, has the government received a significant poll bounce on the back of a

James Forsyth

Brown’s bonus smokescreen

If today ends up with the government in a row with the City over plans to tax bank bonus pots with bankers threatening to take the government to court, then it will be mission accomplished for the Labour party. The same goes if we end up in a debate over the merits of a Tobin-style tax. For obvious reasons, Labour would rather talk about anything other than the state of the public finances so anything that distracts attention from that central question is, to use the word of the morning, a bonus for Brown. The Tories know this and will try and turn the debate back to the public finances

Peter Hoskin

One year on | 9 December 2009

Coffee House will be live-blogging Alistair Darling’s PBR statement from 1230 on. In the meantime, here’s a brief video reminder of George Osborne’s PBR response from last year – probably the Shadow Chancellor’s finest moment at the Dispatch Box. You imagine his address today will be similar in tone, at least:

David Blackburn

PMQs Live Blog | 9 December 2009

Stay tuned for live coverage from 1200. 12:01: And we’re off with the butcher’s bill, remembering the 100th British servicemen to be killed in Afghanistan this year. 12:02: Robert Neal points out that Spain isn’t in the G20 and hasn’t been in recession as long as Britain – is the rain in Spain mainly in his brain. Brown responds by saying that he invited the Spanish Prime Minister to the G20 meetings, so Spain was for all intents and purposes as member of the G20. He’s hasn’t wriggled out of that. 12:05: Here’s Cameron. He’s on Afghanistan – this is effectively our last chance, can we await for every element

Fraser Nelson

Your guide to the PBR Brownies<br />

How can you tell if you’re being lied to on budget day? Normally its easy: Gordon Brown’s lips move. But, today, there’s a handy guide. You can compare Darling’s fiction with the independent average calculated by HM Treasury. I have pulled out the relevant tables:

Allister Heath

Darling’s budget was bad. Osborne’s complicity was worse

There was much that was absurd about Wednesday’s pre-Budget Report, from Alistair Darling’s failure to outline a realistic plan to prevent Britain’s national debt from exploding, to his risibly over-optimistic long-term growth forecasts. Public spending will jump again next year, we’re told. Schools, hospitals and police will be protected from cuts if Labour wins the election — which, plainly, it has not the slightest expectation of doing. This was about political positioning, banker-bashing, with a new bonus tax, and pretending to the electorate that a few efficiency savings and National Insurance tweaks will be enough to rescue Britain. The intention was to deceive voters, with the pain only kicking in

James Forsyth

Chutzpah, pizzazz and style — what Dave can learn from Boris

As the most powerful Conservative in Britain, Boris Johnson has plenty to teach his old schoolpal, David Cameron. But, says James Forsyth, the Cameroons are too busy criticising the Mayor’s ‘amateurish’ approach to see what they’re missing As a piece of political propaganda, the sticker issued by the Crisis housing charity at the last Tory conference came close to perfection. It had a picture of the Mayor of London in jogging gear, with the caption: ‘Boris is making the running on rough sleeping. Join the race, Cameron!’ This was how Crisis thought they could best get their message across: goading Team Cameron into action by comparison with Mr Johnson. It

Irwin Stelzer

Who would lend to a bankrupt Britain?

Alistair Darling’s budget forecasts assume that Britain can keep borrowing all it wants for the foreseeable future.We may not be so lucky, says Irwin Stelzer Federico Sturzenegger and Jeromin Zettelmeyer are not exactly household names. They are, respectively, professor at the Universidad Torcuato di Tella, and an adviser to the International Monetary Fund. Some months ago, as I watched Britain roll up debts that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago, I moved their book, published in 2006, from a back shelf to the top of my desk. Where it sat, unmolested, until two things happened. First, rating agencies got nervous about the quality of the sovereign debt

Brendan O’Neill

Call off the Tiger hunt

However he has behaved, Tiger Woods’s personal life just isn’t our business. Brendan O’Neill on the relentless erosion of the line between public and private Am I the only person who feels repelled by the naked glee with which Tiger Woods has been and is still being beaten to a pulp — no, not by his golf club-wielding wife, but by the world’s media? Ever since Woods crashed into a fire hydrant and a tree outside his home two weeks ago, his private life has been splashed across the front page of every tabloid from Tennessee to Timbuktu. It’s not over for poor Tiger. Earlier this week another clutch of

Tuesday

8 Dec 2009

Alex Massie

Christmas Scandal: Bute House Edition

Why do so many people hate politics? Partly because politicians insist upon making everything a matter of wearying, partisan, sillyness. Take this painting for instance. Hardly a masterpiece, not least because the young girl looks as though she knows she’s marching off to doom and that is the consequence of yet another episode of national folly. But, still, it’s just a picture and, in the end, only a Christmas card. But it’s Alex Salmond’s official Christmas card and so, natch, a matter for bickering and seasonal tomfoolery. As the Scotsman, which oddly now seems to consider the Cross of St Andrew a piece of “nationalist iconography” that, presumably, therefore belongs

James Forsyth

Tomorrow could be a turning point for the Tories

The number of polls showing the Tories below forty percent are causing some heartburn for the Tory leadership. When the first poll came out showing the Tory lead down, there was a feeling that this wasn’t all bad, that it would help remind the party that the election isn’t in the bag. But there is now mounting concern at Tory slippage, this is being reinforced by the fact that the party’s own research shows the same trends. Today’s leader in The Times, a paper which is normally editorially supportive of the leadership, was another unhelpful development. Newspaper editorials don’t move popular opinion but they do still influence the prism through

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