Economy

Monday

Ed West

Someone rid us of the awful slogan: ‘hardworking families’

This is a message to any politician out there thinking of using the phrase ‘hardworking families’ or ‘hardworking people’ – I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you. A day does not go by without a Tory politician using this highly irritating slogan, especially in the regular spam emails I get from the party. The latest occurrence happened today with the energy minister telling WATO that ‘We are determined to protect hard-working families from fuel bill rises’. I must be out of touch with public opinion, as usual, and this idea must resonate with people in general, because otherwise the media-obsessed Tories wouldn’t repeat

Sunday

James Forsyth

Osborne wants to talk about ‘the responsible recovery’ but energy bills are still Topic A

In the minds of government strategists, the autumn statement is the moment when the coalition gets to turn the conversation back to the broader economy and away from Ed Miliband’s focus on the cost of living. But the first five minutes of George Osborne’s pre-statement interview with Andrew Marr were dominated by the action the government is taking in response to Miliband’s pledge to freeze energy bills. The problem for the coalition on energy bills is that the £50 it is taking off bills now might well not be enough to stop bills rising next year. If household bills go up again in 2014, Miliband’s price freeze is going to

Thursday

James Forsyth

Will George Osborne play Santa next week?

When George Osborne stands up next week to deliver the autumn statement, he’ll have some good news to deliver. Not only is autumn, the dreariest of the British seasons over, but borrowing has come in lower than expected and the OBR will upgrade the growth forecasts. But the return of growth, as I say in the magazine this week, poses a strategic dilemma for Osborne. If he declares the economic emergency over, the public might conclude it was safe to turn back to Labour. But equally he has to show voters that he’s sharing the proceeds of growth. I suspect that Osborne will steer clear of too many sweetners. They’ll

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Filming Bono, fighting Balls – how George Osborne’s preparing for his autumn statement

James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman discuss George Osborne’s 2013 Autumn statement: [audioboo url=”https://audioboo.fm/boos/1763353-isabel-hardman-and-james-forsyth-discuss-george-osborne-s-autumn-statement”][/audioboo] Next week’s autumn statement looks at first as if it should be easy for George Osborne. For the first time, he’ll arrive with unambiguously good news. He can announce an upgrade of the growth forecasts and that borrowing has come in lower than expected. Politically, however, his task is as difficult as ever. He has to wrestle back the initiative from Labour. Preparations for this ‘fiscal event’, to use the Whitehall parlance, have been intense. The government’s top Tories met last Friday to discuss how they wanted to project both David Cameron’s trip to China, which they hope

Sunday

James Forsyth

What Lynton Crosby told David Cameron’s political Cabinet

The next time you see a Tory minister on television, count how long it is until they say that David Cameron is a leader with a long term plan for this country. This is the Tories’ new message. In a presentation to Cameron’s political Cabinet on Tuesday morning, Lynton Crosby told the ministers present that the Tories would probably lose the election if it was held today or tomorrow. But, as I report in the Mail on Sunday, he stressed that the election was still 16 months away so the Tories had time to turn things round. He emphasised that they should play up that Cameron is a man with a

Saturday

James Bloodworth

Venezuela: a shining example of how not to help the poor

No serious person today views the Cuban Revolution as anything other than an impoverished tyranny – up to and including the leaders of that Revolution, who have been hastily turning toward capitalism since learning in 2009 that the island was on the brink of insolvency. It remains much easier to find useful idiots willing to defend Venezuela’s so-called ‘Bolivarian revolution’, however, which until recently was supposed to promise something better than its ossified Caribbean neighbour. Not for much longer, perhaps; for Venezuela is on the brink of a social explosion after 15 years of economic incompetence by Islington’s favourite petrocrat. It was reported this week that, absurdly, the most oil

Sunday

James Forsyth

What the Ed Balls is a ‘nightmare’ emails tell us

It has long been suspected that there are tensions between Ed Miliband and Ed Balls. The pair fell out badly over the third runway at Heathrow in government and when Miliband was elected leader, he conspicuously didn’t offer Balls the job of shadow Chancellor. But since Balls became shadow Chancellor the pair has largely succeeded in keeping their differences under wraps. But the leaked emails revealed by Simon Walters in the Mail on Sunday today, show what Miliband’s team privately thinks of Balls. Torsten Bell, one of Miliband’s most influential aides, calls Balls a ‘nightmare’ and complains about how complicated his message on the economy is. Tellingly, he isn’t rebuked

David Blackburn

Nick Clegg’s mantra: You can’t trust Labour or the Tories ‘on their own’

‘On their own’ – those are  Nick Clegg’s watchwords for the 2015 election. His speech on the economy last week was spun as ‘one of his strongest attacks ever on the Labour Party’; but, while Clegg certainly did say that Labour would seriously damage your wealth, he remembered his mantra: ‘So don’t be fooled again: you cannot afford Labour. Let loose in government on their own they would wreck the recovery – costing jobs, driving up interest rates and undermining the growth needed to cut tax bills and fund public services. They cannot be allowed to undo all of the sacrifices that have been made and everything that has been

Saturday

James Forsyth

There’s no point in just outsourcing our CO2 emissions

The global warming question is back on the political agenda with David Cameron likening cutting greenhouse gas emissions to house insurance. His argument is that if there’s a risk that they may be harmful, you want to guard against it. But given that ‘global warming’ is no respected of national boundaries, one thing that isn’t sensible is to simply send energy intensive industries and their jobs and profits overseas. But this is just what the EU is doing, according to Bjørn Lomborg. He reports that: ‘From 1990 to 2008, the EU cut its emissions by about 270 million metric tons of CO2. But it turns out that the increase in

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Luck of the Irish? Ireland’s recovery is down to common sense and graft

My man in Dublin calls with joy in his voice to tell me ‘the Troika’ — the combined powers of the EU, the European Central Bank and the IMF — have signed off Ireland as fit to leave their bailout programme and return to economic self-determination. This is a remarkable turnaround in just three years since I visited the Irish capital in the midst of rescue talks — to find a nation in shock, staring at an €85 billion emergency loan facility that equated to €20,000 per citizen, a collapsing banking system and a landscape scarred by delusional, never-to-be-finished property developments. In the special Irish way, almost everyone I spoke

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Nick Clegg fires the opening shots at Labour on economy

Nick Clegg’s blast at Labour today is just the opening salvo of a Lib Dem offensive against Labour on the economy. It is another reminder that coalition unity is strongest on the economy. Clegg’s jibe ‘Do you know why Ed Miliband suddenly wants to talk about the cost of living? Because they’ve lost the bigger economic argument’ could easily have been said by Cameron. While his argument that ‘healthy household budgets flow directly from a healthy economy. The two go hand in hand’ echoed George Osborne’s response to the GDP figures. At the top of the coalition, they are immensely frustrated that Labour has managed to change the conversation from

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The economy is booming, says the Bank of England. So why won’t it raise rates?

Yet another survey suggests that Britain is booming – this time, it’s from the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee. They’re the guys who kept interest rates too low for too long – creating the last boom. It sees another boom now.”For the first time in a long time you don’t have to be an optimist to see the glass is half full,” said Mark Carney, the new BoE Governor. “The recovery has finally taken hold.” Citi has crunched latest BoE figures (pdf) and says this envisages real GDP growth of a stonking 3.4 per cent next year and 2.8 per cent the year after, which it says is one

Saturday

James Forsyth

Why do the Tories lead on the economy and leadership but trail overall?

One of the odd things about the polls at the moment is that the Tories lead on economic competence and leadership, traditionally the two most important issues, yet trail overall. There are, I argue in the column this week, three possible explanations for this polling paradox. The first possibility is that Ed Miliband is right, that the link between GDP growth and voters’ living standards is broken. A consequence of this is that voters put less emphasis on economic management in the round. Instead, they want to know which party will do most to help them with their cost of living. Then, there’s the possibility that the traditional political rules

Monday

Isabel Hardman

European Council statement: Leaders seize opportunity for economic ding dong

Why did the Prime Minister give a statement in the Commons on the outcome of last week’s European Council summit? Though he is expected to report back to MPs each time one of these jamborees takes place, David Cameron didn’t really have a great deal to tell them other than the tantalising suggestion that the leaders had made progress on cutting red tape and the declaration that ‘the EU is changing’. It was hardly one of those statements where Cameron can wave a budget cut or some other great policy victory at MPs. listen to ‘David Cameron’s statement on the European Council summit’ on Audioboo

Saturday

Melanie McDonagh

When it comes to postage stamps, you’re always dealing with a monopoly

Well, the whole Royal Mail privatisation is going terrifically well, isn’t it? I’m not talking about the pricing of the issue which has obsessed most of the pundits. I’m talking about users. The latest exciting new development from this privatised company with the Queen’s head on the product is that it is to use new technology to let companies know that their promotional material – junk mail as it’s affectionately known to its recipients – has been safely put through the door, so they are now free to cold call households to follow up the delivery. Nice! But it’s the impact on the price of stamps that really gets me

Friday

Isabel Hardman

Who feels grumpier about the recovery?

The Tories were expecting Ed Balls to be a little grumpy today after the ONS’ latest figures showed the economy was growing at its fastest rate in three years. And the Shadow Chancellor didn’t sound his cheeriest when he popped up to respond. In his official response, Balls said: ‘After three damaging years of flatlining, it’s both welcome and long overdue that our economy is growing again. But for millions of people across the country still seeing prices rising faster than their wages this is no recovery at all.’ And on the World at One, he said: ‘For people who are seeing their living standards falling, being told that somehow

Thursday

James Forsyth

The ‘gangbusters’ economy

Tomorrow’s GDP figures are expected to show that the economy is no longer bouncing along the bottom but is now in steady recovery with a second successive quarter of robust growth. It is all very different from the start of the year when the country appeared to be on the verge of a triple dip recession. As I say in this week’s magazine, when in early February the Chancellor’s chief economic adviser Rupert Harrison told a crunch Downing Street meeting that the economy would be going ‘gangbusters’ by late summer, early autumn, the Prime Minister’s chief of staff Ed Llewellyn was so taken aback by the confidence of the prediction

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Growth is not enough — the Tories must show they’re not the party of the rich

The mood was grim when David Cameron, George Osborne and their advisers convened for a crunch meeting on 4 February this year. The economy had shrunk in the final three months of last year; the country was on the verge of a triple-dip recession, unprecedented in modern times. The government was in dire political straits. Those present discussed the situation with appropriate solemnity. But the tension was broken when Rupert Harrison, the Chancellor’s chief economic adviser, passionately declared that the economy would be going ‘gangbusters’ by late summer, early autumn. Ed Llewellyn, the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, chuckled and joked that he would take a note of that confident

Arthur Laffer

Arthur Laffer: cuts succeeded where stimulus failed

 Nashville, TN All the drama coming out of Washington in the last few weeks has obscured some seriously good news: federal government spending is falling. And not at a trickle: think the White Cliffs of Dover. Not since the economic boom following 1945 have Americans seen such a rapid decline in the government’s claim on the nation’s resources — falling by a welcome $94 billion over two years. You need to go back to the end of the Korean war to find a time when US government spending has actually declined over two years. If Republicans in the House stick to the sequester and future caps already built into current

Monday

Isabel Hardman

Justin Welby and the Downing Street grid

One man who isn’t on message at the start of the government’s economy week is Justin Welby, who has been warning against excessive jubilation at the end of this week when the next tranche of GDP figures are released. He told the Telegraph: ‘A flourishing economy is necessary but not sufficient. A healthy society flourishes and distributes economic resources effectively, but also has a deep spiritual base which gives it its virtue.’ This sounds a little bit like pre-2010 David Cameron, but it doesn’t quite chime with the political offensive that the Tories want to go on this week, accusing Labour of making consistently bad predictions about the economy. The