Economy

So where were these 20 economists when Gordon Brown first set the 50p trap for George Osborne? Then, Brown’s gamble was that the Shadow Chancellor was a political strategist with little interest or expertise in economics, so he’d be unlikely to work out just how much the 50p tax would lose the Exchequer, or guess it could be more than £3 billion a year – with further, less calculable damage on Britain’s reputation as a home for entrepreneurs. This was when we needed those economists. At the time, all Osborne had to go on was the IFS which calculated it would cost £800m – assuming the rich were no more

Tieless, Alistair Darling appeared on Marr this morning to discuss his memoir. As with so many of these New Labour autobiographies, there was the strong whiff of a therapy session. At one point, Darling said “if Gordon is listening to this” before remarking that he still felt a huge amount of “residual loyalty” to him. It is not news that the Brown government was dysfunctional. But it was striking that Darling did not dissent when Marr suggested that under Brown, Labour had – collectively – not been fit to govern. In the serialisation of the book in The Sunday Times, the detail that stands out to me is that Darling and David Miliband met

The slump in home ownership is reported today as a bad thing. Many Conservatives, who believe that home ownership releases what the late Shirley Letwin called “vigorous virtues“, may agree. So might Labour, which came to regret its opposition to the Thatcher policy of allowing council tenants to buy their home. Like inflation targeting, home ownership was a solution that worked so well in the 1990s that it was vigorously pursued in the next decade. But here’s the rub: it had disastrous effects. In this case, the disaster was governments pursuing greater home ownership as a policy goal. This meant cheap loans, which meant subprime mortgages, which meant a credit

As James noted earlier, Angela Merkel’s response to the Eurozone crisis is hampered by the awkward arithmetic in the Bundestag. Merkel has been faced with these difficulties throughout the crisis. Her answer has been to oppose initial proposals to solve the Eurozone crisis, only to relent later in the day. This has been the pattern from the first Greek bailout to the expansion of the EFSF, which is currently before the Bundestag. Might her apparently determined opposition to Eurobonds (which, of course, would require a huge transfer of power and cash from Berlin to the Med and Brussels) go the same way? Wolfgang Münchau has a comprehensive piece on the

“It’s not over yet.” That has become the government’s Libyan mantra, delivered with a tone of sombre sobriety. However, James Kirkup reports that, in private, ministers are cock-a-hoop, already dreaming of photo-ops and triumphant flyovers. You wonder what Ed Llewellyn makes of the celebrations. Allegra Stratton has written a revealing profile of David Cameron’s chief-of-staff, ‘the most powerful man you rarely hear about’. Llewellyn is a foreign policy expert, a veteran of tours in the Balkans and the Far East. Stratton says he is: ‘Discreet personally and cautious politically, he will have insisted on megaphone caution from the PM and his cabinet ministers who duly took to the airwaves.’ I’m told that diplomats share

As Tim Montgomerie has noted, a growing priority for voters is the astronomical cost of petrol. In fact, according to a Populous poll conducted outside the Westminster bubble, people are far more concerned about energy prices than almost any other issue, even public sector spending cuts. With prices hitting 150p per litre at some garages, many fear that petrol and diesel is becoming part of the poverty trap. For example, in my constituency of Harlow, figures show that the average motorist is now paying something like £1,700 a year just to fill up the family car. This is a tenth of the average income in our town. Experts have ruled