George osborne

What is Ed Miliband going to ask David Cameron about at Prime Minister’s Questions today now that the latest employment figures show the biggest quarterly increase since records began, and the biggest quarterly fall in unemployment since 1997? Actually, there is quite a lot that he can talk about that means he can entirely avoid the subject – Nicky Morgan’s warning to the Tories about ‘hate’, Aidan Burley, the row between Number 10 and Home Office about stop-and-search and Syria – but the Prime Minister will make jolly well sure that he shoehorns it into any question that’s asked of him, even if it’s a backbench one about the welfare

I have this theory that the reason why the British public is so hugely in favour of cutting welfare to the bone, and the British media so hostile, is that many (maybe most) journalists still depend on financial support from their parents well into their 30s. Since most media folk come from the sort of backgrounds where home ownership is expected, and yet work in an industry where the typical salary makes living anywhere near London extremely difficult, they feel too ashamed to opine on ‘scroungers’ because, well, they are scroungers. Anyway, maybe that’s what’s called projection. Most people in politics, like those in the media, tend to come from

The Chancellor’s announcement that he’s recommending an above average increase in the minimum wage is very welcome news. It’s something Renewal has been campaigning for since our launch in July. Wages have fallen behind prices for almost a decade now. The prosperity of Blair’s boom didn’t reach the low paid and it was the working poor who were hardest hit by the recession, meaning that the minimum wage is worth £1,000 less now than it was in 2008. Now that the economy is firmly on the road to recovery it’s the right time to raise the minimum wage. We have to ensure that prosperity and the benefits of the free

George Osborne’s decision to back an above inflation increase in the national minimum wage is his most politically significant decision since his decision to cut the 50p rate. It also makes that decision far less harmful politically. Reducing the top rate of tax might have been the right thing to do economically but it hurt the Tories politically. It enabled Labour to claim that this was a government for the rich and that the recovery was only benefitting the few. By contrast, this decision allows the Tories to emphasise that, in Osborne’s phrase, this is ‘a recovery for all.’ There will be those on the dry right who don’t like

George Osborne’s speech to the Open Europe conference this morning was billed as the Chancellor taking a tough guy stance with European leaders, demanding that they reform or see their project crumble. It sounded, from the overnight briefings, as though Osborne was trying to cheer up his backbenchers during their current round of banging on about Europe as much as he was trying to make the case for European reform. But when he delivered the full address, it had as much pro-European thinking in it as it did threats. Osborne was focusing on making the case for the whole of Europe to reform, for Europe to create better conditions for

George Osborne’s speech on the need for £25 billion more cuts has opened up some strange dividing lines in Westminster. Labour has done exactly what the Chancellor wanted and questioned the need for the cuts. Nick Clegg has also fallen into place as Osborne hoped and moaned about them being unfair. But Clegg has found an unlikely ally in Iain Duncan Smith, who has let it be known that he does not much like the idea that Osborne could cut a further £1 billion from the welfare bill. So who did Boris Johnson cosy up to this morning when he had his say? Well, the Mayor was certainly keen to

Today, George Osborne used a speech to administer what he called ‘hard truths’ about the economy. But in some cases, the truth was even harder than he let on. Here is a Fisk of his speech… 1. Size matters — ‘Government is going to have to be permanently smaller – and so too is the welfare system.’  This phrase — ‘permanently smaller’ — is designed to appeal to Conservatives. But in isolation, it’s pretty meaningless: smaller than what? The Brown peak? The below graph tells the story. The size of the British government (in red) used to be around average for a developed country (in blue). Gordon Brown’s massive achievement was the Europeanisation of

For the Conservative party, 2013 has been the year of Lynton Crosby. Just over a year ago, the Wizard of Oz was appointed David Cameron’s chief election strategist. Now he’s full-time. His brief is to make sure the Tories in government have a clear message – something that eluded them in the 2010 campaign. And to see that the message is articulated in deeds, not words. In April, the Prime Minister described his own strategy by using a quote from the late Keith Joseph: ‘the right thing to do is to address the things people care about; to fix yourself firmly in what Keith Joseph called the “common ground” of

The ONS has today revised upwards its growth for most of 2013, to show a recovery far stronger than it admitted at the time. This fits a trend: in economics, good luck tends to come in waves. And the tools economists have to work out what’s happening are so crude (and often useless) that it takes years to work out what really happened. Only in 2011, for example, was it clear that Gordon Brown had incubated the worst economic overheating since the war – hence the crash. But by the time this was clear, everyone blamed bankers for the crash – when, in fact, it was just reckless economic management.

Now that the economy is recovering and George Osborne has overtaken Ed Balls in the polls for having the best economic policies, he may be forgiven for wondering if wider rehabilitation is next. The Chancellor’s allies have long seen him as the man who will succeed David Cameron, perhaps in 2018, and imagine that his problem — looking too young — will remedy itself and that his personal popularity will recover along with the economy. Today’s polls suggest this isn’t happening – at least, not yet. While the Chancellor’s professional reputation is recovering from the omnishambolic 2012 budget his personal reputation is still pretty low. In today’s Independent on Sunday,

We already knew that welfare would be a key dividing line for George Osborne at the next election. He set up the dividing lines in the emergency budget and comprehensive spending review in 2010, and they have largely stuck, which is a testament to the Chancellor’s skill as a strategist. But at today’s Treasury Select Committee, Osborne thickened those dividing lines with Labour by saying that the welfare budget must take another billions of pounds’ worth of cuts. It was the language that Osborne used, as much as anything else, that revealed how the 2015 debate will pan out. He said: ‘My view is that welfare expenditure cannot be excluded