On the Westminster grapevine...
Fraser Nelson 6:15pm
'Tis the season for Christmas receptions at Westminster, where the hacks like myself compare notes with people who know a lot more about life than we do. There's a distinct lack of bubbly this year - funny how ministers take special care over that, while the government overspend is (literally) enough to fill every bath in England with Moet - but the chat's been first class, especially at the Centre for Policy Studies bash last night. I thought I’d share some of it with CoffeeHousers. Much of the below may be obvious to y’all, but I found it interesting and thought-provoking. Here are my top ten points from the right-leaning people I cornered:
1) EXPORTS Utter rot being talked about the economy now. Take the idea that the plunging pound will mean an export-led recovery. One must remember that overseas clients will demand a discount. If sterling is off 25% against the dollar they may demand 18%. Politicians never appreciate nuances like this, because none of them have run anything larger than a raffle.
2) SAVERS There are seven times as many savers as borrowers in Britain - something young people never believe because all their friends owe so much. It’s an important fact, and politicians should remember it when formulating policy. So Major’s idea of charging no tax on the first £5k would be very electorally popular, and not too expensive.
3) ECONOMY The Tory message on the economy is still too complicated. An idea for a simpler one: “We should be bailing out the people, not the banks.” An idea for a policy: “We’ll lift out of tax anyone earning less than £20k.” Clarity is needed. Not this worthy, complex stuff about asset-backed securities. Osborne has been spending too much time with accountants, and not enough on the doorstep.
4) CHILDCARE The American welfare reform may have shown a fall in lone parents on the welfare roll, but this should not be confused with a drop in births outside marriage. They continued, but mothers relied on family support more. Absent fathers reappeared, because suddenly they were needed for economic reasons. The most damaging aspect of UK welfare system is that it means mothers with low-income partners are better off alone. In this way, ‘tough love’ welfare reform for lone parents strengthens the family, because it restores the economic function of the family in the low-income groups.
5) MANDELSON The Prince is presenting a threat intellectually, as well as strategically. Look at his Hugo Young lecture where he discussed how to restructure the economy - brilliantly and powerfully argued, and the Tories don’t have a response to it. They’d better get one.
6) JOHN McFALL doesn't like Alistair Darling. Why? It seems tribal: a Glaswegian disliking a snooty Edinburgh lawyer; making for a more interesting Treasury Select Committee. Strange place, Scotland. The internal rivalries eclipse any animosity they may have towards England. Also, McFall accepts that the crash was a regulatory failure, not a banking failure. This is a great attack line for the Tories.
7) NHS SUPER-COMPUTER axing it is a great example of ‘more for less,’ which is Cameron’s soundbite. You can do the same job with Google Health – a record system that the American clinics use all the time. And issues about security of data don’t arise, because the government’s record on data security is far worse on this front. Cameron will need more ammo on more-for-less. It’s the austerity theme, and the think tanks will have to help.
8) DAMIAN GREEN the imbroglio was fun while it lasted, but to concentrate on it too much was a mistake for Cameron in retrospect because it took away attention from the attack on the PBR, which was going well. No cock-up - you can’t choose the timings of these things, and it put Brown on the defensive for a week - but the indignation just wasn't shared by the public. The average voter’s complaint is that the police arrested just one MP when there are 634 others still on the streets. Now folk have forgotten. Cameron realises that, hence all these speeches on the economy.
9) AFGHANISTAN It was in 1985 that the Soviets thought they’d won in Afghanistan – then things went south. There are a lot of parallels with them then, and us now. Gorbachev gave the military two years to make progress, or he’d pull them out. Obama may well say the same to the US military. He asked Brown for 2,000 extra troops and Brown gave him 300. There goes Brown’s chance of being first to get invited to Washington.
10) IDES OF MARCH The peak unemployment will be in January, when the claimant count is normally 15% up. But the delay in reporting means we may not hear about this until March. That is when the economic fertilizer will hit the fan. Then, finally, the public mood may shift from anxiety to anger.
Previous
strapworld
December 17th, 2008 8:39pm Report this commentGosh, you people that reside in the Westminster village have such a hard time.
It is not that lot that will decide the election - it is we the common people out here in the real world.
What a truly sad lot you are!
C Powell
December 17th, 2008 8:57pm Report this commentPoints 2 & 3 are ones which I - and other Coffee Housers - have been making on this blog for weeks now. Never mind the Westminster grapevine. You - and the Tories - need to start listening to us ordinary people a bit more.
Not much champagne in my house but I brew a mean pot of tea and the chocolate muffins are wonderful.
BrianSJ
December 17th, 2008 9:02pm Report this commentFraser,
Great. Thank you.
Especially - well all of them really.
Peak unemployment - long time after January I fear.
Shame about the bubbly but it's overrated anyway.
Neil Turner
December 17th, 2008 9:08pm Report this commentGood refreshing perspective here Fraser - well done.
People like me are screaming at the telly and News websites for some reality from the media and opposition.
2 big questions...
1. Why is it that giants like Sky News are so easily distracted from these vital and fundamental issues ? We all know that the BBC is politically incapable of biting the hands that feeds it, but Sky ?
2. Why is the opposition so ineffective in holding Labour to account ? Things are going to get a lot lot worse as we move towards the brink
Hysteria
December 17th, 2008 9:16pm Report this commentdo you mean seven times as many savers as borrowers Fraser???
StephenDC
December 17th, 2008 9:44pm Report this commentYou would spend quite alot more getting out of the NHS IT contracts than you would just delivering the computer system.
That is the reason Brown hasnt already scrapped this project which the treasury hated at the time and Blair drove through.
Although its about 2 years late, its not costing alot of money yet because the NHS pays when stuff works, and not much does yet.
It may in fact never work. However even if thats true we are better off not scrapping the contract with associated compensation but rather leaving the contractors hanging unable to get paid.
This is actually a very good example of why the talk at parties generally but particularly about efficiencies needs a careful dose of sanity the next day!
Scrapping this contract would cost you billions and save you nothing.
Andrew
December 17th, 2008 9:47pm Report this commentYour Point (9) just reinforces the case for a cut'n'run General Election in February 2009.
Prodicus
December 17th, 2008 10:07pm Report this commentOops. You mean seven times as many savers as borrowers.
John MacLeod
December 17th, 2008 10:17pm Report this commentI shall grimly resist dismantling your fatuous suggestion that Scotland is riven by territorial 'internal rivalries', Fraser: but John McFall is not a Glaswegian. He is a proud native of Dumbarton, miles to the west and not even in the same county, and has represented the town in Parliament since 1987.
Moxon
December 17th, 2008 10:20pm Report this commentPerhaps you;re right about March. But it may be this: sham that Brown could not do better than this, but we'd have been in a much worse case if the 'do nothing' party had been 'in charge'.
Oor Willie
December 17th, 2008 10:20pm Report this comment7 John Mcfall
As Chairman of the Treasury Select Committee did he not have some responsibility for the regulatory failure?
TGF UKIP
December 17th, 2008 10:30pm Report this commentThe most depressing thing about this is the final few words of 3). "Osborne has been spending too much time with the accountants, and not enough on the doorstep."
Now if you had said, Fraser, "and not enough with his family." then we could all have said "Hear ,hear" and your repentance would have greatly added to the Christmas cheer.
Chris
December 17th, 2008 11:06pm Report this comment>There are seven times as many borrowers as savers in Britain
Surely the other way about?
Tom Willis
December 17th, 2008 11:18pm Report this comment"There are seven times as many borrowers as savers in Britain"
Should that not read "There are seven times as many savers as borrowers in Britain"?
Whichever way, isn't it a rather nuanced statement? If I have money in the bank, and also a mortgage, am I a borrower or a saver, or even both? Perhaps NET borrower or saver is the issue?
Pete Hoskin
December 18th, 2008 12:01am Report this commentEveryone who spotted the savers/borrowers mix-up: thanks - it's been corrected now. Just trying to keep you all on your toes!
Sarf Lunnon
December 18th, 2008 12:13am Report this commentAfghanistan: no more troops (and not many more US ones either) because the overland lines of supply have been cut, not only Pak but Uzbekistan since the US were rude about the President. They're looking for little border crossings into Turkmenistan at the moment, and one non-combatant NATO country which is not blacklisted by the neighbours is doing a useful bit of smuggling for us. Otherwise...
TomTom
December 18th, 2008 5:56am Report this commentOne must remember that overseas clients will demand a discount
Actually you don't change export prices in Dollars or Euros simply book the dufference as profit in Sterling.
What this forgets is that Britain's exports are probably semi-finished - like Saab engines from Vauxhall in Wales or sub-assemblies for Airbus - so if the finished product from Germany, Sweden or France is not selling it hardly matters if Britain is making components with devalued pounds.
Politicians do not understand just how integrated production is in the EU and still think of Britain as a land of finished-goods manufacturers.
They used to tell us how we exported more pop music than steel - I have not heard this caim repeated recently; nor much aboit The City and its invisibles ...but we did sell off ICI to Akzo and Pilkingtons to Nippon Glass and Plessey to Siemens and the non-defence side of FEC to Ericsson making the City a bit in fees
Having borrowed £2.5 trillion from overseas it will take a lot of exports to pay that back as the Pound devalues !
Fraser Nelson
December 18th, 2008 9:09am Report this commentJohn MacLeod, if you're the sometime Herald columnist you'll know all about Scotland's internal rivalries. The difference between Dumbarton and Glasgow is appreciated as much down here as the difference between Clapham and Lambeth is up there.
Susan Hill
December 18th, 2008 9:43am Report this commentThere are other exports. The right in my books sell to a lot of foreign countries. Those are exports. Tiddly. But they`re exports.
Excellent analysis and I hope Cameron reads it.
They still haven`t put forward any sound arguments or policies on the economy since that silly stuff about cutting Council Tax. Or if they have I haven`t noticed or don`t remember - which is the point really.
P.S. I see Cameron`s wife`s posh stationary shop is offering a 20% discount. That`ll bring down the cost of their writing paper there to a fiver a sheet then.
William Norton
December 18th, 2008 10:10am Report this commentI think the more important question concerns "while the government overspend is (literally) enough to fill every bath in England with Moet".
What's the working on that?
JONNY
December 18th, 2008 10:31am Report this commentIf they don't bring in Ken Clarke, they're going to lose the next Election.
Hugh Jeffery Knight
December 18th, 2008 10:34am Report this commentSusan: At least Mrs Cameron's posh shop is stationary. It already kills trees for its stationery: imagine the environmental impact if it were mobile.
The Mathlete
December 18th, 2008 10:53am Report this commentWilliam Norton: I'm bored at work, but I did this quite quickly.
Census 2001 - 20,451,000 households in England
Assume 1.5 baths per house = 30,676,500 baths
Ave bath = 50 galls = 225 litres
That requires 300 btl of Moet to fill 1 bath
I can get Moet at my local Threshers for £23.50. (I reckon the public sector would end up paying about £35, but let's use my lower figure.)
So it would cost c£7,050 to fill one bath.
£7,050 x 30,676,500 gives a total of
GB£216,269,325,000.
Fraser: Does that work?
I haven't double-checked the figures because I'm off for coffee.
William Norton
December 18th, 2008 11:32am Report this commentMathlete: I was wondering more about the 'overspend' aspect.
I'm not really querying that it would cost approx £216 billion to fill every bath in the country (perhaps a little less; I'd guess at a slightly lower bath per household figure).
Also, Government is clearly 'overspending' - the point is by how much. £216 billion is a rather aggressive estimate for waste/unnecessary expenditure - total estimated TME for 2008/9 is £623 billion.
Fraser Nelson
December 18th, 2008 1:12pm Report this commentWilliam, I'd calculated for rather less water the in bathtub: 42 gallons, and few of us fill it to capacity. And I'd gone on 1.2 average, not 1.5 - several houses have no bath at all now. And while a second shower is common a second bathtub far less so. But by overspend, I mean the deficit. Tax collected expected to be £545bn this year according to PBR08, difference/borrowing/overspend =£118bn. More than enough for everyone with a bath to bathe in Moet.
cuffleyburgers
December 18th, 2008 1:13pm Report this comment@ William Norton - at round about a third, mathlete's guess for waste looks about right.
@ Mr Nelson - plse don't refer to Mandleson as the prince, it is even more annoying than when Italian (ie Berlusconi's) media refer to Berlusconi as "Il Cavaliere".
Mandleson isn't a prince, he's only a lord because he was put there by an unelected incompetent git who shames his office.
Mandleson is a slimy treacherous lying piece of shit; if you are looking for a suitable sobriquet how about the "ueberscumbag"?
Ivan Dunnow
December 18th, 2008 1:35pm Report this comment1) EXPORTS: Garbage from you: whatever miracles a devalued currency *won't* achieve, it's hardly as if it's a benefit-neutral event. In the circumstances we (and all other Western industrial democracies) find ourselves, what's happening to the pound is what the government would of course ideally want to happen (but equally obviously cannot actually say so in public).
2) SAVERS: well we all now know the balls up you made on this one. It's difficult to take your fulminations quite so seriously when you can't even get them the right way round. But more importantly, you affect to (or perhaps actually) believe that 'savings' and 'debt' are exactly comparable, and that the right metric is cash value. They're not and it isn't. Debt is a much more dynamic property than savings.
3) ECONOMY: the Tory message isn't, as you claim, too 'complicated'. It's non-existent in most instances, and fundamentally wrong in the race cases where it can be discerned. Our biggest failing by far has been clinging so tightly, and so fearfully to Labour's policies. We should never have backed their spending plans (that was three wasted years, where we could have been establishing our own narrative); and, it was madness to back them at Conference as they lurched from bad to worse.
4) CHILDCARE: and as you now know, Dave now intends to whip the parliamentary party in support of the worst sparts and cultural Marxists on the Labour backbenches.
5) MANDELSON: a bogeyman who illuminates the spinelessness of Team Dave not by what he does, but just by how he so effortlessly causes them to bed-wet.
6) JOHN McFALL: a media talkign head, written up simply because he likes jumping into every Tv studio that will have him. The point remains, he's wrong, Darling's right (or rather, substantially less wrong than McFall is), and Osborne is nowhere.
7) NHS SUPER-COMPUTER: totally, but as every pro-Dave flack like Finkelstein keeps shrieking, we're not going to offer any detail about austerity, and are thus as unconvincing as the government are.
8) DAMIAN GREEN: There is really is a beam you need to address before you start upon that mote Fraser - *you* were front and central in the hysterical over-reaction to this. Much though I'd, as a Thatcherite reactionary, like to pin the blame for the mishandling of this solely on Dave, his idiot friends in the house press hardly did him any favours.
9) AFGHANISTAN: Fraser says, because we're putting in few extra troops, "there goes Brown’s chance of being first to get invited to Washington". Yeah, because a.) that matters one whit to our national self-interest; b.) France or Germany are going to get their first. Except . . . they're no more going to offer extra divisions than we are. Indeed, they're all still going to remain lesser players than the UK in Afghanistan. Oh, and the Canadian PM and Mexican president *always*, by tradition, meet a new US president before any European leader does.
10) IDES OF MARCH In other words, Dave has hunkered down, has nothing to offer, and is just praying that events will save him from his the consequences of his four years pointing in absolutely the wrong direction.
Hysteria
December 18th, 2008 1:45pm Report this commentWhat Susan said...
I just can't get my head round why the Tories seem to have completely lost the plot on providing cogent attacks on the economic front.
I mean - I suspect most of us here are towards the nerdy end of the spectrum in terms of keeping up with the political news - and if we can't spot a message what hope has the rest of the electorate?
Mrs May's answer to Q1 on the other post is but one example of the problem.....
(note to moderator - can't we have some kind of interlinking thingummy at the side of the screen...?)
Anyway - the electorate will go with who they think is best placed to help them keep their house, job, pension etc. And absent a coherent narrative from DC, they will vote Brown.......
Verity
December 18th, 2008 4:02pm Report this commentHysteria, I agree that absent a coherent message from the Conservatives, the electorate will vote for Brown. Confident prediction: The will be no such coherent message.
Theresa May's condescending, dismissive answer to question No 1 would have shed a few Tory voters right there.
hadrian
December 18th, 2008 10:59pm Report this commentI honestly doubt if genuine floating voters are as in love with Broon as those polls suggest.General dissatisfaction will, in the end, I suspect take a huge toll on Broon, no matter how assinine the public may be in thinking he's 'in control' when it comes to the economy. People are just fed up with him and his cronies and the concept of a 'rotten borough' of politicians in power too long may yet see them done for- particularly as the recession starts to bite deeply into visible areas such as retail in the customary ( even in the best of times!) post Xmas 'slump'.
On Damian Green, I disagree, Fraser, that this should be allowed to fade. It is opposition's job, for pete's sake, to lead and alert, and I'll tell you this- if my MP were arrested in similar fashion I'd be up in arms at the implications. Come on, Tories, civil liberties are one of your distinctive fields- it's up to you to get the message of what's happened across. To let it die is nothing short of criminal complicity.
As for John MacLeod- from the habitually 'bitter' tone of his posts I shouldnae be surprised if it's our auld Herald, miserable bugger, misery guts! Great reposte, though, Fraser!
Altogether a stimulating post, laddy!!
Incidentally- the Spectator Leader, Humbug, is just that, in its suggestion that Christianity could be even vaguely 'socialist'! Biblical Christianity is unyieldingly for 'honest capitalism' and a severely restricted State as all the great studies of the 'Protestant work ethic' and calvinism demonstrate!
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