Darling's position of strength

boulay

O/T but has anyone undertaken an exercise in looking at the tory manifesto at the last election and extrapolating it out to see if their policies would have actually made any positive differenc in our coping with the downturn?

i was reading a jeff randall column this morning and he mentioned tory plans to cut GBP5b from government spending at the last election and wondered if this realism could be documented across other areas.

sorry for being off topic!

TrevorsDen

What's credible is that this inept government tore up the bank regulation rules on a Brown whim and led us into this recession with masses of debt based on bogus growth.

Nothing Darling or Brown say on the back of that is remotely credible and they cannot hide the fact that we have to pay back the debt from this recession AND the debt were were saddled with going into it.

Oh and any chance of building up a surplus to deal with the next recession?

Nope - thought not. Brown and Darling et al care only for one thing, keeping us moribund and subservient whilst they continue to fiddle the books.

Jeremy

Do you mean to say that Alistair Darling is the Chancellor of the Exchequer after all? And not Ed Balls or Peter Mandelson or Gordon Brown? I thought they were all either taking it in turns, speaking across one another or fighting over the role like ferrets in a sack.

And hasn't Darling left it a bit late to wag his finger at the bankers? Labour could have nailed the bonuses issue back when they held the purse strings. But they didn't. The greed may be the bankers', but the failure to put an end to it when they could have done so is Labour's own...

lawrence greek

A mini CSR will focus on just Labour's pet areas, it will be a pointless posturing exercise. In all this discussion all we ever really hear from them is 'will you cut Sure Start?'. It will be more of the same.

Denis Cooper

This week on the money-go-round -

The Bank of England created £6.50 billion out of thin air and used it to buy up previously issued gilts from the market, on Monday and Wednesday.

Taking the total new money that the Bank has now created and used to buy up gilts to £103 billion, equivalent to about 7% of GDP.

Meanwhile on Tuesday and Thursday the Treasury borrowed a total of £7.75 billion by selling new gilts into the market.

With the Bank continuing to mop up excess gilts from the market, the Treasury is having no difficulty selling broadly equivalent gilts into the market in order to borrow enough money to cover the government’s budget deficit.

In accordance with the Weimar doctrine, 97% of the Bank’s “quantitative easing” is being directed towards easing the government’s financial difficulties; however there is no truth in recent reports that local councils will be instructed to provide residents with free wheelbarrows.

Orson Presence

He's saying, "I haven't got a clue what's going on, so I don't know what to do".

Visionary.

Chris lancashire

The excuse being trotted out that a CSR cannot be undertaken because of the "uncertain economic position" is risible. It is precisely when times are difficult that governments, companies and individuals need to look at income, expenditure and factor in a range of future possibilities and risks to establish the best plan for handling them. To not undertake a CSR at this time is to abrogate the government's responsibilities.
And why, magically, will the economic position become forecastable AFTER an election?

Simon Stephenson

'To do detailed allocations running up to 2013-14 at the moment, with all the uncertainty, just does not make any sense,'

Alistair Darling

Oh come off it!

The entire process will be going on as if nothing's happened. Of course a half-trillion pound organisation like the public sector is going to be planning ahead in a very detailed way. Moreover, it will be planning so as to set an order of priority for commitments depending upon different assumptions of the availability of funds.

For Darling to suggest that all this is being put on hold pending less uncertain times is treating the public like eight-year-olds.

What Labour are desperate not to happen is for the completeness of these detailed deliberations to be published before the next election. This is totally a decision being made for party reasons, not for anything else.

The problem with the full spending review, from Labour's point of view, is that it is too unequivocal. It doesn't allow them to select the juicy bits from a dried-up whole and present them as typical of it. Whereas what they propose to do is to present only the juicy bits, and then push for all it's worth the false idea that these are representative of the whole.

What a desperate arena of uselessness our national political scene has become.

Denis Cooper

Just updated on:

http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/markets/apf/results.htm

"The table below show the outstanding stock holdings (on a settled basis, net of any redemptions) for each facility. These data are as at close Thursday 2 July 2009.

Commercial Paper £1,914mn
Corporate Bonds £803mn
Gilts £102,868mn "

102,868 divided by 105,585 = 97.4% .

Chuck Unsworth

A mini-CSR is merely a concoction of 'palatable' facts. Whether it would bear any relationship to economic reality is entirely open to conjecture.

Darling et al simply don't get it, do they? What's wanted and needed is complete openness - and what's being offered is selective partiality.

So anything which Darling offers which is less than full transparency of all the facts will, inevitably, be regarded by the electorate as a cover-up. And if he does decide to open the books for all to pore over that will now be seen as yet another retreat.

Politically this move is a self-inflicted wound. Whether it is mortal or not remains to be seen. However it is yet another manifestation of gross incompetence.

chris

Darling has a direct responsibility to the taxpaying citizens of this country to act effectively on their behalf before any other consideration, e.g. party politics. This responsiility is to ensure taxpayer's money is spent properly and not wasted, and only allocate funds to spending departments in response to transparent and honest demands, which the taxpayer can understand. Taxpayers are all of us, including those on benefits.

As we have said before, if he can't do this then he will be remembered as being completely useless. It is much easier to be honest than otherwise, even if it hurts.

At the bottom line, including all the 'off balance sheet stuff' how much will be borrowed by the government on behalf of us (per family and per individual), at the peak of our indebtedness, a few years hence, if their predictions can be believed?

Everybody, everybody knows that Brown is responsible directly for 75% of this mess, and putting us on the edge of bankruptcy.

Apparently Darling has stood up to the idiot Brown, but what for?

Publius

If the Tories have any sense they will refuse point blank to allow Labour to set the terms of the debate on Britain's future.

Even to use Labour's Newspeak vocabulary is to concede what should not be conceded.

[BTW, Mr Hoskin. You wrote "their" above instead of "there"]

dorothy wilson

The Conservatives should pre-empt this by setting out in a straightforward way their understanding of the country's current financial situation insofar as they are able to put the figures together with the information available to them.

They should then challenge Darling to say whether or not their figures are correct and, if not, ask him to spell out what is missing.

The Bellman

Chuck Unsworth: Presumably it will be regarded as a cover-up by our creditors as well. This isn't just a self-inflicted political wound, it's an economic suicide note.

As it, there's been a significant dumping of UK gilts this week, and I suspect its only the BoE money-printing, and possibly a few investors buying up in order to sell it on to the BoE, that is ensuring buyers are found. Those sellers will have to find something to do with their GBPs...

TGF UKIP

And of course Darling has one other factor massively in his favour - his opposite number is George Osborne.

Ian C

Darling's grip on that dagger is getting stronger by the minute.

It is strengthened by the absurdity of the idea of a General Election without a spending review in the current circumstances. If Labour want one-tenth of a prayer of winning the election there must be one. Darling appears to recognise that.