Osborne colours the water blue

Dorothy Wilson

"...and criticism peaked last week when less than a quarter of a City panel believe he has the mettle to be Chancellor."

But, according to yesterday's Sunday Times, even less rated Darling and the score for Brown was only just above zero!

Nicholas

Well this should be another good Tory-focussed Speccie post to invoke a torrent of the usual anti-Osborne and anti-Cameron jibes from the supposedly right of centre fans for 5 more years of Gordon Brown - all those earnest "true conservatives" who would rather give victory to the extreme left than compromise to ensure a Labour defeat.

Well done, chaps. The spirits of 1997, 2001 and 2005 salute you.

Boudicca

This public sector workers has never voted Labour and never will.

I am not responsible for the last 13 years of mayhem.

Right On

Have to say thought this was an excellent article from Osbourne.

To my mind he's absolutley right and is showing exactly the direction the country needs to follow.

However, the question remains - whilst the majority of people think that money grows on trees will they be willing to listen to what amounts to a financial tightening.

AndyinBrum

What Nicholas said

Zoo keeper (Elephant House)

I never voted for any of them.
I simply left the country in 2007 when I saw a society convinced that getting something for nothing was not only possible - it was the way to go !!!

Now it's payback time - time to get nothing for something - and people seem uncomfortable with that.

Short the UK in his sane and regular posts, tells it like it is. Tells it how it has to be. Disregard his information and advice at your collective peril.

stephen

The Tory flip flopping between Osborne and Clark as lead economic spokesman can only confuse voters. Ken did an excellent job on Andy Marr yesterday for the sake of winning the election cant Boy George stay in his broom cupboard as we were promised

natasha

What the FT article neglects to mention is that Sachs was and remains a leading advocate of economic shock therapy. He was a key adviser to the Yeltsin government in the early 1990s, and his shock therapy approach to reforming the Russian economy proved to be a disaster, impoverishing millions and paving the way for the more authoritarian, anti-Western Putin regime. Extreme free market fanatics are incapable of learning from experience - they just keep applying the same textbook remedies without the slightest regard for wider social and political considerations. The fruits of their labours are almost invariably counter-productive and destructive to the causes they advocate (as was seen all too clearly in Russia, where the introduction of a laissez faire model led in time to a huge political backlash).

Frankly I find it shocking and incredible that Osborne is co-authoring articles with the highly controversial Sachs less than two months before an election. Further proof, if any were needed, of his total political naivety.

Short the UK

Sharp quote from John Lanchester - March 2010:

"Conclusion: whatever the political hue of the new government, it has to walk a fiscal tightrope. It is probably going to be a very good election to lose. Faced with this, the trajectory of the public mood will, I think, closely match that of the Kübler-Ross grief cycle. At the moment, thanks to the subjective mildness of the recession, we are still in denial. Next, as the full extent of the bill becomes clearer, there will be anger, especially since the hard times will have next to no effect on the bankers and politicians who, in the public mind, caused the crisis. Then there will be a helpful-for-the-government period of inflation. Then interest rates will shoot up in an attempt to control inflation, and at the same time we will see tax rises, services closing and job losses. It’s at this point, as the recovery begins to seem like a tractionless slog, that we’ll go through the depression stage of the cycle."

If the pound collapses we will go to the Depression stage rapidly, we are on a knife edge. Whichever way you cut the cookie this "soft" depression is far from over and in a blink of an eye it could morph to a "hard" depression.

Senor Frizby

I'll never forget the posters on the wall in my local NatWest branch with a flash sports car and the strap line: "Why Wait?"

It summed up the whole financial attitude prevalent in the Blair / Brown era.

Time for change. Time for people to realise that we can only spend what we have to spend.

Hawkeye

I say the nay-sayers and trolls are out in force.

Look - it is very simple. Regardless of whether or not Osbourne is any good we need Brown out. Brown is a 1000 times worse than Osbourne.

A lot of people need to STFU and concentrate on the real objective which is winning the election. We are in the final run now and changes to the team will not play well. The team has been picked and we live or die by it - change is no longer an option.

Hawkeye

Oops - that last posting should have been on the "Cameron synonymous with change" thread.

Publius

I agree with Nicholas. Brown must go! That is the priority.

Gary Williams

Osborne should be speaking out loudly and often about the failures of the regulators. The whole point of regulation is to protect the broad interests of society from the overzealousness, greed or incompetence of private interests. Was the Treasury unaware that RBS had a 2 Trillion pound balance sheet? Did the FSA have no idea that RBS was loading up on billions of pounds of Other Banks' sub-prime paper? Did Chancellor Brown not notice the UK housing bubble, and the 100% mortgages that were fueling it?
Osborne must home in on the theme of regulatory gross failure. Brown's attempt to divert all blame towards America is like blaming all the death, destruction and suffering in New Orleans on unseasonable weather.

Tim Carpenter LPUK

"or believing future job creation can come simply from the public sector payroll."

What does he mean by "simply"? It NEVER comes from there in any meaningful or sustainable way.

djw2009

Phew! The quangocrats can sleep easy in their beds! There will be no cuts, just a little frugality. The £100bn in quango spending has been ringfenced by Little George.

denis cooper

"Osborne is wary that the public sector could come to Labour’s rescue, and pledges that jibs [sic] will be protected ... "

Well, to some extent it's possible to reconcile that pledge with the pressing need to cut the state's outgoings, but only to some extent and more detail is required if the pledge is to be believed.

Otherwise when public sector workers come to vote each of them will be wondering whether his own job would be for the chop if the Tories got into government, and whether he'd then be able to find another job, and quite reasonably asking himself why he and his family should be made sacrificial victims in an attempt to solve problems not of their own making.

It seems to me that it would be better to recognise widespread concern about the prospect of unemployment and express a determination not to allow overall unemployment to rise, than to pledge that public sector jobs would be protected.

cityboozer

What natasha said. I would almost sooner have Krugman on my side than Sachs.

Yosemite Sam

It is true that Sachs is controversial. So what. So is Stiglitz, for example. But Sachs is an incredible thinker; that Osborne is writing with him is a testament to Osborne. I just do not think Sachs would associate himself with a second-rater. Well done George.