Wednesday, 20th February 2008
4:55pm
Once again, Gordon Brown has got away lightly with his gross mismanagement of the economy. Today's public finances statistics were less bad than feared, thanks to strong revenues from income and corporation tax in January, but they were pretty grim nevertheless. That is not the impression one gets scanning today's almost universally positive headlines, however.
So here is a reality check: in the financial year 2007/08 to date, public sector net borrowing -- the main measure of the budget deficit -- has already reached £26.5bn. This is a cool £6bn more than over the same period last year, and represents a horrific deterioration in the health of the public finances.
Far from having regained control of the exchequer's purse strings, Brown and Alistair Darling are still on course to breach their £38bn deficit forecast for the financial year as whole. I still suspect that the final outcome could hit £40bn.
Looking ahead, the position is even bleaker: a slower economy is bound to depress revenues even further. Brown's astonishing profligacy during the good years will eventually catch up with him -- and for all today's clever spin and all the looming tax raids on non-doms, there is nothing he can do about it.
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4:29pm
Supreme Court Bar Association President, and senior PPPP figure, Aitzaz Ahsan has just finished a second powerful and moving speech to the media in Lahore. It's the first day that
press restrictions on him have been lifted since he was placed under house-arrest. He’s demanding the restoration of all deposed judges and calling for “A long march” by the legal community on March 9th, the day that Chief Justice Muhammad Chaudhry was suspended by President Musharraf in 2007, if they’re not released by then. Today, civil society demonstrators calling for the judges to be freed, chanted “Go Musharraf, go!”
The judges issue is a significant one. Their reinstatement is a key term that Nawaz Sharif wants any future coalition partners to agree to. Imran Khan (
who called Zardari after his election win),
agrees with Sharif. It was one of the reasons Khan gave for his party not participating in the elections. Shahid Dastgir Khan, England and Wales Supreme Court lawyer and UK representative for Imran Kahn’s party, told Coffee House yesterday evening he doesn’t think that Aitzaz Ahsan enjoys the full support of his PPPP compatriots.
While PPPP Co-Chair Asif Ali Zardari says he wants an “Autonomous and independent judiciary,” he doesn’t actually state that he wants the reinstatement of the deposed senior lawyers as a coalition partner condition. His primary demand is a
UN probe into the assassination of his late wife Benazir Bhutto. “It is regrettable that he has not made the release of the lawyers a condition,” S.D. Khan said.
Preliminary counting is nearly done, final results are still coming in, but it’s clear that the PPPP and the PML (N) will have
enough seats between them to form a majority government in the National Assembly.
Shahid Dastgir Khan sees between eight and fifteen PML (Q) members “Crossing over” to the PML (N).
Official numbers will be announced by the Election Commission on March 1st 2008; there may be some minor changes as one challenge to a result, on the basis of malpractice, has already been mounted.
There were
reports this morning about Presidential aides having met Asif Ali Zardari in which a coalition was mooted, substituting other parties for the PML (N) of Nawaz Sharif but these reports have been flatly denied by the PPPP.
President Pervez Musharraf is digging his heels in and has
announced today that he is not going to resign.
A PPPP Central Executive Committee Meeting has just finished and Zardari is hosting a reasonably good-humoured, slightly chaotic, press conference as I write. To a question about continuing price-hikes over the next few months, he has answered that he intends to involve the business community more in public-private partnerships to address such problems. He also discussed the judiciary.
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4:11pm
CoffeeHouse has just been brought up in the Commons – Mark Harper has challenged Ed Davey to clarify what on earth Lembit Opik is on about. Is it true, he asked, that Lembit is not a rebel as he claims because the LibDems plan to abstain on the issue of a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty? Davey cryptically said that we will have to wait and see – and said that one option open to them was “constructive abstention,” whatever that is. Answer: no one in that disorganised party has the faintest idea what their policy is. They can’t even decide if they will sit on a fence.
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3:03pm
Do read Lesley White’s sympathetic profile of Lembit Opik in today’s Times. There is, though, no getting away from the fact that Opik has some strange views and none stranger than this: “He talks about the transference of psychic energy, how his crossness that our Virgin train was late had put a spring in the step of the woman who later showed us to a meeting at Shrewsbury hospital.”
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Fraser Nelson 12:57pm
Back refreshed from the recess, Cameron (41) starts off by wishing Brown a “happy 57th birthday” – when “happy birthday” would have done.
Nothing groundbreaking in their exchange. Cameron had a few good lines responding to what Brown had just said. “There always is an inquiry with this government. Frequently a police inquiry.” And then “That facts were left on a civil servant’s desk for a year he presents somehow a triumph of government policy.” And bad jokes “nationalisation that would make Castro proud”. I suspect these were memorised – Cameron’s speciality is reeling off memorised lines with the fluency of a stage actor. At PMQs, it works.
Clegg was right to go on Northern Rock. His party (okay then, Vince Cable) has emerged better from this than Tories/Osborne by demonstrating a superior grasp of the situation. Brown had obviously prepared for Cameron asking this question and gave his response to the Tories instead – “he has six policies for this.” As ever, Clegg loses credibility on his second question: the “excess profit” of energy companies which should somehow be “handed back through lower energy prices”. Wrong target. The liberalised UK energy market is one of the world’s better-performing ones – and recent hikes are all the more stark because they follow years of real terms price cuts. What should be “handed back” is the outrageous VAT imposed on fuel. That, not the thinning margins of energy companies, is the scandal.
Cameron then came back for a second round, going on Northern Rock Brown was ready for this, attacking those six Tory policies. It would, he said, be “a fire sale of assets, getting less than market value for them”. As the architect of the calamitous gold sale, he’d know plenty about that. “We are the party of stability,” bleats Brown. Problem is, no one believes that anymore.
I love how he drops in “I was talking with Premier Wen by telephone yesterday” – oh how well Brown would have fitted into 1970s Moscow.
Labour’s Kerry McCarthy asked a planted question: youth unemployment is down 55% in her constituency. Really? A brief check suggests those on benefits simply shifted into other categories. There were 10,610 on benefits in Bristol East in August 1999 (the earliest figures available) and 11,970 in May 2007 (the latest available). This is what she should be worried about.
Brownie Alert Here is Brown’s response: “Youth unemployment has fallen by more than 60 per cent in the last ten years”. Really? When I blogged on this last May unemployment amongst under-25s was, staggeringly, higher than the 14.5% rate when Brown walked into power.
We’re getting almost 80 comments on the Brownies, and we’ll start to deconstruct his little statistical tricks next week. And if anyone has found Tories or LibDems using porkies too, send them in – Coffee House is an equal opportunities myth-buster.
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11:52am
It’s our Dear Leader’s birthday today: Gordon Brown is 57 years young. He's a famous bibliophile - and I figured we could send him a list of books. Here’s five to start with.
1) Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff – how to stop control freakery leading to misery
2) Wikinomics – why hierarchies are collapsing and the age of big government really is dead
3) Littlejohn’s Britain – he can take a view of his government from the bottom up.
4) Words That Work – Frank Luntz on why repeating “stability” seven times a day is a route to lose elections.
5) The Power of Charm - because it’s never too late for self-help.
Can CoffeeHousers think of any more?
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10:53am
There was a nice vignette on
Today in Parliament last night; centred around
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock’s request for another bank holiday in the UK.
Sir Digby Jones was the main voice against the proposition, stressing that each bank holiday results in a £2.5 billion loss for British coffers. Whilst its supporters cited imbalances (England gets eight bank holidays, compared to the European Union average of eleven), or even the inexplicable ranking of saints. As Lord Butler put it:
"My Lords, is not St Patrick’s Day a bank holiday in Northern Ireland? Can the Minister explain why St Patrick is favoured over St David, St Andrew and, indeed, St George?"
The bank holiday question is one that provokes a great deal of feeling. Dr Eamonn Butler, of the Adam Smith Institute, thinks
we should scrap them altogether. Whilst the Fabian Society has
campaigned for more bank holidays. Accordingly, then, I thought I’d canvass Coffee Housers’ views on the matter. Should we have more or less bank holidays? And, if we are to have more, what should they commemorate?
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9:12am
The Tories had a head start on welfare reform, but Brown is fast catching up. When Chris Grayling launched his Wisconsin-style proposals last month, there were (typically) fears internally that they were too harsh. Yet there were two surprise factors: the overwhelmingly positive public reaction, and Brown's inability to decide whether to accuse them of heartlessness or plagiarism. Brown then decided to follow, perhaps sensing the anger over this. He is making fast progress - rhetorically at least, which at election time is 80% of the battle. Reading today's press trailing a Purnell announcement, it seems Labour is briefing hard and recognises in welfare reform a powerful agenda which Brown rightly does not want to let the Tories champion. You may think this is natural Tory territory. But this is precisely what scares many off in the Cameron era. Brown has no qualms about being accused of being too tough on benefit claimants. A race is now on to see which party can be boldest on welfare reform. And it is a race which Brown may yet win.
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9:05am
Americano has analysis of Obama’s big win last night and wonders whether Hillary can recover before the crucial March 4th contests.
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Tuesday, 19th February 2008
7:11pm
This video of Ken Livingstone laying into the London Assembly is quite breathtaking. If he carries on like this, he’s going to lose in May
Via Play Political
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