Politics

Ed Balls has been warming up to this one for a while, and now it has finally come: an all-out attack over rising prices. In an interview with the Sunday Times (£), the shadow chancellor warns of Britain’s “cost of living crisis,” and demands that George Osborne reverse the VAT increase. Much of his pleading is made on behalf of motorists, who – as I pointed out a couple of days ago – face punishment at the petrol pumps. He doesn’t even mention spending cuts once, especially not where his own party’s are concerned. Rising costs, clearly, are the new weapon of choice. And it’s not just Balls. Ed Miliband

Oh look, the ruling Fianna Fail party is set for defeat in the Irish election. Unsurprising, for sure, but the scale of their drubbing will still be something to behold. An exit poll conducted by RTE has them in third place on only 15.1 percent of the vote – which, as Sunder Katwala points out over at Next Left, is some way down from both their traditional 40+ per cent support and the 41.6 per cent that they achieved in 2007. The same exit poll has the centre right Fine Gael party in the lead (on 36.1 per cent), their best performance for 28 years, although not enough for an

Have the Tories rediscovered the Right instincts? If power without responsibility has been the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages, then the lot of a government minister can seem like responsibility without power. In private moments, ministers complain that they are overwhelmed by paperwork and have to drive change through a recalcitrant Civil Service. Members of the coalition Cabinet are rapidly finding out that the answer to the question ‘who governs Britain?’ is not as simple as they’d hoped. Nothing new there. Relative impotence is the perennial complaint of new ministers. They quickly come to appreciate that Yes, Minister was as much fact as fiction. Today, however, there are

Last week Reform published its 2011 scorecard of the Coalition Government’s public service reform programme. Following the articles on the health, welfare  and education reforms, Andrew Haldenby, Reform’s Director, discusses the Cabinet Office.   The Prime Minister has put the Cabinet Office in the vanguard of his efforts to reform public services.  The Cabinet Office Structural Reform Plan gives the Cabinet Office responsibilities to reform the Civil Service, create more competitive public sector markets and reduce inefficiency” (through the operation of the Efficiency and Reform Group).  These are major objectives on which the success of the wider programme depends.  For this reason, the lack of progress should be a real

“Now he and his leader know what it’s like to be people’s second choice,” trilled George Osborne during his recent encounter with Ed Balls over the dispatch box. But might Balls actually have been Miliband’s third choice for the shadow chancellorship? That’s the implication of a delicious little story in today’s Sun, which claims that Miliband first “tapped up” his brother, aka MiliD, when trying to replace Alan Johnson: “A Labour insider revealed: ‘Ed’s people were desperate not to give the job to Balls.’ However, Ed stopped short of offering his brother the job when David made it clear he wanted to stay on the backbenches.” If true, then it’s