Politics

With an Obama administration almost statistically inevitable, attention is turning to the post-election struggle for positions and power.  His current aides include Gregory Craig, Scott Gration, Ben Rhodes, Richard Danzig, Samantha Power, Tony Lake, and Susan Rice – a team which is said to funnel through Denis McDonough, an Obama confidante, who briefs the senator. But when it comes to populating the administration’s key slots, many of these aides may have to take a back seat in favour of more well-known and politically-connected candidates. Joe Biden has warned that an Obama administration would face an international challenge in its first six months. Faced with such a prospect – or at least fears of

He’s done it. I blogged a while ago about how Gordon Brown lost his battle to have Northern Rock struck off the books, causing trouble for his oft-repeated Brownie that he has reduced debt from 43% to 37% of GDP. In August, the ONS showed National Debt was 43.3% – and had actually been at those levels for a year. So what was Brown to do? Last week, I reported a rumour that he’d ordered up a new debt series to exclude NR. I said something daft at the time, like “he couldn’t – could he?” Well, he did – and in fact he had by the time I blogged. There is now a new

Much as though I applaud David Cameron’s plan to give struggling small companies a VAT holiday, a rather large obstacle occurs to me. Wouldn’t this be illegal under European Union law? The Sixth EU VAT Directive mandates all states to apply VAT the same way as long as the main rate is a minimum of 15% and the discounted rate at least 5%. Room for manoeuvre was tightened to almost zero two years ago in the EU Recast Sixth Directive. You don’t mess with this, as the Blair government found out when it lost its fight to grant companies the right to reclaim VAT spent on fuel. So how will

The results from a couple of tomorrow’s opinion polls have hit the good ol’ information superhighway, and they’ll make pretty disappointing reading for Brown & Co.  The first – a ComRes poll for the Independent – puts the Tories on 40 percent (down 1); Labour on 31 percent (up 2); and the Lib Dems on 16 percent (down 2).  Whilst an ICM poll for the News of the World suggests that any Brown bounce is of the “dead cat” variety. Sure, Labour have made some gains – particularly on the economic competence front – but the fact is that after the Our Saviour Brown narrative of the past couple of

I’ve read and re-read Cameron’s speech on the economy, hoping that I had somehow missed the radical message to answer Gordon Brown. I have given up. Britain is facing a tsunami of unemployment, two years of recession if we’re lucky and what do the Tories have to say? They’ll set up a new quango, and try to tinker with council tax. We had new phrases: instead of “irresponsible capitalism” we’re told there will be “responsible free enterprise”. His dreadful “social responsibility” phrase is making a comeback in the form of “economic responsibility” and remains just as vacuous as a concept. Much of the detail appears worryingly wrong-headed. Cameron seems to say

British households are far less able to deal with the credit crunch because taxes have risen by the equivalent of £6,520 per household compared to 1996/97 levels. This ratcheting up of the tax burden has been a steady feature of the Brown years but it is being felt with particular force now. During the boom years, homeowners felt richer as their house price rose at the fastest rate in the OCED and borrowed massively. So now, when the debt tap is choking, millions of households are right up against it because of this higher tax take. A tax cut is, of course, how to help people facing soaring food and