Politics

According to today’s Daily Record, Sarah Brown is set to “spearhead” the Labour campaign in Glenrothes.  It’s hardly suprising news – talk of her involvement has been doing the Westminster rounds since her much-vaunted cameo at last month’s Labour party conference.  But it shouldn’t be forgotten that this is far from normal practice.  As the Record points out, “It’s believed Sarah will be the first Prime Minister’s wife to actively campaign during a by-election”; raising all kinds of questions about how involved PM’s partners should be in the political process.  Whether they’ll undermine the “Sarah Effect” remains to be seen.

Although it comes as little surprise, the warning from the Ernst & Young Item Club that the UK is already in recession is the most significant confirmation that we’ve had so far about the poor state of our economy. Using the same forecasting model as the Treasury, they also predict that inflation is set to fall – giving more scope for interest rate cuts – and that the economy will start growing again in 2010. The question remains about what the political effects of recession will be. Will a prolonged downturn erode the Our Saviour Brown narrative, along with the poll gains he’s made over the past few weeks? Or have Brown and

You’ve got to hand it to the Brownite spin operation – for once, their bludgeoning approach seems to be working.  The terms they’ve coined, and which are repeated ad nauseum by Labour figures – “Global financial problem which started in America”; “We’re meeting with world leaders”; and even that “Whatever it takes” chestnut – really do seem to be filtering down to the national consciousness, if some of the latest polling on economic competence is anything to go by. Why?  Well, it’s not because our Dear Leader is economically competent – the past eleven years have put pay to that idea.  I rather suspect it’s because the financial problems we’re

James Forsyth on how the two candidates earned their party’s nominations and how the final stages of the campaign are playing out It was on the eve of the Iowa caucus, 2 January, that it became clear that Barack Obama’s candidacy was more than just a form of political entertainment. Obama’s last speaking engagement was in a high school gym in Des Moines. It was the hot ticket of a cold night. This was the best orator in a generation giving the most important speech of his political career so far; the youthful crowd were expecting quite a show. But the star attraction had lost his voice. When he tried

Ben Brogan spots this gem from an interview with the Prime Minister of Luxembourg, Jean-Claude Juncker: Gordon Brown “begged” to turn up at the Eurozone meeting last week. Brown desperately wanted to turn up so that could present to a domestic audience this carefully crafted image of Brown the Saviour, the man called in to advise the Eurozone lot. But as Juncker says in the interview: “The British prime minister had to beg to be let into the room in which the euro group was meeting. I’m sure that when the storm is over, the British will think about whether they shouldn’t become an equal in all decision-making bodies.’” This,

How bad can unemployment get during the Brown Bust? Predictions of two or three million unemployed miss an important point. The concept of the “dole” has changed: unlike in the 1980s it has become a way of life, as well as a safety net. There were 5.2 million on out-of-work benefits last February of which just 806,000 were claiming unemployed benefit. The number of out-of-work, working-age people sustained by the workforce could break six million next year. The progress on tackling what Beveridge memorably called the “giant evil” of idleness was woeful – mainly because 81 percent of the new jobs were either created or taked by immigrants. They may

The Brown Bust: house prices This is the first in a short series on the illustrated Brown Bust, we’ll show you graphs looking at the various aspects of the bursting of the Brown Bubble. After failing to control monetary policy – giving the Bank of England an inflation-only remit – the out-of-control money supply led (as it always does) to an asset bubble which has now burst. This graph shows how spectacularly. In little over a year, UK houses have fallen by 14 per cent – more than they did in six years under the Tories. Both lines are rebased to 100, with 100 being the peak of the market