Politics

Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.

Friday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Printer rage

You have heard about Brown hurling staplers and mobiles in a rage before. But laser printers? A new one to me. Bloomberg, hardly a salacious source, says this in a story it has just released: “The prime minister, 58, has hurled pens and even a stapler at aides, according to one; he says he once saw the leader of Britain’s 61 million people shove a laser printer off a desk in a rage. Another aide was warned to watch out for “flying Nokias” when he joined Brown’s team. One staffer says a colleague developed a technique called a “news sandwich” — first telling the prime minister about a recent piece

Thursday

Matthew Dancona

A fractured covenant

The 50p tax bombshell is not only a reversion to the worst politics of envy – a form of politics one hoped, naively as it turned out, had been consigned to the dustbin of history. It is also the worst manifestation yet of a very modern aspect of Brownite Labour. As I wrote in the Sunday Telegraph at the weekend, Damian McBride’s vile emails sent from a Government address and the heavyhanded arrest of Damian Green both reflect a dangerous belief that the public interest and party political interest are identical, co-terminous. Last night, Labour insiders made little attempt to pretend that the logic behind the 50p tax was fiscal:

Martin Bright

What Would a Budget for Innovation, Enterprise and Aspiration Look Like?

The papers make pretty depressing reading this morning, whether you are Alistair Darling, a Spactator reader facing the prospect of a 50p top tax rate or a member of the mythological “hardworking” family. Growth at its lowest rate since the war, stratospheric debt, unemployment over two million: the end of the first decade of the 21st century is turning into a living nightmare. And I don’t buy the prediction that this will be over by the end of the year.  I agree with those who say that the government which takes us out of recession will harness the hard work, enterprise and aspiration of the nation. But I really don’t

Wednesday

David Davis

Budget 2009: Politics before economics

Quite simply, the 50p top tax rate is designed as a trap for the Tories. The IFS have already said that 45p wouldn’t raise any money, so 50p certainly won’t either. It may well have the effect of driving talented people away from Britain to countries like America or Switzerland, where the top rates are 35 percent and 30 percent respectively. People may not cry over the bankers, but they will cry over us losing talented software writers and the like.  That will have a deletorious effect our ability to forge a new economy after the recession.  And it is a good demonstration of Brown doing harm to the country

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Deficits to come

Michael Saunders, chief economist at Citi, is, for my money, the best analyst out there. We use his stuff regularly at Coffee House. If you have the nerve (and if you’re not on Osborne’s Treasury Team, who would find what follows sickening), click after the jump for his graphs on projected deficits. As he says: “The Chancellor appears to have opted for vague plans for medium-term tightening, hoping that the gesture of eventual fiscal restraint will avert a fiscal crisis and avoid the political crisis that Labour would face from serious measures to address the UK’s fiscal weakness. But, in practice, these forecasts probably will convince few (if any) outside

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

What the Treasury told lobby journalists

Earlier, I referred to a Treasury briefing for journalists. This is an event which takes place straight after the Budget for lobby journalists. As it is on the record, we at Coffee House figured we’d release a transcript. It’s an historic Budget, this is your money they’re talking about and the the Treasury’s thinking is crucial. This is from a senior Treasury civil servant, taking questions from about four dozen lobby journalists after he had gone through the main points of the Budget: There is no change in the projection of public spending growth from next year onwards? No, there is, there is.  He announced in his speech that it

Jill Kirby

Budget 2009: Incompetent and vindictive

I almost felt sorry for Darling, as he delivered this preposterous Budget. Lacking Brown’s capacity for self-deception, he cannot possibly believe the growth forecasts he offered us, and on which his borrowing plans depend. There was nothing in today’s speech to suggest that the Government has the remotest idea of a credible plan to rebuild the British economy; the announcements and re-announcements which purported to support jobs and boost industry were almost all as trivial – or illusory – as the spending cuts which are meant to sustain them. But this was also a deeply socialist Budget, setting its face against the City and against the engines of growth. Brown

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Cameron lays into the Government of the Living Dead

The highlight of the Budget began the moment Alistair Darling sat down. David Cameron’s brief, savage and brilliantly detailed attack on Labour’s ‘decade of debt’ must rate as his best ever parliamentary performance. At 12:30 the Chancellor stood up and delivered his budget in the studious, methodical manner of a vicar running through the accounts of a village fete. He began with a Noddy-in-Toytown history of the recession, reminding us that it all began back in 2007 when those naughty Americans started making lots and lots of silly loans. Then he said that the recession brought unexpected blessings. Families with tracker-mortgages were saving £230 a month. ‘Inflation has come down’,

Matthew Dancona

The politics of a 50p top rate

This was an astonishing Budget for all sorts of reasons – mostly connected to the proposed levels of debt. But I was most struck by the political symmetry of Darling’s decision to raise the top rate of tax to 50 per cent for those earning more than £150,000 pa. In his 1998 book The Unfinished Revolution – a book that was combed for lessons by the Cameroons in their early days at the helm – Philip Gould wrote the following: “I have never had any doubt: increasing the top rate put us at political risk. Blair was always instinctively against raising the top rate, Brown more inclined to keep the

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The pre-Budget bombshells

Two bombshells have landed pre-Budget. One: tax receipts are falling even faster than we thought (central government revenues down 12% in March, a record drop) and the 2008-09 deficit to £90bn, double the £43bn Darling forecast in his last Budget. Black hole, anyone? Next: claimant unemployment is now 1.46m. Last October, in his PBR, Darling forecast 1.41m unemployed by the end of the year. It hit 1.46m by March – the highest in 12 years. So how much worse can it become?  The below graph, from Citi, is worth a thousand words. This isn’t even the end of the beginning.  

Martin Bright

Let’s Pray For No Rabbits

James has predicted that there will be a good news element to the Budget that no one has yet predicted. I do hope there is good news, but I also hope it isn’t presented with a last-minute flourish. The 10 pence tax fiasco should be warning enough on this front.  Judged on his set-piece performances so far, however, Alistair Darling is not a rabbit-out-of-the hat kind of guy. I am delighted that the indications so far suggest  he is concentrating on the employment situation and that he has fended off some of the pressure from next door. I fear Matthew is right when he says that there are signs of

Matthew Dancona

Darling needs to blow economic dog-whistle

Whatever the economic equivalent of a “dog-whistle” is, Alistair Darling needs to blow on it loud and clear today. The briefings and counter-briefings from Numbers Ten and Eleven in recent weeks have made clear the rift between a Chancellor who wants at least to acknowledge fiscal reality, and a Prime Minister who wants to keep spending and borrowing, though the Heavens fall. Darling needs to remain notionally loyal to his boss but make it clear to those looking for the right signals that he grasps the true nature of the crisis and understands that this Budget is about more than establishing political dividing-lines against the Tories. The PM has already

Andrew Gimson

Boris for Prime Minister?

Boris Johnson’s first year as Mayor of London has proved something of a shock, especially to his own side. His enemies, including the Tory parliamentary leadership as well as the sort of people who toil on the Guardian’s comment pages, find they have underestimated him. It suited them to write him off as a clown who would soon make a complete mess of things, if by some fluke he were to defeat Ken Livingstone in the election held on 1 May last year. This belief in Mr Johnson’s ineptitude became unsustainable last October when he sacked Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner. The Mayor did not, in theory, have

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

‘Let’s melt down the railings to make bicycles’

I met Boris Johnson in his office in City Hall overlooking the Thames and Tower Bridge. Our former editor seemed a more thoughtful and sensible character than the man who used to practise cycling with no hands down Doughty Street at lunchtime, but there were signs of the old Boris tucked around his mayoral office: ping pong bats (the Mayor likes to unwind by trying and failing to beat his personal assistant, Ann Sindall); a book of love poems by the late Woodrow Wyatt; a bust of Pericles in the corner, looking out over this 21st-century Athens. Do you identify with Pericles?


 It would be absurd to say that I

Dan Jones

There is no sacred right to be a lazy fat slob

If political reality means we can’t tax the overweight, then at least let’s have tax breaks for those who bother to take exercise, writes unashamed metrosexual Dan Jones Hands up if you employ a personal trainer. Actually, that’s a trick question. If you can raise your arm without wincing in pain then either you don’t have a personal trainer, or yours is letting you slack off. (Get a new one.) For those of you with your arms pinned to the sides of your bodies from the sheer build-up of lactic acid — ask your trainer — well done. A few years ago your friends might have sneered at you and

Tuesday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The IMF’s damning verdict

Forget the Budget. The IMF’s Global Financial Stability Report has just produced the figures Gordon Brown didn’t want you to read: the cost to the UK taxpayer of the banking crisis. The Treasury’s approach is to airbrush banks out of the picture, and kid us on that we’ll get the money back eventually. The IMF gives it to us straight. It estimates (p44, pdf) that when this is over British taxpayers will have the largest bill in the G7. The bank crisis will cost the UK some 13.7% of GDP – which works out as about £190bn (see graph below). The figure for the US is 12.1% and Canada just

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Smile, smile, smile

Finally, Gordon Brown has at last done something to cheer us up – and released what is perhaps the funniest video ever to come out of No10 (watch it after the jump). Now that his dirty tricks unit has been exposed, he’s trying to come across all friendly and cuddly – and has given a video annoucement of his crackdown on Tory second jobs, disguised as a tightening of MPs expenses. He stops short of breakdancing, but only just. He’s addressing a horribly serious issue: the near-fraudulent abuse of expenses by MPs. But he shuffles, waves his hands and beams as if he’s playing Santa at a kiddies party. Occasionally,

Monday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Economic inactivity and the recession

Perhaps the two most dangerous words for any Labour politician to say right now are “green shoots”. Spend long enough in the economic desert and you can hallucinate, and many of the blips right now – an upturn in some property prices, a slight recovery in sterling – could be taken by anxious politicians as proof that the worst is over. But amidst these are genuine good signs. The banking system finally seems to have been stabilised (at cost, yet uncalculated, to the public purse). The fall of the pound has helped stem the fall in exports: Britain has fared better than may other European countries (the joys of a

The Spectator

Just in case you missed them… | 20 April 2009

…here are some of the posts made on Spectator.co.uk over the weekend: Fraser Nelson watches Ed Balls struggle against the truth, and reports on Liam Byrne giving his support to Balls. James Forsyth reveals what a broken ballot box tells us about the future of the Labour Party, and wonders whether Labour will greenwash the Budget. Peter Hoskin reports on Smeargate II, and says that the Tories should step around any more 45p tax traps. Dr Eamonn Butler tells us what to expect in the Budget. Martin Bright looks ahead to the Budget. Clive Davis gives his take on the Georgia Gould fiasco. And Melanie Phillips laments the UK’s involvement

Saturday

Guido Fawkes

A Blogger’s Notebook

Having sat patiently on a barrel of digital dynamite for months — the emails from Gordon Brown’s chief spin doctor Damian McBride to Mandelson’s protégé Derek Draper, suggesting Tory smear stories — I light the fuse on Andrew Neil’s BBC Daily Politics show. In an unedifying squabble, I succeed in stitching up the once again infamous Draper on live TV, forcing him to deny that he takes briefings from McBride. Viewers at home may be baffled as to why I am determined to talk about Draper’s relationship with McBride. They may also be bemused by my unflattering Berkeley University T-shirt. The reason for this is to wind up Draper even more: