Politics

This week William Hague is visiting Bosnia, trying to highlight the problems in the country 13 years after the Bosnian War that saw 100, 000 civilian die. His visit provides welcome attention to the country’s slide towards conflict; while he can helpfully distance the Tory party from the dastardly Conservative policy at the time, which saw Douglas Hurd argue against aiding the Bosnian Muslims. So what is happening in Bosnia? A lot – but hardly any of it is particularly positive. Bosnian Serb Prime Minister Milorad Dodik, a moderate-turned nationalist, has adopted a secessionist agenda. His long-term policy seems clear, the peaceful secession of the Serb province as Milo Djukanovic

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