Politics

Some of George Osborne’s targets – like balancing the books – are always five years away; he never has to meet them to claim success, as long as he plans to achieve them. But having a falling cash-terms deficit he can be measured on. In March, the OBR forecast that borrowing for 2013-14 would come in just half a billion pounds under last year’s total. It now looks like Osborne will easily meet his target. Public borrowing for September this year was £1 billion lower than for the same month in 2012. For the government’s financial year so far, Osborne has borrowed £6 billion less than at the same point

Yesterday’s agreement between the French state-owned company EDF and the UK Government regarding the ‘strike price’ for the electricity that will be generated by Hinkley C should be welcomed by everybody who cares about our environment, our economy and the security of our energy supplies. It’s taken three political parties, three Prime Ministers and two governments eight years to reach this point. Over this period, David Cameron has gone from espousing an investment-deterring policy of nuclear generation as ‘a last resort’ to welcoming the environmental and economic benefits of the industry in the shape of the deal that should pave the way for the construction of Britain’s first new nuclear

After every reshuffle, sacked ministers choose to tread a number of different paths. Some go rogue, either to the extent that Tim Loughton has since losing his job last year, or at least in publicly criticising their party’s policy, as Jeremy Browne has since being sacked in this year’s round. Others go to ground, receive appreciative applause in the Chamber when they ask very anodyne questions about the local incinerator in their constituency, but don’t bother their former bosses. And a very small number decide to offer some quiet thoughts on how things might be better. Sacked housing minister Mark Prisk seems to have gone down the third route. I

Newcastle upon Tyne Andrew Adonis is not your conventional ‘retired’ politician. The sprightly 50-year-old shadow infrastructure minister remains more influential than his current job title suggests. After running Tony Blair’s policy unit at No. 10, Adonis kick-started the academies programme and paved the way for Michael Gove’s education revolution. Under Gordon Brown he rose to Secretary of State for Transport, where he renationalised the East Coast railway and conceived High Speed 2. Adonis took a central role in Labour’s failed coalition negotiations with the Lib Dems (a party he was once a candidate for) before quitting frontline politics. Today, Adonis is more instrumental to Labour than ever, leading Ed Miliband’s

One man who isn’t on message at the start of the government’s economy week is Justin Welby, who has been warning against excessive jubilation at the end of this week when the next tranche of GDP figures are released. He told the Telegraph: ‘A flourishing economy is necessary but not sufficient. A healthy society flourishes and distributes economic resources effectively, but also has a deep spiritual base which gives it its virtue.’ This sounds a little bit like pre-2010 David Cameron, but it doesn’t quite chime with the political offensive that the Tories want to go on this week, accusing Labour of making consistently bad predictions about the economy. The

Today is, as we all know, the start of economy week in Westminster, with politicians striving to show that all that jubilant talk about dawns breaking over the hill this summer wasn’t misplaced. The Hinkley Point deal, the first new nuclear plant in a generation, is supposed to show that Britain is open for business, is building, and is providing jobs and training for a new generation of workers in a new generation of nuclear plants. On the Today programme this morning Energy Secretary Ed Davey tried to outline some of the value that this deal with EDF and Beijing-controlled energy companies China National Nuclear Corporation and China General Nuclear