Politics

Courtesy of Paul Waugh and the Standard, the OBR projects there to be a £6bn budget surplus by 2015-16. There was no fanfare to herald this in George Osborne’s statement, which was a litany of dirge-like thanksgiving for catastrophe averted. The Treasury is now describing the figure as being ‘within the margin of error’, which is fluent Sir Humphrey-speak. The Standard’s discovery is another example of the government deliberately hiding good economic news – in what Fraser terms Osborne’s Paul Daniels Act. Now why, I wonder, would a self-confessed tactical obsessive, who just happens to be the Chancellor of the Exchequer, be doing that?      

The publication of a quarter of a million US diplomatic cables is going to blow the lid on a lot of the world’s diplomatic secrets. So we learn that the Saudis and other Sunni Arab states are urging the US to stop Shi’ite Iran’s nuclear programme by any means necessary. The New York Times’ points out that none of the cables are labeled ‘top secret’, so we are unlikely to find out the most sensitive secrets of American diplomacy. Instead, what we are getting is public confirmation of things we have long suspected. Emblematic of what are learning is confirmation that the Yemenis talked with the Americans about how to

Timothy Garton Ash asked an important question in the Guardian recenty – is Europe becoming more German? Or, to put it more accurately, does the EU have to become more German to survive? “If the eurozone falls apart, it will be because Germany did not do enough to save it. If the eurozone is saved, it will be thanks to Germany. This is the greatest challenge to German statecraft since the country was peacefully united 20 years ago.” “Yet here is another horn of Germany’s dilemma. For half a century, German politicians have repeated, like a mantra, Thomas Mann’s call for “a European Germany, not a German Europe”. It was in

The media pack is often blind to an impending political car-crash.  For instance, very few in Westminster, or the media, noticed the scrapping of the 10p tax band until the screech of twisting steel turned heads. The same is happening now in relation to living standards. The media and political establishment are yet to wake up to the fact that working families in Britain are about to become poorer (though hat-tip to Allister Heath for being quick off the mark on this front). The gathering wisdom is that, with the recession now behind us, household budgets will start to recover.  We have just published a new report – Squeezed Britain