Politics

Ed Balls never gets enough credit for the Brownies that he cooks up. One was served today, when he spent an interview with the Beeb denouncing those Tory plans to axe 220,000 apprenticeships. As he put it: “There is a choice for our country – a choice between a Government which says we must act to get through difficult times and the Conservatives, who on Monday announced cuts in public spending which would mean over 200,000 apprenticeships cut. In fact, it would mean almost no apprenticeships for young people at all.” Except there are no Tory plans to axe apprenticeships. Not one. It was concocted by Mr Balls, on the

Will anyone take Gordon Brown’s claim to create up to 100,000 jobs seriously? As a statistician will tell you, “up to” includes the number zero. And as any economist will tell you, government can’t create jobs. The best it can do is move jobs, from the private to the public sector via tax – or from the future to the present, via debt. And in this case, I suspect it’s all a hoax anyway. Sure, Brown can hire some builders to renovate schools. But first of all, how many of his 100,000 were going to be hired by the state anyway? And of those who weren’t, can he be so

No.10 has come up with an ingenious solution to what could have been a yearly presentational problem: to have Gordon Brown’s New Year’s Message as a disembodied voice, with no video at all.  You can listen to it here. And that voice observes that an “old era of unbridled free market dogma was finally ushered out”. Remind us, who was Chancellor during the last ten years? It’s typical of Brown’s pettiness that he also includes in his New Year message a stab at the Tories, saying “The failure of British governments in previous global downturns was to succumb to political expediencsy and cut back investment across the board thereby stunting

Splendid to see Boris developing the Apocalypse Now theme for 2009 which he road-tested in the Spectator Christmas issue. Here’s what the Mayor says in his New Year message: I want to quote Colonel Kilgore in Apocalypse Now when he says ‘Some day captain, this war is going to end’, and some day, this recession is going to end. We can speed the demise of this recession if we all help the poorest in our community and if we make the vital investment that we need in our mass transit system and in fighting crime, so that London emerges at the end better placed to compete and entrenched in its

I said that Gordon Brown’s VAT cut was too small to notice – yet I have just saved £15 on furniture imports from Bali. Of course, £15 is a serious, noticeable amount of money. Problem is, it only helps people who have £600 to fork out on furniture. And here this is another defect of Brown’s useless VAT cut: it helps people like me – who are saving like mad to atone for their borrowing sins – instead of helping the lower-income groups who are most likely to spend extra money. The VAT and duty cuts announced in the last pre-Budget report are, in fact, perfectly regressive – helping the