Politics

Like Darling’s Mais lecture, Osborne’s speech to the LSE was rather long with no discernable points of action. No matter how much you say the word “responsible” (ten times, in his case), it just doesn’t add up to a policy. First the good news – Osborne uses Japan as an example of Keynesian spending. That’s the right analogy. Next he says he will “help people directly by getting money into their pockets through the tax system” – ie, tax cuts. Great. They can be easily funded by scrapping government waste, or abolishing failing government programmes. But Osborne goes on to complicate the issue and his signoff is this: “There is

Now that even Nigel Lawson says tax cuts are not the right way to go, why am I calling for them in my column? Lord Lawson did not issue a fatwa on all tax cuts, but warned against “massive tax cuts.” He is wary of so-called Keynesian fiscal activism – borrowing massively, to cut taxes. As am I. You can argue it’s better than Keynsian spending, but both still do more harm than good. I am arguing that the new era of deficits (I don’t expect we’ll see a balanced British budget for five years) need not lead the Tories to abandon tax cuts. They need a new argument for

Alistair Darling has not set out a new fiscal framework in his much-delayed Mais lecture – but he has read the last rites over the so-called the financial rules. “To apply the fiscal rules in a rigid manner today would be perverse,” he says. Not to say impossible: the rules set a 40% limit on net debt and it was 43.4% last month. Instead there is assurance that “people should be in no doubt that Government will take the decisions necessary, to ensure sustainability in the medium term.” George Osborne – back in action, and with a major speech planned on Friday – has released other Brown quotes which pledge

I was joking when I said a few weeks ago that Gordon Brown spoke about the recession as if it were the SARS virus. But at his press conference this morning, and just now at the press conference with Sarkozy, he has used a new phrase: “stop the contagion”. Contagion? If it is, it was incubated in 11 Downing Street as he pumped the economy full of debt, in the hope that he’d never be found out and rates would not rise. The contagion kept touting dangerously underpriced debt until the average British household had borrowed 172 per cent of its income – twice as much as even the Italian

So, George Osborne’s admitted that he “made a mistake” getting chummy with Oleg Deripaska in Corfu, and the Westminsterati are prepared to draw a line under his involvement in the Yachtgate scandal.  The Tories should now grasp this opportunity to completely remove themselves from the story.  And – however great the temptation may be – that means not prodding Peter Mandelson over his refusal to disclose more about his meetings with Deripaska. Two main reasons why: 1) It was Osborne’s attempt to rile Mandy that largely got him into this mess in the first place.  And 2) If the shadow chancellor is to regain any political capital he may have lost, he needs to demonstrate that he has risen above the tawdriness

There’s a sense this weekend that the media hurricane has moved on from George Osborne – leaving him bruised and bloodied, but unbowed – and is now bearing down on Peter Mandelson.  Sure, the Tories are still experiencing some turbulence: a story about how they should repay a loan from the Rothschilds, as well as some ex post facto analysis by the Sunday columnists.  But after his letter to the Times yesterday, the Key New Revelations are all about Lord Mandy.  And the questions being flung at him, about his links with Oleg Deripaska, are the more difficult to answer. The hope in Downing Street will be that the calls