Society

If you think it’s a coincidence that Matt Drudge has put his siren on to blast the ‘news’ that Condoleezza Rice is the ‘front-runner’ to be Mitt Romney’s running-mate just as Romney’s campaign fends off fresh questions about his record at Bain Capital then, my friends, you’re charmingly naive. This isn’t a serious proposition. It’s just a smokescreen. Romney may be many things but he’s not wholly daft. He’s not going to pick a pro-choice woman who is also, probably, in favour of gay marriage. Nor, alas, does Condi bring a record of achievement to the ticket. As Daniel Larison observes, in typically withering style: Quite. Rice may have a

The Office for Budget Responsibility put out its annual Fiscal Sustainabilty report yesterday. It’s got three graphs which are a wee bit scary. Here’s the first graph, showing what proportion of taxes paid and state services used comes from which age group: Speaks for itself, really. We rely heavily on the middle-aged for taxes, and spend heavily on early and later years. Look in particular at the pink lines – that’s health and long term care. Now look at graph number two: Spot where the growth is. Note the percentages are the average increases each and every year, for the next 50 years. Put the two graphs together and you

Jonathan has already mentioned yesterday’s Fiscal Sustainability Report from the Office of Budgetary Responsibility. He appears to welcome mass migration both now and as an inevitable part of our future. Perhaps I could put a dissenting view? Migration itself can be a good thing. But mass migration (in the numbers it has happened in recent years in Britain and many other Western countries) is a bad thing. It strains our welfare systems, encourages people to ghetto-ise rather than assimilate and creates not so much a multi-racial society as a country made up of different mono-cultural centres. It causes a breakdown in trust both between and among communities, and erodes the

Some generalisations hold good. Young people, for instance, tend to be less hostile to immigration than their elders. This speaks well of their decency but also, as today’s report form the Office of Budgetary Responsibility makes clear, to an intuitive sense of their own self-interest. If there’s one thing today’s Fiscal Sustainability Report makes clear, it is that the under-40s are going to need some help if Britain’s ageing population isn’t going to cripple the country. Of course, the standard caveats need to be applied: the OBR makes projections and projections are vulnerable to events. The purpose of these reports is to help provide a context within which policy can

Ever wondered what would happen to the British economy if net immigration were slashed to zero? Well today’s ‘Fiscal Sustainability Report’ from the number crunchers at the Office for Budget Responsibility provides a glimpse of what such a future might look like — and it is a grim picture indeed. They’ve put together projections for the economy — and the public finances — all the way to 2062. Of course such long-term predictions should be taken with a pinch of salt. As Pete says over at ConservativeHome, ‘today’s OBR figures will probably bear as much comparison to the 2060s as the Jetsons will’. But the OBR don’t just produce one

&”Did you encourage them to make up the made up thing to their own advantage?” That’s how one Twitter correspondent paraphrased a question to the Deputy Governor of the Bank.  The LIBOR scandal has exposed the institutions and culture of the City to popular scrutiny as never before.  The population is reacting with justified incredulity to the absurdity it is finding.   LIBOR submissions from Barclays and everyone else were based not on the rate at which they would lend, not on what they actually had to pay to borrow, but on what they said they thought they might have to pay. On the face of it, that is the flakiest