He’s sat down already! So much for the spin that he would speak for an hour. He barely had enough for half an hour and eked that out to 50 minutes. A raft of minor predictable and predicted measures … the only real story is borrowing, with the government now wading in an endless sea of red ink. We need to get stuck into the budget red book to find out how really bad it is. The TV pundits don’t seem to have grasped this yet.
Darling says government will be borrowing £14bn for the four years to 2010/11 – this is £20bn more than forecast at the Pre-Budget Report in October.
It’s been billed as the “Green Budget”. Here are some of Darling’s green announcements: 1) The Government are considering raising the carbon emissions target, for an 80% cut in emissions by 2050. 2) Legislation to be introduced for plastic bag charging. 3) New £26 million fund to help householders reduce emissions. 4) Reform of vehicle excise duty (including re-banding) to encourage consumers and manufacturers to buy/make less-polluting cars.
At the moment, the Government’s going to miss its target to halve child poverty by 2010 by some distance. As expected, Darling’s trying to make up some of the ground. He’s announced: a planned increase in child benefit to be brought forward to April 2009. And the child element of Child Tax Credit will increase to £50 a year.
The blandness of Darling’s speech is awesome: his tie may be imperial purple but his manner is scarcely that of a natural helmsman. What a contrast with the bullishness of his predecessor. He has the countenance of a man expecting to be punched very hard. All is predicated on the Big Global Excuse: times are tough, but the Government is (allegedly) delivering “stability”. He has used the word 16 times so far…
Darling’s just said that the UK is “better-placed” than any other country in the face of global slowdown. Do check out Fraser’s table, which proves our Chancellor wrong. Plenty of Brownies all round, in fact. He’s already talked about “low inflation”. We’ll put up a full analysis later.
We’ve just put up two articles by Ian Mulheirn, the Chief Economist at Social Market Foundation. The first is on mortgages, and can be found here. The second, on green taxation, is here.
As Howard Reed put it earlier, public finances are so tight that the there won’t be many winners from today’s Budget. And all early signs indicate that the winners will either be the very richest or the very poorest members of society. For the rich: concessions on non-dom taxation and vague hints of a corporate tax review. For the poor: more money to tackle child poverty. The middle classes miss out. Yet as figures in this morning’s Telegraph reveal, the middle classes have always missed out under this Government. Even in the years of plenty. Since 2002, the annual tax bill faced by middle class families has risen by some
Alistair Darling’s first budget is an opportunity to re-establish his and the Government’s credibility after a turbulent few months. It will also be an opportunity to define his own agenda and differentiate himself from the Prime Minister’s 10 years at the Treasury. This all has to be done against the backdrop of a slowing down in the economy and with little room for fiscal manoeuvre. The Chancellor’s first major decision that will set the tone and scope for the rest of the Budget has to be about the structure of the tax system. This needs to be taken with the long-term goals of economic stability, fairness and administrative efficiency in
Debate about Geert Wilders and his anti-Koran film Fitna is everywhere in Holland. Newspapers, television shows and private conversations are awash with apprehension. Since the murders of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh, and the hounding into exile of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Wilders is the most prominent critic of Islam in Holland. With his shock of blond hair and startlingly frank language, the MP and leader of the Dutch Party for Freedom is instantly recognisable. But what about Fitna — the movie that no one has seen, but everyone, including the Dutch government, has already condemned for being likely to kick off the next round in the violent confrontation between
Tired of Euro-Sloane bores in Chelsea, Venetia Thompson tours the clubs of Harlesden, the UK’s ‘gun capital’, and experiences a world where a firearm is as normal a status symbol as a Chanel handbag or a Rolex watch would be in SW3 I am dancing slowly with a Portuguese friend to beautiful Zouk music from Cape Verde, sung in Creole. He suddenly throws me against the wall behind him and shoves me down towards the ground. One of my pearl earrings flies across the dance floor. The music has stopped, people are scrambling towards the safety of the now deserted DJ booth or running to get out of the club.
John Hutton, the energetic Secretary of State for Business and a few other things, has reason to be pleased with the expressions of ‘significant interest’ in constructing new nuclear power plants that he has received from British Energy, EDF Energy, E.ON UK and Iberdrola — the British, French, German and Spanish utilities — respectively. These are among the handful of companies in the world with the knowhow and financial resources to build and then successfully operate these capital-intensive and complicated plants. The government’s case for the need for new nuclear plants is straightforward. The nation’s ten existing plants will be shut down by 2023, reducing this low-carbon source of energy
The Letters of Lytton Strachey, which I have just been reading, are a mixed joy. Odd that a writer supposedly so fastidious in the use of words should have produced effusions in the 1920s using ‘divine’ or ‘divinely’ half a dozen times in a single letter, just like a Bright Young Person from Vile Bodies. On the other hand, they provide nuggets of discreditable facts, chiefly about the sexual tastes of the Great and the Good, such as the Labour Lord Chancellor, Jowett. He also relates how he himself was pleasurably crucified by the young Roger Senhouse, an elaborate business which involved making a blasphemous ‘cut’ in his side. More
When the sun lowers itself into the Pacific Ocean, west of California, it has a way of lingering on the horizon that makes you imagine it will stay for ever. It is perhaps less bright than at its zenith, but more beautiful. You don’t want to let it go. Then, just as you are sure it won’t disappear, it does. The other day, my older son and I walked along the beach near my father’s house between Los Angeles and San Diego. We did not talk much, and I forgot to tell him that in that same briney wash north of us my father taught me to body-surf and to
‘I am and always have been an activist,’ says Paul Boateng, the British High Commissioner to South Africa. ‘As a lawyer, a Methodist lay preacher and now as a diplomat, that is what I am. It is how I have been brought up and I can’t imagine ever being anything other than that.’ Boateng’s posting comes to an end next May and somehow one can’t quite see this Hackney-born, one-time firebrand of the Greater London Council allowing himself to be quietly packed off to the Lords. He will then be 57, still relatively youthful by Westminster standards and, as his late Ghanaian father, Kwaku, once told the Daily Mail, it
Elliot Wilson explores how investors can back ventures that lend to the world’s poorest entrepreneurs Prathminda Kaur is the modern version of the Little Match Girl, only with a twist: instead of perishing in a Victorian winter, she’s making a nice living for herself selling red onions and bell peppers in a Mumbai market. Kaur arrived in the Indian coastal city eight years ago. To start with she slept on the street, borrowing money from a loan shark at dawn, handing him more than 90 per cent of her profits at dusk. On an average day, the interest on her loans worked out to an annual rate of 10,000 per
If you think pensions are boring, how exciting do you think poverty in old age will be? I only ask because conventional attitudes to this problematic topic are not just dangerous but also out of date. Most people know that failing to save will not prevent them growing old. Fewer realise how recent rule changes have removed many of the more rational excuses for shunning pensions. First among these is distrust of insurance companies. The age of deference ended long ago and one unexpected casualty was the with-profits fund. People are no longer willing to buy financial products they do not understand simply because a man in a suit says
It was the achievement of Sir Robert Shirley ‘to have done the best things in ye worst times And hoped them in the most callamitous.’ So at least reads the inscription over the west door of Holy Trinity, the chapel he founded at Staunton Harold in Leicestershire. The most notable things Shirley did were to build his chapel in an elaborate Gothic style during the Commonwealth and to conspire on behalf of the exiled Charles II. He died in the Tower for his pains. Holy Trinity, so evocative of the Catholic Middle Ages, was as damning a statement of his sympathies as the weapons he was caught stockpiling for the
Neil Collins has become addicted to alphaville’s interactive forum for stock-market watchers There are thousands of websites for anyone interested in markets. You can spend whole days shunting from one to another, blitzed by irritating ads, looking at share prices anywhere in the world, reading opinions expert and stupid, blud-geoned by analysis. Where on earth do you start? Can you sift the wheat from the chaff? More importantly, can you avoid being bored to death? The small, resolute band who still read the print version of the Financial Times have long since become used to skimming past what we in the trade call a ‘house ad’ — a puff for
Grouse shooting and grouse moors have historically been the preserve of the British aristocracy. For anyone interested in game, shooting grouse is about as good as it gets. If pheasant shooting is a yacht, grouse shooting is a luxury private liner reserved only for the very rich. Owning a grouse moor is like owning a very expensive, extremely high-maintenance toy — and there are a group of buyers who are making grouse moors one of the most sought-after assets in the land. With only 300 moors in Britain, specialist agents say that there’s a queue of newly wealthy buyers but very few sellers, and consequently prices are heading skyward. The