Latest from Coffee House

Latest from Coffee House

All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories

Will the government break its health spending pledge?

Let’s make one thing clear right from the off: the IFS did not just say that the government would break its pledge to increase health spending in real terms. What it did say is that the government is coming close to breaking it — and that’s the truth. Here’s the graph that we’ve put together

Fraser Nelson

Scouring the Budget small print

This morning’s newspapers have a feast of analysis on the Budget. I’ve covered 15 of them, and what journalists normally do is spend the day trawling the small print of the Budget document hunting for stories. But this time, the stories seem to have migrated to the Office for Budget Responsibility’s accompanying report, packed with

Budget 2011 round-up

Coffee House ran a live blog of the Chancellor’s statement and the Leader of the Opposition’s response. In addition to that, here is a selection of posts from Spectator.co.uk on the Budget: Fraser Nelson says Osborne’s cuts have got softer. James Forsyth considers the Budget’s political implications, and witnesses Ed Balls’ mischievous response. Peter Hoskin

James Forsyth

Balls replies with mischief

Ed Balls has just delivered Labour’s Budget briefing. His main point was that the Office of Budget Responsibility now forecasts higher levels of unemployment than it did last autumn. He claimed that this would lead to a £12.6bn increase in spending on unemployment benefit. He also argued that the decision to increase tax thresholds by

Giving up before the race has begun?

How will history judge George Osborne’s second Budget? Once the headline writers have moved on to the next story and the longer-term consequences of the measures become apparent, will this budget be seen as doing the right thing? Unfortunately the answer is, at best, “not really.”   By sticking to the target of eliminating the

James Forsyth

Osborne pulls it off

George Osborne beat the expectations game today. His abolition of the fuel duty escalator for this parliament should — Elizabeth Taylor and Libya permitting — get him the front pages he wants.   Aside from the headline measures, I think there are three stories that will run on from this Budget. First, the government is

Lloyd Evans

Dave’s rave

Friskier than a spaniel. That’s how Cameron seemed at today’s PMQs. The Gadaffi debacle has given him a Falklands bounce – prematurely one senses – and he was glowing like freshly made toast from the praise lavished on his performance on Monday. He seemed to want to share the good cheer with everyone else, even

Budget 2011 live blog

1348, PH: And Ed Miliband comes to a close, still sounding the same note: that the growth downgrades prove the coalition is bad for the nation’s health. We’ll come to a close there, too. Thanks for tuning in. More Budget coverage on Coffee House all afternoon, starting with these graphs. 1244, PH: Ed Miliband is

James Forsyth

Osborne’s white rabbit

We can expect at least one rabbit out of the hat in George Osborne’s Budget speech. The Chancellor is a canny enough operator to have held at least one big announcement back. Already this morning, we have had news that all councils will freeze or reduce their council tax next year. But I expect there

James Forsyth

Osborne’s 50p question

If I was a betting man, I’d fancy wagering that if the economy is growing at a decent clip again by next year’s Budget, Osborne will abolish the 50p rate then. His announcement of a review of how much revenue it actually brings in, strikes me as a move to pave the way for its

Osborne the Reformer is an unfinished work

One interesting aspect of today’s Budget is the government’s change of tack on personal allowances. Back in June 2010, when the Chancellor committed to raise allowances from £6,475 to £7,475, he chose to cancel out the gains for higher rate taxpayers by lowering the level at which the 40p tax rate kicks in. The idea

Alex Massie

There’s No Right Not to be Offended

There’s nothing wrong with being offended by an argument but everything wrong with asserting a “right” not to be so offended. When this notional right is combined with the suggestion that the offending writer be punished or blackballed or, as seems to be possible these days, reported to the police we find ourselves in a

Fraser Nelson

Osborne’s new, softer cuts

George Osborne has today done some massive juggling. It wasn’t a Budget for jobs after all, but a Budget to help people cope with the soaring cost of living. North Sea oil companies and banks were stung for various income, fuel and corporation tax cuts. The Chancellor spotted — immediately — that cost of living

Alex Massie

Elizabeth Taylor, 1932-2011

There’s no successor to Elizabeth Taylor. No contemporary actress possesses anything like her fame. That’s a consequence of the changing nature of celebrity and the fragmentation of popular culture. The movies got small and so did the stars. But the sensational aspects of the Taylor-Burton saga makes it easy to forget that their celebrity was

Alex Massie

Is 40% the “basic rate” of income tax?

MPs are pretty out of touch, of course, clueless about the way “ordinary people” live. That’s what we’re supposed to think of course. We’re not supposed to remember that MPs probably regularly encounter a much broader range of public opinion and circumstance than highly paid columnists and political editors. Here, for instance, is Ben Brogan

PMQs live blog | 23 March 2011

1232: And that’s it. And here’s my quick verdict: a solid performance from Cameron is what was, on the whole, a sedate session. The Main Event starts now, follow our live blog here. 1228: More fire from Cameron on the NHS. “Do you want to save … lives,” he quivers,” or do you want to

Rod Liddle

A seismic moment

Great news for the nuclear industry and indeed for the world: George Monbiot has “altered” his stance on nuclear power and is now in favour of it, rather than being non-committal. In a magnificently self-regarding piece for the Grauniad yesterday he pointed out what most of the rest of us have been arguing for years

Fraser Nelson

The levers that Osborne might pull

Cutting taxes for the low-paid is the most useful thing Osborne can do in what will, I suspect, be a distinctly unmemorable budget. The Mail and The Sun both have competing figures — £205 and £320 — for the annual rebate. Given that the average Brit is paying £310 more due to Osborne’s VAT rise

Budget morning

George Osborne couldn’t really have expected a much better set of newspaper covers than the one before him this morning. Despite the dreary background picture – war, confusion, higher inflation, lower growth, the ruinous state of the public finances, etc – a handful of papers are leading on the goodies in his Budget, and specifically

Alex Massie

Good News for Obama

Not from Libya, obviously, since the situation there plainly has the potential to damage the American President but from a source closer to home. Dick Morris says Obama is finished: Will Obama get reelected? No way! In the teeth of the economic catastrophe that is shaping up, his chances are doomed. True, even Dick Morris

Ending Cameron’s War

The coalition is now in danger of coming unstuck — not because of failure, but because of its success. It needs to urgently decide how to run itself and what its aims are. Before it runs out of targets. Neither is easy to do. The US may want to handover control of the mission but

Alex Massie

A Sinner Repents

Fair play to George Monbiot: You will not be surprised to hear that the events in Japan have changed my view of nuclear power. You will be surprised to hear how they have changed it. As a result of the disaster at Fukushima, I am no longer nuclear-neutral. I now support the technology. A crappy

James Forsyth

Removing Gaddafi is key

The question of whether Gaddafi should be targeted and what the exit strategy should be in Libya are intimately linked. In truth, there is no exit strategy that does not involve Gaddafi’s fall from power. As long as he is there, the threat to those that the international community is now pledged to protect will

James Forsyth

Budget eve

In stark contrast to 2003, when Gordon Brown delivered his Budget on the same day that Baghdad fell, the Treasury is phlegmatic about the Budget being overshadowed by Britain’s involvement in a conflict overseas. But the signs are that this will be, within the obvious fiscal constraints, an ambitious Budget. Tonight, we have had confirmation

Web Exclusive: HolyBookers 1 – Facebookers 0

Cairo The Facebook and Twitter revolutionaries are taking a beating at the hands of the Brothers. The results of Saturday’s referendum are now out and they point to a simple truth: the internet was fine as a tool for gathering a few hundred thousand youths in Tahrir Square; but it is largely irrelevant as a

Your five-point guide to tomorrow’s Budget

From rescue to recovery — that’s how George Osborne is selling his Budget ahead of its release tomorrow. But what might we see beyond the rhetoric? Here’s a five-point guide for CoffeeHousers:   1) Growth. It almost feels like a tradition now: a new Budget, and a new set of forecasts from the Office for

The state of public opinion ahead of the Budget

It’s a point that I’ve made before, but here it is again: Budgets don’t tend to shift opinion polls, at least not the headline numbers. But opinion polls can give some insight into how Budgetary decisions will go down with the public. So by way of a catch-up with some recent polls, and ahead of

Three principles that should underpin the Budget

As I see it, there should be three simple principles underpinning George Osborne’s Budget tomorrow. Let’s take them one by one: 1) Variations in household wealth mean that policies aimed at affecting the wider economy will often have unpredictable political effects. Economists have a tendency to imply that changes in GDP affect everyone uniformly, but