Conservative party

Strange days, indeed.  While most of the frontpages today are unflattering for Labour – particularly, and unsurprisingly, those of the Telegraph and the Sun – I imagine that Brown & Co. will be quite pleased with the general tone of the Budget coverage.  Much of it mirrors the Independent’s view that Darling “played a weak hand well”.  Or, elsewhere, there’s a kind of detached indifference about what is described as a “boring” Budget. Yes, if you like, you can take that as proof that the Darling-and-Mandelson approach to the public finances is less politically toxic, and a good degree more sensible, than the Balls-and-Brown approach.  But, to my mind, it

This year’s Budget was never going to win the election for Labour but it could have lost it. If the markets had reacted really badly to it, warnings about how Britain is in danger of going Greek would have suddenly gained traction. But Darling avoided that fate with a Budget that did little. Listening to it, it was clear that those inside Labour who argued that the strategic imperatives for this Budget had to be appearing credible and not risking an adverse market reaction had prevailed. The mood music was very different from the PBR, with its emphasis on investment versus cuts. Politically, the challenge for the Tories is this:

The public remains infatuated with Vince Cable. A Politics Home poll reveals that 31 percent want Cable to be chancellor. It’s a crushing endorsement: Don’t Know is his nearest rival on 24 percent, followed by Ken Clarke on 16 percent. Cable’s reputation rests on his sagacious airs and an apparent contempt for party politics. His eminence is baffling. Fleet-footed fox-trotter he may be; economic guru he is not. Andrew Neil’s interview shattered Cable’s invincibility. The Sage of Twickenham admitted to changing his mind over the HBOS Lloyds merger and his constantly shifting position on cuts was exposed. Add to that the ill-thought out Mansions Tax and Cable begins to look

George Boateng, Alan Milburn and Andrew Smith have written a letter to George Osborne, calling him to task over the contradictions in his policy. ‘It is not clear to us whether these mixed messages are a deliberate attempt to obscure your plans or a symptom of a confused approach to policy but either way the public deserves better.’ Fair enough. Osborne’s policy has become more concrete in recent weeks, but much remains still to do. Peversely, I think they’ve given too much detail, and have been found out because they haven’t seen the nation’s books.The reduction in the amount of cuts that are planned is a case in point. But

Listening to BBC news, it’s striking how they are still using Labour’s politically-charged vocabulary. When the universities are kicking off about their budgets being cut, the BBC newsreaders are told to talk about “investment” in higher education, rather than spending. Why, though? An “investment” would be to put £1 billion of taxpayers’ money into an Emerging Markets fund, and hope it grows. Giving it to universities – many of which serve neither students nor society – is not an investment. But using the word “investment” is Labour code for “good spending”. There is one particularly frequent example if this: the BBC regularly confuse the words “deficit” and “debt” – a