Economy

I spent this morning with Ed Miliband on a trip to a factory in Sunderland. Miliband was visiting the Liebherr plant there, which manufactures cranes. The centerpiece of the visit was a Q&A with the workforce. Now, a factory in the North East is not the toughest venue for a Labour leader to play. But Miliband appeared far more comfortable in this setting than he does when giving a traditional speech from behind a podium.   Unlike Miliband’s Q&A at Labour conference, the questions were not softballs or traditional left-wing fare. One set of three questions were: why don’t we close the borders, bring back national service and do more

Across Europe, the bien pensant are worried. They fear that the Eurocrisis could lead to the rise of populism — whatever that means — and even extremism. The spectre of the 1930s stalks a lot of discussions, as the FT’s Gideon Rachman found out at a lunch with a hedge fund manager who thought the break-up of the Euro would lead to “the next Great Depression and a resurgence of Nazism”. But is there real cause for fear or is this a matter of people projecting a particular history onto the future? Economic dislocation has in the past led to populism but not uniformly, or at least not in numbers

One letter, that’s all it takes. After 38 City types wrote a letter to the Daily Telegraph this morning, urging George Osborne to drop the 50p rate of income tax, Westminster types have been chirruping on about it ever since. All three party leaders have had their say, except, so far as I can tell, Ed Miliband — although Ed Balls stood in for him anyway. Of all the responses, it is David Cameron’s that is the most noteworthy and perhaps even surprising. Speaking about deficit reduction on the Jeremy Vine Show earlier, the PM was unequivocal: ‘We have to try and do this in a way that is fair

George Osborne’s attack on the European Commission and his fellow finance ministers, for wasting time talking about a financial transactions tax when it is not going to happen, is quite a significant moment. It marks an attempt by Britain to knock this idea, which would hit this country far harder than anywhere else in Europe, off the agenda.   The Treasury, the Foreign Office and Number 10 have become increasingly exasperated about how this issue keeps coming up again and again. This feeling has been intensified by the fact that this issue is being discussed even as the crisis in the Eurozone is worsening by the hour.   Osborne’s remarks

Nicolas Sarkozy has served up his second austerity budget in as many months, in a bid to retain France’s AAA credit rating. The president wants to cling on to those three precious letters at all costs. There are elections in six months’ time and he isn’t doing well in the polls. Austerité Part Deux consists of tax increases and spending cuts totalling €7 billion, the government announced today. There will be increases in VAT and levies on large corporations, as well as curbs on increases in welfare spending. This savings programme follows the €11 billion one announced in August. Sarko’s bid to get re-elected in 2012 is in disarray. According

One of the great challenges facing Britain is how to re-moralise society. A country where individuals, or businesses, can’t tell the difference between right and wrong has fundamental problems. The Times reports today that David Cameron is planning to start talking about the need for “moral markets”. There’ll be those on the right who don’t like this, who feel it is pandering to Ed Miliband’s distinctions between predator and producer capitalism. Others will feel that it is impractical. Then there are those who’ll counter that the only responsibility of business is to maximise profits. But this is important territory for Conservatives to be on. Cameron’s “chocolate orange” speech back in

This week’s issue of The Spectator hits the newsstands today. Here, for CoffeeHousers, is James Forsyth’s Politics column from it: Last week’s rebellion by David Cameron’s backbenchers in support of an EU referendum ended eight years of peace in the Tory party on the European question. Now, the offer by the Greek Prime Minister of a referendum on the bailout package — designed to appease nervous Greek Socialist party backbenchers — means that the uncertainty surrounding the eurozone will drag on into the New Year. George Osborne regards the confusion surrounding the future of the single currency as the single biggest obstacle to a British economic recovery. The Chancellor and

The Hair Shirt walked abroad at PMQs today. Those attending the Square Mile sleepover finally forced their agenda into the political mainstream. The question is, what is their agenda? A protest that doesn’t define its programme allows others to define it for them. And today both party leaders tried to harness the anti-capitalist spirit for their own political ends. Ed Miliband claimed to be scandalised by a recent, and arguable, surge of 49 per cent in directors’ pay. He demanded that the PM take action. Cameron seemed equally appalled at the news that fat cats have been getting fatter during the recession. But he wasn’t taking any sermons from Labour.

The growth number for the third quarter of this year is out, and it’s a little bit better than expected: 0.5 per cent. Many economists were saying that we’d have to hit around 0.4 per cent to recoup the growth lost to the Royal Wedding and Japanese Tsunami in Q2, so we’ve managed that. But, that aside, this is not the time for party poppers and champagne corks. It may not be Econopocalypse, but it’s not Mega Growth either. We are still living in a bleak, borderline stagflationary environment. Besides, I still reckon that we oughtn’t get especially worked up about these quarterly figures anyway. For starters, the obsession over

The games have started a day early, folks. The latest quarterly growth figures are set to be released tomorrow morning, but already Ed Balls is waxing insistent about what they have to be: “Simply to stay on track for the Office for Budget Responsibility’s most recent forecast, already downgraded three times, we will need to see growth in the third quarter of 1.3 per cent. And to reach the OECD’s latest and more pessimistic forecast, we will need to see a figure next week of 0.9 per cent.” To be fair — and this is not something you’ll read often on Coffee House — the Shadow Chancellor has a point,

A week may be a long time in politics, but it is no time at all in protest. As the inhabitants of Parliament Square have demonstrated, even a decade is as nothing so long as you have a constantly morphing cause, a council with no balls, and a small but steady stream of acolytes. Last weekend I watched a bridal party sneak in through the side entrance of St Paul’s Cathedral. This weekend I went back, curious to see whether the protest that had kept them from entering through the main door had located a point yet. Walking up from Fleet Street the first sight that greets the visitor is