Economy

Thursday

David Blackburn

The Big Society in action

The Big Society, in so far as it can be defined at all, envisages an empowered people taking responsibility for their local communities. The little platoons’ efforts could determine the atmosphere of a place, by helping to deliver public services, founding employment schemes, running activities that unite the rich and the dispossessed, and exercising more influence over planning authorities. It is, in effect, an assault on adamantine local government, overbearing central government and predominant corporatism. This morning’s Independent has a cockle-warming tale of how the fledgling culture of localism and voluntarism is taking flight: ‘More than 230 separate local campaign groups against wind farms are operating across the UK, from

Tuesday

James Forsyth

A double boost for the coalition’s economic strategy

Perhaps, the most important thing about the 0.8 percent growth figure for the third quarter announced this morning is that all but 0.1 percent of it came from the private sector. The strength of the private sector in this quarter suggests that the coalition is right to think that the private sector can more than make up for the jobs that will be lost in the public sector over the coming months. In another piece of good economic news for the coalition, Standard and Poor have taken Britain’s triple A credit rating off negative outlook and returned it to stable. This should help keep the yield that the government has

Peter Hoskin

Stronger than expected growth

The growth figures for the third quarter of the year have just been released, and it’s better than we thought: 0.8 percent, twice the 0.4 percent figure that was expected, but down on the 1.2 percent achieved in the spring. In any case, it should play well for Osborne & Co. We’ve just witnessed the fastest third-quarter expansion of the economy for a decade. Double speed, rather than double dip. Really, though, these figures throw up more questions than conclusions. By far the most important is: where next? The coalition would have been untroubled by an even larger reduction in growth now (caused by weak consumer spending, among other variables),

Monday

Peter Hoskin

Cable takes his wind-up act to the stage

A luminous streak of self-aggrandisement in Vince Cable’s speech to the CBI this afternoon, which began thus: “I should acknowledge that that the CBI has been remarkably far sighted; Digby Jones first invited me to speak to you eight years ago, the first Lib Dem asked to do so. I recall some members wondering ‘Vince Who?'” And continued, as Paul Waugh notes in a typically insightful post, with a passage that will wind up the Business Secretary’s detractors in the Tory party: “Just a few years ago, most people in politics, not only Gordon Brown, thought the growth problem had been solved. The only dispute was between those who shared

Peter Hoskin

Cameron’s certainty contrasts with Miliband’s equivocation

An opportunity to compare-and-contrast David Cameron and Ed Miliband outside the sweaty heat of PMQs, with both party leaders delivering speeches to the CBI this morning. Given the audience, both majored on business, enterprise, and all that – and it meant there was plenty of overlap on areas such as green technology and broadband. There were some differences, though, that are worth noting down. Cameron was first up, setting out a three-step plan for boosting British business. Broadly speaking, it revolved around what the government is trying to achieve in the Spending Review – and so the PM boasted that, “last week, we took Britain out of the danger zone.”

Peter Hoskin

The coalition’s feel-good factor

Since last week’s Spending Review – and even before – the government has been operating in a toxic news environment. I mean, just consider the three main news stories that have surrounded the cuts. First, the 500,000 public sector job losses. Then, the IFS report and that single, persistent word: “regressive”. And today – on the covers of the Independent and the Times – warnings that we could be dipping back into recession. Set alongside that tidal swell, the outpourings of Simon Hughes and the polling companies register as little more than sour footnotes. Even if the coalition plans to hide some of its better news, there’s a clear need

Sunday

Fraser Nelson

Osborne’s Paul Daniels strategy

Is George Osborne the first British Chancellor to hide good news in the small print? I ask this in my News of the World column (£) today, and ask what he’s up to. Listening to Nick Clegg on Marr this morning, even he can’t quite say that the same forecasts that predict 500,000 public sector job losses also envisage three times as many jobs created in the private sector. Why so coy? I suspect because it would spoil the magic. That there is a deliberate gap between what this government is saying and what it believes it is doing.   James Forsyth was the first to write (in his political

Peter Hoskin

The IDS plan approaches consensus status

Plenty of attention for Nick Clegg’s listening, reading and smoking habits this morning, as well as his appearance on the Andrew Marr show. But it is another of Marr’s guests who has made perhaps the most important intervention of the day: the shadow work and pensions secretary, Douglas Alexander. Here’s how the Beeb website reports it: “Mr Alexander also said he backed ‘in principle’ the coalition’s plan to replace all out-of-work benefits with a single ‘universal credit’ payment. He said such a move was ‘sensible’ but he would be ‘scrutinising’ the government ‘very carefully’ over its £2bn start-up costs.” If true, then it leaves the the parties in a surprisingly

Peter Hoskin

The government goes for growth, as Cable tackles takeovers

As Benedict Brogan observes, the government’s renewed emphasis upon growth is hardly deafening – but it is certainly echoing through this morning’s newspaper coverage. Exhibit A is the Sunday Telegraph, which carries an article by David Cameron and an interview with Vince Cable – both of which sound all the same notes about enterprise, infrastructure, deregulation, tax and trade. There’s a letter by George Osborne in the Sunday Express, which contains the word “growth” a half-dozen times. And then there’s Cameron’s claim that the next decade will be “the most entrepreneurial in Britain’s history,” in a podcast on the Downing St website. Welcome to two weeks devoted, apparently, to growth

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

Living costs – where the real threat lies

Déjà-lu is a feeling that Spectator subscribers become familiar with. Part of the reason for subscribing (which you can now do from £12, including free iPad access) is to get ahead of the competition – and read today what the newspapers will be saying tomorrow. We’re delighted that the cover story of Thursday’s edition, by Allister Heath, is the main OpEd slot in the Daily Mail today – and with good reason. All of the focus has been on the cuts, 500,000 jobs to go etc. As CoffeeHousers know, jobs are not expected to be the issue over the next few years: the same forecasts suggest 1.5m jobs will be created.

Tuesday

Fraser Nelson

Putting the cuts into context

Having been accused of being a “pain denier” by Tim Montgomerie yesterday, I’d like to quickly defend myself. In my News of the World column, I sought to put this in some perspective. I put in the fact that has been reported nowhere: that we know what the cuts will be. Total cuts to government spending will be 3.7 percent, spread over four years. It is debt interest which forces departmental cuts down to an average of 13 percent, again spread over four years. There will of course be real pain, for thousands of workers facing redundancy. For commuters facing a huge 30 percent rail fare increase. But when trying

Monday

Peter Hoskin

The presentational battle begins in earnest – as the double-dip warnings wind down

Rule 97 in the Practitioner’s Guide to Westminster Politics: if you want to get a message out pronto, then corral a bunch of impressive names into writing a letter to a national newspaper. We saw the tactic used by both Labour and the Tories before the election. And we see it again today, with a letter in the Telegraph, drafted by the Tory peer Lord Wolfson and signed by 35 business leaders, pushing George Osborne to “press ahead with his plans to reduce the deficit”. And you know what? He may just do that. In truth, these kinds of letters are hardly a bad thing for the government, however stage-managed

Friday

Tom Clougherty

Privatization revisited

The similarities between now and the early years of the Thatcher government can easily be overplayed. Yes, there are parallels: a public sector grown fat on government profligacy, unions leaders stirring up resentment, and a government unsure about quite how radical it wants to be. But there are clear differences too: the political dynamics, the industrial landscape, and, indeed, the magnitude of the fiscal crisis. Nevertheless, there is at least one successful Thatcher-era policy that is desperately due a comeback: privatisation. It won’t have escaped many CoffeeHousers’ notice that, despite the tough talk on the deficit, the government is still borrowing almost £20m per hour. The cost of servicing our

Sunday

Fraser Nelson

Rochdale, revisited

Putting Ed Balls into Home Affairs is like trapping a bee in a jar: he’ll come out furious, and anxious to sting. In his new brief, he has immigration. And he’ll know Cameron’s vulnerabilities. The greatest threat facing the coalition doesn’t come from Ed Miliband. It comes from a deep dysfunction in Britain’s economy: that when it grows, we just suck in more workers from overseas. Balls knows this, and the resentment it causes in affected communities – which is why he was talking tough on immigration during the leadership contest. He knows where the economic bodies are buried: he dug the graves. He also knows that unless Cameron manages

Friday

Peter Hoskin

From the archives: Entering the ERM

It’s twenty years, to the day, since the UK joined the European Exchange Rate Mechanism – a decision that would, of course, culminate in our withdrawal on Black Wednesday, 16 September, 1992. Subsequent years of strong growth placed those events in a fresh context, but here’s The Spectator’s take from 1990: The dangers of stageism, The Spectator, 13 October 1990 Give the European federalists and inch, and they will take a kilometre. Commenting on Britain’s entry into the Exchange Rate Mechanism of the EMS, Sir Leon Brittan claimed that ‘Britain has begun an inevitable move towards joining a full European Monetary System, including a single currency’. And the Guardian, which

Thursday

Andrew Haldenby

Hutton points the way forward on pensions

John Hutton’s interim report on public sector pensions today will go down as one of the most important moments in the public service reform story.  John Hutton doesn’t just set out the principles for putting public services on a sustainable footing, although he does do that (by explaining the inadequate levels of contributions into these schemes).  More importantly, he confronts head-on the problem that public sector pensions pose for the opening up of public services to competition. One of the key reasons that many companies have waited on the sidelines of the public sector for years is the disparity between public and private pensions.  Tony Blair’s Prime Ministerial demands for

James Forsyth James Forsyth

A solution to the immigration cap puzzle

The coalition’s immigration cap is, as several Conservative Cabinet ministers have pointed out privately, flawed. It threatens to cap the kind of immigration that bothers almost nobody, high skilled foreign workers coming to this country to do a specific job. As Ken Clarke has told colleagues, the problem is that Labour — albeit right at the end of their time in office — stopped non-EU low-skilled immigration. So all there was left to cap was high-skilled immigration.   But there is a potential solution that would enable the cap — a Conservative manifesto promise — to remain in place, but also deal with Vince Cable and businesses’ objections http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard-business/article-23879244-vince-cables-attack-on-immigration-cap-wins-city-backing.do. One

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Hunt the heretic

Eureka, the science magazine from The Times, is in many ways a brilliant accomplishment. Advertising is following readers in an online migration – but James Harding, the editor, personally persuaded advertisers that a new magazine, in a newspaper, devoted to science would work. And here it is: giving the New Scientist a run for its money every month. That’s why it’s such a shame that today’s magazine opens on an anti-scientific piece denouncing those who disagree with the climate consensus. My former colleague Ben Webster, now the paper’s environment correspondent, is an energetic and original journalist – so it’s depressing to see his skills deployed in a game of hunt-the-heretic.

Wednesday

David Blackburn

What to make of Cameron’s rejection of laissez faire?

Pressure brings out the best in David Cameron and right now he’s coasting. He gave, as Pete and Fraser have said, a subdued speech. The content was there but his delivery was calm, except on two occasions when he spoke rather than read the autocue. He attempted to sell the Big Society (third time and no luckier). Then he said, with conviction, ‘I don’t believe in laissez faire.’ Those six words are pure Tory Reform Group, pure Iain Macleod, pure One Nation. He evoked that traditional form of Torysim with a firm description of how his government seeks to empower people as responsible groups not just free individuals. A theme

Peter Hoskin

Cameron stumbles onto the stage

Who’d have guessed that David Cameron would go into his conference speech on the backfoot? This was supposed to be a moment tinged, if anything, with jubilation: the first Tory PM for thirteen years addressing a party that seems to have fallen in love with him. But instead we’ve got the child benefit row, and with it apologies, rebuttals and hasty repositioning. It is to Cameron’s credit that he can breath the two words that evade other, more culpable politicians: “I’m sorry”. But on the eve of his big speech? Far from ideal. This exercise in damage limitation may have slightly eased Cameron’s situation today – but it has put