George osborne

The Treasury is keen to downplay any sense of drama surrounding the spending review. On Marr this morning, George Osborne declared that he was ‘confident’ that he and Vince Cable would agree the BIS budget ‘in short order.’ He emphasised that the differences between them were not that large. Indeed, I’m informed that the differences between Treasury and BIS are over capital not current spending, making them easier to resolve. Osborne and Cable have only begun to speak directly in recent days. Up until Thursday, Osborne had been leaving the negotiations to Danny Alexander. Despite Osborne’s protestations, it looks like the BIS budget will go down to the wire. Cable

The Tory leadership held one of its election strategy meetings yesterday at Chequers. The Prime Minister and his colleagues will have been reassured that their party certainly seems to be turning its face towards 2015, with some of David Cameron’s fiercest critics preferring to get behind the campaign for James Wharton’s referendum bill. I look at some of the ways Cameron and his colleagues are trying to repair relationships in my Telegraph column today. But Tory anger comes in waves, and there’s one racing towards the shore that, according to backbenchers, has a great deal to do with the party’s chances with its core vote at the next general election.

George Osborne is expected to respond to the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards’s final report in his Mansion House speech this evening. The report is hefty and packed with recommendations, but there are two areas where the Chancellor will find himself treading a particularly tricky path. Both the proposal to defer bonuses and introduce a criminal offence of reckless misconduct in the management of a bank are designed to encourage responsibility and a greater regard of the consequences of bad behaviour. But Osborne will know that they also pose a threat to the success of the city. He will need to consider what effect deferring some remuneration for up to

When a politician’s speech is spun ten days in advance, you know there’s trouble behind the scenes. Next week’s Mansion House dinner will be seen by City attendees principally as a farewell to Sir Mervyn King — and journalists present (including your columnist) will be timing the ovation to see how it compares with Eddie George’s full five minutes in 2003. But we learn that the Chancellor is ‘poised’ to use the occasion to ‘signal’ a public offer of Lloyds Banking Group shares that could raise up to £17 billion and mark a turning point in the post-crisis clean-up of the banking sector. By giving discounts to small investors, it

Ed Balls has just told Andrew Neil on the Sunday Politics that Labour will include pensions in their welfare cap. This opens up a major dividing line with the Tories who have been clear that George Osborne will exclude pensions from his spending cap. I suspect that Balls and Ed Miliband will now be badgered with questions about whether, if necessary, they’ll cut pensions — or not up-rate them — to meet the cap. Given the power of the grey vote in British politics (Labour estimates that one in every two voters in 2010 was over 55) they are going to come under massive pressure to rule this out. But,

Today must count as one of the most encouraging days for the centre right in British politics in recent times. Labour’s apparent abandonment of universal child benefit is a massive blow to the 1945 settlement. It is akin in significance to when Labour began to accept the privatisations of the Thatcher era. Now, there’s no intellectual difference between declaring that better off pensioners won’t receive winter fuel payments and that better off mothers won’t receive child benefit. But in symbolic terms, the difference is huge. The winter fuel payment is a recent addition to the welfare state, introduced by the last Labour government. It is not fundamental to it. By

Does marriage matter anymore? Not so long ago, David Cameron was foremost amongst those giving an unfashionable ‘yes’ to this question. It became his signature theme, the closest he had to a Blair-style ‘irreducible core’. It seemed, at the time, as if a 1979-style realignment was underway. The Labour Party was being sucked into the vortex of its own economic failure. Its social failure was just as profound: it had tested to destruction the idea that more welfare makes countries stronger or fairer. And study after study showed that the institution of marriage was easily the most powerful weapon every developed to promote health, wealth and education. In Cameron, we

George Osborne has got through the IMF’s report on the UK economy. It is far from a ringing endorsement of his approach but, as Isabel notes, its criticisms are couched in such opaque language that I doubt they’ll have much political impact. I also suspect that the Treasury is not unhappy about being told that it needs to get on with returning RBS and Lloyds to the private sector. Selling even a tranche of these bank shares before 2015 would be politically powerful, aiding the Tories in their attempt to argue that they’ve been clearing up the mess that Labour left behind. The next challenge for the Treasury is the