George osborne

Gordon Brown may have gone, but advocates of his calamitous policies remain. David Blanchflower, the chief exponent of borrowing more, has a piece in The Guardian today which is worth examining. Written with his trademark chutzpah, it’s a very clear exposition of the Labour argument — along with its flaws. Here are some extracts, and my comments: “In his budget speech last month, Chancellor George Osborne suggested that he was hoping for ‘an economy where the growth happens across the country and across all sectors. That is our ambition”. Sadly, to judge by Wednesday’s GDP figures, growth under this coalition remains just an ambition, a mere illusion.” And why would

Aside from the “Calm down, dear” drama, there was something else worth noting from today’s PMQs: David Cameron trying for a calmer debate on the deficit. He admitted that his government is not really being that much more aggressive than Gordon Brown would have been. They’re cutting £8 for every £7 that Brown and Darling proposed for 2011-12, he said. It’s a line that Nick Clegg road-tested in his speech to the IPPR last week, and it represents a new and welcome strategy. To date, the rhetorical differences have been stark. The Tories have said: we’re the big bold cutters, Labour are deficit deniers. Labour has replied: your cuts are

Something has undoubtedly changed in the coalition in the past fortnight. Even those at the centre, who have been most loyal to the concept of coalition, are now happy to complain about the other side and its behaviour. But I’m still sceptical of all the early election speculation which has been sparked by Jackie Ashley’s very clever Guardian column. The main reason why I don’t think it will happen is the Cameron brand. Ever since David Cameron became leader of the Conservative party, the top of the party has believed that the protection of the Cameron brand is essential to electoral success. Cameron has too much personally invested in showing

The Liberal Democrats are mad as hell at their coalition partners—and don’t seem to care who knows it. Their fury has been caused by what they see as the roughhouse tactics of the No campaign and the Tories’ complicity in them. Chris Huhne’s letter to George Osborne has been written to make clear just how betrayed the Liberal Democrats’ feel by the actions of their coalition partners. Huhne writes, “I explicitly warned you that the manner of the AV campaign would be as important as the result, in terms of the effect on the coalition.” Then, he moves onto a particular Lib Dem bugbear—the claim that AV would cost £250

Barack Obama’s budget plan has become a political debating point on this side of the Atlantic. Ed Balls set the ball a-rolling in an article for the Guardian this morning, which effectively claimed that the President isn’t planning to cut the deficit as quickly as George Osborne is. “The truth is that it is Osborne himself who is isolated,” is how he pugnaciously put it. But the Tories’ Matthew Hancock has since responded — on Coffee House, as it happens — arguing that, actually, the Obama Plan is simpatico with what Osborne is doing. By way of hovering above the red-on-blue scrap, we thought we’d put together a comparison of

Seems that the Tories can be more assertive too. After remaining more or less silent on the matter since the coalition was formed, George Osborne has today given his take on the AV referendum to the Daily Mail — and he’s far from kind towards the Yes campaign. “What really stinks,” says the Chancellor, “is actually one of the ways the Yes campaign is funded.” What he has in mind are the campaign’s ties to an organisation that sells vote counting services, as revealed by Ed Howker in The Spectator. “I think there are some very, very serious questions that have to be answered.” But, rather than just attacking the

Andrew Tyrie promised that the Treasury Select Committee would be an assertive, insistent body under his stewardship — and he hasn’t disappointed so far. The committee’s recent evidence sessions have been fiery affairs, particularly by the usual standards of these things. And today they have released the result: an extensive and prescriptive report into last month’s Budget. Several of the report’s observations are worth noting down — not least that advance briefing of the Budget is “corrosive of good government,” and that “almost all the evidence received [about the government’s Enterprise Zones] is unsure about the extent to which they will contribute to UK growth.” But more significant is the

Developments aplenty on the Portuguese front — the most noteworthy being that Britain is probably in for a €4.8 billion share of the €80 billion tab. Robert Peston explains the numbers here, although it basically comes down to the lending mechanisms that will be deployed. Add up our 13.5 per cent exposure to the European Financial Stabilisation Mechanism (EFSM) with our 4.5 per cent exposure to the IMF’s pot, and it comes to €4.8 billion. Or, rather, £4.2 billion. The politics of the situation are precarious for the coalition. Yet I doubt they’ll be unduly troubled by Ed Balls’s suggestion that “it would be better if this was sorted out