Liberal democrats

Friday

Jonathan Jones

Which tax cuts would be best for the economy?

With all these tax cut suggestions kicking about — and with the British economy desperately in need of some oomph — it’s worth asking: which would help growth the most? It’s not of course the only consideration, but it is clearly an important one as we struggle to find our way out of recession.   Fortunately, the OECD is on hand with two recent reports to help answer our question. The first, ‘Tax Reform and Economic Growth’, divides taxes into four broad categories and ranks them on how harmful they are to growth: This suggests that the Centre for Policy Studies is right — on growth grounds at least —

Thursday

Sebastian Payne

Detoxifying profit in education

Profit and education are still two words that should only be put together with caution. The coalition has long-accepted this is a toxic area, as typified by Nick Clegg in September when he proclaimed: ‘Yes to greater diversity; yes to more choice for parents. But no to running schools for a profit; not in our state-funded education sector.’ But as Fraser argued last year, we need profit-making schools to spread the benefits of Michael Gove’s reforms to the most deprived children. To straddle this divide, Policy Exchange has proposed a halfway solution today: social enterprise schools. Similar to a private company, the proposed model has full financial transparency and a duty to reinvest

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The tension’s rising inside the coalition

Talking to a Downing Street adviser earlier this week, I was struck when they observed that a ‘2014 election wouldn’t be too bad really. David would have done his best, Nick would have done his best. But they just couldn’t make it work anymore.’   The Tories have spent some time recently contemplating the possibility that the coalition might not run for the full length of the parliament. At a recent Chequers away day, the prospect of the Liberal Democrats walking out in 2014 was openly discussed.   That this possibility is even being talked about is revealing of the mood inside the coalition, which is the subject of my

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Why George should listen to Danny

In the new Spectator, we back the Liberal Democrats’ plans to raise the tax threshold to £10,000 — provided that the money is found by cuts in state spending rather than the pensions raid they propose. It’s not top of my list of tax cuts, but we have to accept the realpolitik. It’s the only tax-cutting option that has advocates in the Treasury. There are plenty of proposals around to cut taxes and wake the British economy from its ‘lost decade’ slumber. The need to use tax cuts as a remedy to the deficit will be familiar to anyone who has followed the American presidential debate: every candidate, even Romney,

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

Miliband snipes, Cameron deflects, Bercow bobs

Let’s be honest. I shouldn’t say this but I can’t help it. I’m fed up. The NHS reform process has been dragging on for months, and still there’s no end in sight. Ed Miliband brought it up at PMQs for the third week running. The position remains the same. Miliband loves it. Cameron lives with it. The PM claimed that 8,200 GP practices are now practising his reforms and the Labour leader replied with a list of professional bodies — nurses, doctors, midwives, radiologists — who oppose them. And that’s exactly the trouble, for me, at least. If the issue were a race-horse some crazy campaigner would plunge beneath its

Tuesday

Peter Hoskin

Nick Clegg’s NHS squeeze continues

As I said last week, Nick Clegg is in a tricky position when it comes to this Health Bill. Thanks to the concessions that he secured and welcomed last year, he can’t now just slander it outright. But thanks to the concerns of his own party, he will also be reluctant to endorse it in full. The result is the sort of ambiguous performance that the Deputy Prime Minister put in on ITV’s Daybreak show this morning. He did get stuck into Labour for their ‘outrageous’ misrepresentation of the reforms. But when it came to actually supporting the Bill, it seemed to me that he used generalisations — such as,

Jonathan Jones

The Lib Dems step up their push for £10,000

Set your TiVos. At 6.55 tomorrow evening, BBC1 will air the Liberal Democrats’ latest party political broadcast. For those of you who can’t wait, here’s a sneak preview: In the video, Nick Clegg describes his proposed increase in the income tax personal allowance as ‘a £700 tax cut for ordinary working people — that’s an extra £60 in your wages every month’. I’ve remarked before on the similarities in both rhetoric and policies between the Lib Dems and Barack Obama, but Clegg’s ‘£60 a month’ pitch is as close as you get to the way Obama sells his payroll tax cut extension as ‘about $40 in every paycheck’. We can now surely

Monday

James Forsyth

The Tories desert Cable in the Commons

When a Secretary of State is in trouble, it is traditional that his governmental colleagues rally to his side. But as Vince Cable defended overruling the Business Select Committee’s objections to Les Ebdon, there was but one Tory Cabinet minister on the front bench. This despite Cable having rung round private offices in search of support, as Patrick Wintour reports. In total there were three Tories on the front bench for most of the statement, Cable’s junior minister Mark Prisk, the whip Mark Francois and the Leader of the House Sir George Young in his normal seat. The absence of Tory ministers combined with 13 hostile questions from Tory backbenchers

Sunday

Jonathan Jones

The tax debate at the heart of the Budget

The run-up to last year’s Budget was all about fuel duty. This year it’ll be all about direct taxes. The Lib Dems are determined to put their manifesto pledge of raising the income tax personal allowance to £10,000 front and centre. They already managed to turn this promise into government policy in the Coalition Agreement, and last year’s Budget announced that the threshold would rise to £8,105 in April this year. But Nick Clegg’s made clear that he wants to go ‘further and faster’ on this. The Conservative response at the Treasury – according to today’s Telegraph – is simple: ‘how are they going to pay for it?’ Initially, Nick

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Balls the tax-cutter?

‘Balls urges tax cuts’, we’re told. Has he had a Damascene moment? Has the borrowed penny dropped? Nope, this is his longstanding and cynical campaign to cut VAT. Under the Labour years, when Balls was encouraging Brown to adopt a ‘scorched earth’ policy to the public finances, he urged against raising VAT to 20 per cent as Alistair Darling wanted. Not because he didn’t think it was necessary, but because he knew that if Darling didn’t do it, Osborne would. So VAT could be an election campaign tool, and then a stick with which to beat the wicked Tories (and the Lib Dems, who dropped the ‘VAT bombshell’ that they

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Tory Ministers need to back the Health Bill

Tomorrow’s Downing Street meeting on the implementation of the health reforms is meant to send the message that the bill is definitely going ahead. Number 10 is keen to shore up the bill ahead of Liberal Democrat Spring Conference following the uncertainty caused by Rachel Sylvester’s column and Conservative Home’s call for the bill to be dropped. Indeed, I understand that at the Quad dinner on Monday night, Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander made the basic political point that the Liberal Democrats would feel absolved of the need to support the bill if any Tory minister came out publicly against it. But Tory ministers still need to muster more public

Thursday

Peter Hoskin

The Lib Dems prepare their strategy for future coalitions

Contain your excitement, CoffeeHousers: the Lib Dems are debating whether to change their ‘constitution’ so that their members have a greater say over future coalition negotiations. The amendment has been put forward Tim Farron and Norman Lamb, and proposes that, in the event of coalition talks, the party’s ‘negotiating team’ should have to consult with a ‘reference group consisting of not more than nine people appointed equally by…’ blah, blah, blah. In fact, you can just read the whole thing on page 41 of this document. The Lib Dems will be voting on it at their Spring Conference next month. But while internal Lib Dem governance may not be the

Peter Hoskin

At least it won’t go to penalties…

Who’s winning in the latest match between Vince Cable and the Conservatives? The Business Secretary did take an early lead, with the news that No.10 had grudgingly yielded to his demand to appoint Professor Les Ebdon to the role of ‘university admissions tsar’ — a man who has hardly been kind about the coalition’s universities policy in the past, and whose appointment had been blocked by the business select committee. But, according to the Telegraph this morning, the Tory leadership appear to have scored a goal of their own: Cable’s proposal for imposing penalties on graduates who pay off their student loans early is to be dropped. We can, and

Tuesday

Jonathan Jones

How Obama’s new budget fits into the UK debate

Yesterday, Barack Obama set out his budget for ‘Fiscal Year 2013’ – that is, for the year beginning October 2012 (in the US, the fiscal year runs from October to September, rather than April to March as it does here). Of course, the federal budget has to be passed by both houses of Congress before being signed off by the President, so the final version will look very different to this one. It is better thought of as a statement of Obama’s intent, and his starting point for the negotiations between Congress and the White House. Nevertheless, it throws up a few interesting points, not least in how it relates to our own

Monday

Peter Hoskin

Nick Clegg’s NHS squeeze

Andrew Lansley’s career prospects were boosted yesterday — when Simon Hughes said that he should ‘move on’ after the NHS reforms have been implemented. Since then, Downing Street has redoubled its defence of the Health Secretary; with a spokesman explaining tersely this morning that, ‘Simon Hughes speaks for himself ’. And Nick Clegg himself has added that, ‘Andrew Lansley is the architect of the NHS bill. He cares passionately about the NHS. He’s the right man for the job and he must see it through.’ Clegg’s general support for the Bill — and Danny Alexander’s — is worth noting because it’s one of the factors helping David Cameron hang on

Sunday

James Forsyth

Warming up for the Budget

The Budget negotiations within government are now underway. The quad of Cameron, Clegg, Osborne and Alexander held a meeting last week to discuss their priorities for the Budget on March 21st. They’ll continue this conversation over a working dinner tomorrow night. Already, we know that the Liberal Democrats main priority will be to get the personal allowance as close to £10,000 as possible. As The Sunday Times reports, they’re suggesting paying for this by taking away various reliefs for higher-rate taxpayers and closing some of the loopholes in the tax system. I also understand from Liberal Democrats close to Clegg that they’re also interested in some new green taxes. For

Saturday

Peter Hoskin

The 50p tax debate won’t be settled this year — but it might be escalated

More evidence this morning that the government won’t be dropping the 50p rate any time soon, in the form of an interview with Danny Alexander. ‘This is not the time to be looking to reduce the tax burden on the wealthy,’ he says to the Daily Telegraph’s James Kirkup and Robert Winnett. This is a line that other ministers have deployed recently, and not just Lib Dems. And it suggests that the coalition is confident that HMRC’s forthcoming review of the rate will say that it does indeed raise revenue. But the matter won’t end there. The IFS recently said of the HMRC review that, ‘tax records for just one

Friday

Peter Hoskin

Lansley’s health problems are starting to look terminal

The discontent with Andrew Lansley’s health reforms has been rising since the New Year. But, one or two threatening quotations aside, most of this has come from the government’s natural opponents: Labour and the unions. That changes today. Over at ConservativeHome, Tim Montgomerie has written a post calling for the Health Bill to be dropped. It is, Tim says, ‘not just a distraction… but potentially fatal to the Conservative Party’s electoral prospects.’ And he finishes: ‘It must be stopped before it’s too late.’ This would be striking enough by itself, but its impact is doubled by a single sentence: ‘Speaking to ConservativeHome, three Tory Cabinet ministers have now also rung

Wednesday

James Forsyth

The BIS select committee makes its presence felt

We will soon find out whether the coalition meant what it said about empowering parliament. The BIS select committee has rejected the government’s preferred candidate for the post of the head of the Office of Fair Access. The committee concluded that it was ‘unable to endorse the appointment of Professor Ebdon as the Director of OFFA and we recommend that the Department conduct a new recruitment exercise.’ But Vince Cable, the business secretary, is said to be keen to override the committee’s verdict. Number 10, which has never been keen on Ebdon, is opposed. As I said on Sunday, the circumstances behind Ebdon’s name going forward are straight from The