Treasury

Bankers make estate agents look popular and so any government deal with bankers that doesn’t involve kicking them is politically tricky. The Treasury, acutely aware of the politics of all this, are very keen to stress that the government ‘played hardball’ with Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds and RBS in the Project Merlin talks. The actual deal is not a bad one. The promised £10 billion pound increase in lending to small businesses is better than expected. On bonuses, the banks have got off relatively easily. But crucially the bonus pool will be smaller than last year and bank head’s bonuses will be dependent on meeting lending targets for small businesses.  

Tomorrow is the first Osborne Balls Treasury Questions clash. It should be a fiery encounter. There’s little love lost between the two men, they are both aggressive despatch box performers  and the two of them know that their clash over the economy is likely to be the major factor in determining the next election result. Balls has a fair amount of material to work with: the disappointing growth—or, more accurately, non-growth—figures for the final quarter of last year, the limited success of the national insurance holiday for new small companies and the failure to publish a growth plan. Set against that is that Osborne will be able to accuse Balls

No doubt about it, George Osborne is being pulled in two directions ahead of the Budget. There are those, such as the Lib Dems, who would have him reduce taxes for the least well-off. There are those, such as Boris, who would have him reduce taxes for higher earners. As I suggested yesterday, this debate pivots around two particular measures: raising the personal allowance and cutting the 50p rate. Rachel Sylvester develops the story in a typically insightful column (£) for the Times today. It quotes an “ally of the Chancellor” to the effect that Osborne is minded more to raise the personal allowance than to cut 50p. “Not many

It’s not just the growth figures, you know. Today, the Office for National Statistics also released its latest estimates for the state of the public finances. Among the headline findings was a crumb of consolation for the Treasury: it is on track to meet its borrowing target for the financial year. But that’s by the by when compared to this other snippet from the ONS release: our national debt went up by £1,300 billion in December. Don’t worry, though – it’s not really as terrible as all that sounds. What’s happened is that the human calculators have finally worked out how to account for Lloyds and RBS on the public

The Christmas Special of The Spectator is out today, and George Osborne kindly agreed to an interview. We have printed 1,500 words in the magazine, but James and I thought CoffeeHousers may like a fuller version, where he has more space to speak for himself.  We have gone into way more detail on tax policy here than in the magazine, for example, as Osborne is seldom pressed on this point and his thoughts are very interesting. We have divided it up by subject headings, so CoffeeHousers can skip the chunks they’re not interested in.   Liberty, paternity and Treasury It is an exciting day for Liberty Osborne, the Chancellor’s daughter,

The revolution may not be televised, but protests certainly are – and the process magnifies the drama. Since last night, the news broadcasts have all had footage of two thugs trying to smash the windows of the Treasury and, in the process, familiarising themselves with the properties of bombproof glass. The attack on Charles and Camilla’s royal limo is splashed across all this morning’s front pages. The script is so well-rehearsed now that I hesitate to repeat it: the vast majority are peaceful protesters, infiltrated by vandals who soak up the attention. Many of the protesters yesterday looked like they’d get a cab straight back home to their Notting Hill

Asking PFI contractors to voluntarily give back some of the money that they are due from the government might seem like rather a hopeless task. But the PFI-Rebate campaign launched today by Jesse Norman, one of the smartest of the new intake of Tory MPs, has a better chance of success than appears at first blush. Norman is pushing for the contractors to take a 0.5 percent cut which they might well decide is worthwhile to deal with all the negative publicity that further scrutiny of PFI would bring. If these contractors want to take the PFI model global, then they can’t really afford the kind of coverage that a

Courtesy of Paul Waugh and the Standard, the OBR projects there to be a £6bn budget surplus by 2015-16. There was no fanfare to herald this in George Osborne’s statement, which was a litany of dirge-like thanksgiving for catastrophe averted. The Treasury is now describing the figure as being ‘within the margin of error’, which is fluent Sir Humphrey-speak. The Standard’s discovery is another example of the government deliberately hiding good economic news – in what Fraser terms Osborne’s Paul Daniels Act. Now why, I wonder, would a self-confessed tactical obsessive, who just happens to be the Chancellor of the Exchequer, be doing that?      

This from Matthew Taylor – the former No.10 head of policy, speaking to the Times for their series (£) on the fall of New Labour – deserves a post of its own: “For me, New Labour died when Tony bought Gordon an ice cream in 2005. I remember sitting in Downing St two days after the election win and chucking into the bin the proposal to break up the Treasury.” 

Answer: it depends on how you look at it. I’ve put together the chart below (click for a larger version), which sets how much money we’ve given the the EU since 1973. There are three lines for each year: i) our gross contribution, ii) our total contribution (which is the gross contribution minus the money we get back from the rebate), and iii) the net contribution (gross contribution minus both the rebate and the money that the Treasury gets to pay for various EU projects across the UK). In terms of how much the EU costs the taxpayer, then, I’d say the second line is the best one to follow:

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

It’s fast becoming a tradition: when the IFS calls the government’s work “regressive,” send for Nick Clegg to take the think tank on. He wrote an article for the FT debunking their analysis back in August. And, today, he does the same via an interview in the Guardian. It’s pretty forceful stuff from the Deputy PM, as this quote testifies: “I think you have to call a spade a spade. We just fundamentally disagree with the IFS. It goes back to a culture of how you measure fairness that took root under Gordon Brown’s time, where fairness was seen through one prism and one prism only which was the tax

George Osborne was well received by the 1922 committee of Tory backbenchers when he addressed them on the spending review earlier. There was much thumping of desks, the traditional sign of approval at meetings of the ‘22.   Talking to Tory MPs this afternoon, they are pretty happy with the package. They are glad that the money being taken out of the welfare budget means that the departmental cuts are less than expected. Overall, they think the package is politically sellable and has denied Labour that many targets.   One concern is about how local councils, including Conservative ones, might react to a 28 percent cut in their funding from