Uk politics

Saturday

Will Straw

George Osborne isn’t working, we need a Plan B

Although sometimes implied in public debates, deficit reduction and growth are not alternatives. Both are essential for Britain’s prosperity and economic stability. On either count, George Osborne is failing. In 2010, George Osborne inherited an economy that was growing at 0.7 per cent. Later that year he ignored the advice of many economists and set out plans to close the deficit within four years rather than eight. He also failed to set out a coherent growth plan, predicated on investment and jobs in the green economy that his party once championed. The result, plain for all to see, has been a double dip recession. The economy has contracted in each

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Ken Clarke’s 2015 campaign slogan

It was not a huge surprise when Ken Clarke rowed back this afternoon on his comments to the Telegraph about tax breaks for married couples. The minister without portfolio was hardly going to get through the first interview he has given since the reshuffle without saying something he would later have to ‘clarify’. But he made another interesting observation to the newspaper about the Tories’ 2015 strategy. He said: ‘If we are back to strong growth by the next election, we probably won’t need to campaign. If at the next election, the economy is in strong normal growth, George Osborne will be given the Companion of Honour or something and

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Conservative renegotiation strategy

In The Spectator this week, Charles Moore argued that David Cameron — despite his oft-stated desire to renegotiate the terms of Britain’s EU membership — doesn’t actually have a European policy. Charles’ criticisms have clearly stung. For in his Telegraph column, he outlines what post-2015, the Conservatives would seek in any renegotiation: “In essence, the scheme is to turn the EU into two concentric rings. The inner ring shares the euro and undergoes political union. The outer ring avoids both these things and has a looser, trading membership grounded in national parliamentary sovereignty. You could say that this split already exists, in fact if not in theory, but the difference

Friday

James Forsyth

The Brussels budget imbroglio

The EU budget negotiation, now a month away, promises to be David Cameron’s next big European test. The Prime Minister has repeatedly declared that he wants to see the EU budget frozen at 2011 levels and that he’s prepared to use the need for unanimity to achieve that. The Economist this week has a very useful scene-setter for the budget talks. It sketches the contours thus: ‘Countries are coalescing around loose (yet often divided) groups. There are the ‘friends of cohesion’: the net recipients of regional spending, such as Poland, Hungary and the Baltic states. And there are the ‘friends of better spending’: the net contributors, such as Germany, France,

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Is the government being inconsistent on teacher training?

To be fair to Kevin Brennan, he seems to have updated his attack line on Michael Gove since his ‘don’t-call-teachers-names’ press release that Labour sent out overnight. The party’s shadow education minister is now attacking the Education Secretary for inconsistency, arguing that his announcement today on improving teacher training contradicts the decision to allow academies and free schools to employ unqualified teachers. He has just told BBC News: ‘But what’s rather strange about what the Government is doing is at the same time it’s saying there should be more rigour in the testing of teachers as they go in to the profession, it’s saying more and more schools can hire

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Rising energy bills add to pressure on government

EDF’s announcement that it is raising gas and electricity bills by nearly 11 per cent will increase pressure on the government in two ways. The first is that these sorts of hikes in the cost of living mean that while ministers have been cheered by recent pleasing statistics on growth, jobs and inflation, voters might not feel as though things are going so well for them. If their own experience of the economy is one where their rent, shopping bills and energy bills are soaring while their wages are frozen, then they may not feel quite as sympathetic to the government as official statistics suggest they should. The second is

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Michael Gove to toughen up teacher training

Michael Gove is announcing tougher tests for trainee teachers today, with calculators banned from maths assessments, and the pass mark in tests for English and Maths being raised to the equivalent of GCSE grade B (which still doesn’t sound that taxing), along with a new test in verbal, numerical and abstract reasoning. The Education Secretary says the changes ‘will mean that parents can be confident that we have the best teachers coming into our classrooms. Above all, it will help ensure we raise standards in our schools and close the attainment gap between the rich and poor’. It’s part of the government’s drive to demonstrate that it is, in David

Thursday

James Forsyth

Can Ed Balls leave his past behind?

A large part of the Tory message at the next election will be ‘don’t let Labour ruin the economy again’. One of the things that will help the Tories make this a topic of the campaign is Ed Balls’s constant desire to defend the record of the last Labour government. As Jonathan noted earlier, when Andrew Neil pointed out that Labour was — contrary to Balls’s earlier denials — running a structural deficit in 2007, Balls got into a long-winded attempt to justify both that and his denial of this point last year.

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

David Cameron rebuked by statistics chief over PMQs comments

David Cameron’s taunt at Ed Miliband yesterday during Prime Minister’s questions that the ‘good news will keep coming’ was taken by some as a hint at today’s GDP figures, which the PM has early access to. Now the chair of the UK Statistics Authority Andrew Dilnot has written to Cameron to rebuke him for the line. The letter, which you can read in full here, says: ‘The Pre-Release Access to Official Statistics Order 2008 states that recipients of pre-release access must not disclose ‘any suggestion of the size or direction of any trend’ indicated by the statistic to which the recipient has been given such access. It is clear from

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Herman van Rompuy’s revelatory Downing Street lunch

David Cameron had lunch with Herman van Rompuy in Downing Street today to discuss the UK’s position on the EU budget. Despite the Prime Minister’s tough talking in public about his determination to veto any real-terms increases in the money available for the multi-annual budget, the Downing Street spokeswoman refused to confirm that there was in fact any mention of this threat at today’s meeting, which Nick Clegg apparently popped into briefly. She said: ‘Discussions focused on the multi-annual budget. Both the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister made clear the Government’s position that we do not support a real-terms increase in the EU budget. They reiterated that at

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Adding a bit of mongrel to Number 10

The saga of whether Lynton Crosby, the hard-charging Australian strategist who ran Boris Johnson’s successful mayoral campaigns, will join the Cameron operation continues. I understand that contrary to popular belief the obstacle to Crosby coming in is not the money. One senior source tells me that ‘If it was just about money, Andrew Feldman would be sent out to raise it’. Amongst senior figures, there’s also confidence that a compromise could be reached on both Crosby’s desire for control of polling and his desire not to lose all of his current corporate clients. But the blockage is the level of control that Crosby wants. There’s a sense among the Number

Jonathan Jones

Ed Balls tells porkies about the deficit

Ed Balls has just been given a thorough grilling by Andrew Neil on the Daily Politics — particularly on his past assertions that Labour were not running a structural deficit in the years leading up to the financial crisis. Here’s the relevant section of the interview: listen to ‘Ed Balls on the structural deficit, 25 Oct 12’ on Audioboo

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Iain Duncan Smith’s latest welfare cut kite

It is strange that the government has chosen to trail a speech by Iain Duncan Smith on an issue popular with voters on the same day as good economic news. The Work and Pensions Secretary has already reached an agreement with Chancellor George Osborne that it is possible to cut a further £10 billion from the welfare bill (when he originally said he would block those cuts), and is now starting to prepare the ground for some of those cuts to take place. He knows that while the public supports further welfare cuts, the Lib Dems will not without a credible package which ensures the rich are paying more. One

James Plunkett

When a growing economy still feels bad

David Cameron was right; the good news has kept on coming. This morning’s first estimate from the ONS puts GDP growth in the third quarter at 1.0 per cent. Cue much justified squabbling over what the ‘real’ number is. A significant portion of this growth will be a one-off, post-Jubilympics bounce-back, suggesting slower underlying growth. As Jonathan pointed out yesterday, ONS first estimates have a margin of error of 0.7 percentage points, meaning that even with these factors built in, the real figure could lie between 0.3 and 1.7 per cent. Gaps of this magnitude are no small matter. But behind these arguments about the number itself lies a different

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Economic growth faster than expected as Britain exits recession

The economy is out of recession. It grew by 1 per cent in the third quarter of this year, which is the fastest quarterly growth rate since 2007. This positive number makes it a lot easier for the coalition to claim that the economy is ‘healing’. Expect to see ministers heading to TV studios to talk about how a million more private sector jobs have been created, how there are record number of new start ups and that inflation is down. Being out of recession makes it a lot easier for the coalition to defend its economic record. Today’s number should also serve to boost consumer confidence, to provide a

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Labour prepares for the worst (good news on the economy)

Whether or not he did accidentally suggest that he knew what tomorrow’s GDP figures will be at Prime Minister’s Questions, David Cameron did have a jolly good point about the way Labour responds to good news on the economy. He told Ed Miliband: ‘It’s only a bad week if you think it’s bad that unemployment’s coming down, it’s only a bad week if you regret inflation coming down… every piece of good news sends that team into a complete decline, well, I can tell him, the good news will keep on coming.’ As Fraser blogged at the weekend, Ed Miliband’s strategy is predicated on the government continually cocking up. It’s

Jonathan Jones

Why British GDP figures are almost ALWAYS wrong.

Will it be 0.5 per cent? 0.8 per cent? 1 per cent? Whatever figure the ONS tells us GDP grew by in the third quarter of 2012, there’s one thing you can be pretty sure of: it won’t be the actual amount GDP grew by in Q3. In the past 51 years, just 12 of the ONS’s 205 first stabs at quarterly growth have survived later revisions. To be fair, the ONS recognises this, and cautiously labels tomorrow’s figure a ‘preliminary estimate’. But just how wrong is it likely to be? If tomorrow’s figure is +0.5 per cent, does that mean we can be pretty confident that growth was between,

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

PMQs sketch: Miliband gives up on Songs of Dispraise and attacks Cameron on competence

Goodness, he’s enjoying himself. Ed Miliband is brimful of confidence these days and he handles himself like a master juggler at PMQs. He flicks out deft gags and acerbic asides while keeping the central question in the air. He’s having fun. And it’s a pleasure to watch. Greatly helpful to him is the government’s pledge to deliver at least one major and one minor cock-up every week. Last Wednesday it was Cameron’s improvised announcement that energy companies must give customers the lowest tariff. Today he tried to explain this. ‘There were 400 different energy tariffs last year,’ the PM told the Commons. ‘That’s totally baffling.’ ‘The only people baffled,’ said

Hamish Macdonell

Salmond’s darkest day could be yet to come

For years Scotland has been waiting to see when his luck would run out – well, now it has. Alex Salmond: gambler, tipster, political animal and First Minister now has another moniker: author of the country’s first scomnishambles. Yesterday marked, without doubt, the First Minister’s worst day in office. First, he lost two MSPs. Left-wingers Jean Urquhart and John Finnie announced they were leaving the SNP because of the party’s conversion to Nato. That decision, taken at SNP conference last weekend, has alienated many left-wingers in the party because they see it – rightly – as part of Salmond’s attempts to take the SNP into the moderate, centre ground of Scottish politics. But

James Forsyth James Forsyth

‘Prisoners are not getting the vote’, Cameron confirms

David Cameron was in a particularly irritable mood at Prime Minister’s Questions today. But he did what he needed to do and made clear that ‘prisoners are not getting the vote under this government’. It seems there may be another Commons vote to further demonstrate the will of the House on this matter. If there is, it’ll be fascinating to see whether the Attorney General, who is far more concerned about upsetting the Strasbourg court than his Conservative colleagues, chooses to excuse himself. Ed Miliband enjoyed mocking the Prime Minister and the Chancellor in his questions; I’ve rarely seen the Labour leader more confident on his feet at PMQs. But