Strange that there’s really only one major political point arising from Gordon Brown’s interview in the Standard today. But, then again, maybe that is the point. Like the PM’s interview with the News of the World a few weeks ago, the emphasis is far more on the personal than anything else: his relationship with Sarah
Andrew Haldenby’s article in the Telegraph this morning got me thinking: when was the last time the Tories really pushed the fiscal case for public service reform; that the government can indeed deliver better services while spending less money? By my count, you’d have to go back around six months to George Osborne’s speech on
It’s just been announced which Parliamentarians will face criminal charges over their expense claims. They are: David Chaytor Jim Devine Elliot Morley Lord Hanningfield So, three Labour MPs and one Tory Lord. Expect plenty more public anger – the Legg report has no way near drawn a line under this issue.
Great article from my former boss, Andrew Haldenby of Reform, in today’s Telegraph. He makes the general case that spending less on public services needn’t mean worse public service – far from it, in fact – and is scathing about the political class’s inability to soak up this lesson. But it’s this passage which jumped
We all know that Peter Mandelson enjoys the limelight, but this – from Kevin Maguire’s column in the New Statesman – is taking things to a whole new level: “Set your videos for Mandy: the Movie. I hear that the resurrected Prince of Darkness is to star in a fly-on-the-wall documentary. Eager to share his
The Legg report is about 240 pages, if you can manage it. But the message you can take from it is short enough: there’s going to be plenty more public anger with our political class. Guido’s post here should tell you why. But, suffice to say, there are MPs paying back up to £42,458. There
Consider the expenses wound well-and-truly reopened – not that it ever really closed in the first place. Sir Thomas Legg’s report into the matter will today identify around 350 MPs who have to return a total of about £1 million in dubious claims. What’s more, in his introduction to the document, Legg is set to
So the former roadblock is now a born-again reformer – and, like most born-again types, he wants everyone to know about it. Writing in today’s Guardian, Gordon Brown sells his proposal for a referendum on the alternative vote system as “a rallying call for a new progressive politics.” And, from there, he gallops through written
If you’re worried about the national debt burden, then what follows is one of the scariest graphs from the IFS’s Green Budget. It extrapolates from the government’s current plans and assumptions to work out when debt may get below 40 percent of GDP again. The answer, as you can see, is sometime in the early
A noteworthy observation from the IFS’s Rowena Crawford, here at the Green Budget launch: “We’ve never had three consecutive years of public service spending cuts, let alone the five years we’ve got forecast ahead.” She also pointed out that, if Labour extended its pledges to ringfence certain areas of spending until 2015, the cuts for
It’s back to the British Museum for public finances anoraks. After George Osborne’s speech here yesterday, the IFS are this morning presenting their Green Budget (that’s green in colour, rather than green in outlook). It’s the mid-session coffee break, so I thought I’d fill CoffeeHousers in on what’s been said so far. The bottom line
Front page of the Independent: “Vote of no confidence in Tory economic policies”. As headlines go, it’s one of the worst the Tories have had for a while – even if, as Anthony Wells and Mike Smithson point out, it’s kinda misleading. Truth is, the Indy’s ComRes poll finds that 82 percent of people want
The growth of the public sector isn’t exactly new news, but the figures attached to it are always pretty eyecatching. These courtesy of Allister Heath in City AM: “MORE evidence of a growing public-private divide: 57 per cent of extra UK jobs created during 1997-2007 were either officially on the government’s payrolls or ‘para-state’, technically
So, is David Cameron’s shift in emphasis on spending cuts a u-turn, a clarification, or something else? Well, when it comes to existing Tory policy, it doesn’t actually change much. We were always rather taking it on trust that Cameron & Co. would cut spending by much more than Labour this year. The cuts they’ve
How things change. A few months ago, Alistair Darling would only go so far as to not rule out a public sector pay freeze. By the time of the Pre-Budget Report, that became a 1 percent cap on pay rises. And now, in an interview with the Sunday Times, he’s talking explicitly about public sector
It’s only a small thing, but does anyone else find this detail from today’s Times interview with Alastair Campbell a little, erm, peculiar: “On the [Campbell] fridge is a Christmas card from David Miliband, a clipped photo of George Osborne in the Bullingdon Club shooting pheasant, a GCSE revision schedule. It is the type of
Ok, ok – so PMQs may be of more interest inside Westminster than out. But, love it or loathe it, it’s still one of those things which affects the mood music of politics and how it is reported. Far better for a party leader to do it well, than to be bludgeoned by his opponent
As Ben Brogan outlined in his Telegraph column last November, there are plenty of Tories placing a good deal of emphasis on the London Olympics. By the time it comes around, they may well have spent two years cutting spending, raising taxes, and generally struggling against the fiscal problems that Brown has hardwired into our
We’ve been rather starved of opinion polls over the past week, which is probably no bad thing. But this PoliticsHome poll on the economy has come along to give us at least something to mull over. And its findings aren’t good news for Labour. First, only thirty-four percent of repondents think that the economy has
In his Telegraph column today, Ben Brogan asks one of the most important political questions of all: do the Tories have a plan for dealing with the mess they face in government? They talk tough on debt and spending, for sure, but the details are still kinda lacking. Is there anything behind the rhetoric? And,
