George osborne

Remember those Lib Dem calls for a mansion tax at the weekend? I said at the time that, ‘the Lib Dems appear to be drawing more attention to which of their own policies they are fighting for within government, whether those policies make it to the statute books or not.’ Well, now they're at it again. Nick Clegg is giving a speech this morning in which he'll urge George Osborne to go ‘further and faster’ in raising the income tax threshold to £10,000 a year. It was the stand-out policy of the Lib Dem manifesto, so it's hardly controversial that Clegg should want to see it enacted ASAP. But it's still striking that he's making this appeal in public. A year ago, he'd have emphasised what the coalition was already doing to raise the threshhold.

The political implications of today’s growth numbers are complex. On one level, a contraction in the economy should provide Miliband and Balls with an opportunity to make their economic case against the government. Indeed, Balls is already out with a statement calling the GDP figures a ‘damning indictment of David Cameron and George Osborne’s failed economic plan’. I suspect that Miliband is also looking forward to PMQs rather more than normal.   But on the other hand, as long as Cameron and Osborne enjoy a big lead on the economy — 18 points in the last ICM survey — bad economic news will reinforce voters’ tendency to stick close to nurse for fear of something worse.

Britain's national debt rose to over £1 trillion last month, and will never return below this threshold. George Osborne is increasing net debt by 61.5 per cent in real terms over this parliament, more than the 59.9 per cent which Labour proposed when it fought the last election. Here's how the OBR's current projections for debt contrast with what Darling proposed in his last Budget: At the time, Osborne said Labour's debt plan was reckless and unsustainable. I think he owes Alistair Darling a generous apology. Then, Darling said he'd halve the deficit over four years. Too slow, said Osborne. Now, he's taking five years to do it – as the below graph shows: Osborne has kept to his spending plans, which cut departmental totals by 2.

Ever since Ed Miliband’s ‘predatory capitalism’ speech at the Labour Party conference, the future of capitalism has been a subject that has much occupied our MPs. Clegg made his speech on Monday, and Cameron delivered his yesterday. I have had plenty to say about the coalition government’s inadequate economic policy, and its inability to stoke growth. But Cameron’s speech was impressive, and it’s worth going into in some detail. I look at it in my Telegraph column today. Much rot is spoken about capitalism. It is not an ideology, there is no rule book you can tweak: it is simply the name given to the system where people trade with each other the world over.

It's far from the first poll on Scottish independence in recent years, or even in recent days, but YouGov's effort for Channel4 this evening contains some noteworthy findings nonetheless. What is does is replicate the conditions that — for the reasons that Peter Kellner explains in a very useful blog post here — Alex Salmond would like in 2014. Which means two questions, one after the other. First, status quo or ‘devo-max’? Second, status quo or full independence? And the results? By YouGov's count, 58 per cent of people are in favour of ‘devo-max’ for the first question, with 42 per cent against. And, for the second question, 39 per cent back full independence, with 61 per cent against.

Even as Ed Balls embraces the need for austerity today, he takes a very different position to the coalition on why it’s necessary. The government has always blamed the need for cuts on the ‘awful economic inheritance’ bequeathed it by Labour. Balls, on the other hand, puts the blame squarely at George Osborne’s door. In his Fabian Society speech, he said: ‘George Osborne’s economic mistakes mean more difficult decisions on tax, spending and pay.’ His argument is that, by cutting ‘too far and too fast’, the coalition has caused the economy to stagnate and thereby created the need for more austerity. Labour has, of course, long been trying to shift the blame for the cuts away from themselves and onto the coalition.

Edinburgh It became clear last night why George Osborne was put in charge of the Coalition Government’s fightback against Alex Salmond and separatism: he is the only one who has the ability to really score points off the Nats. The Chancellor’s intervention on currency and bank notes – suggesting that an independent Scotland might not be able to keep the pound and that, if it did, it might be banned from producing Scottish bank notes – hit the SNP hard. Osborne’s remarks shook one of those comfortable certainties which the SNP has been peddling for so long – that Scotland would simply keep sterling after independence and everything would progress as normal.

There’s much chatter in Westminster today about the fact that George Osborne is chairing the Cabinet committee on Scotland. Osborne is, of course, the Conservatives’ chief electoral strategist as well as the Chancellor of Exchequer. This has led to some suggestions that he wouldn’t be too upset by a referendum defeat that would make it an awful lot easier for the Tories to win a majority at Westminster. This is unfair: Osborne is a Unionist. What those around Osborne have long been interested in is the option that the coalition seems to be ruling out: fiscal autonomy. The circle around Osborne have long believed that it is only when Scottish politics is about how to raise money as well as how to spend it that the Tories will revive north of the border.

The politics of the ‘undeserving rich’ is again dominating the news this morning. David Cameron tells the Sunday Telegraph that ‘The market for top people isn’t working, it needs to be sorted out’. While the Mail on Sunday reports that George Osborne is planning to create a new criminal offence of ‘criminal negligence’ that could be used against those bankers who endanger the financial system. Perhaps the most significant aspect of Cameron’s Sunday Telegraph interview, though, is his attempt to redefine ‘fairness’. Cameron has tried to do this before, arguing that it isn’t just about redistribution but about people getting out what they put in.

Whenever politicians talk about social care, they tend to promise ‘cross-party talks’. It's their little euphemism for ‘we don't want to commit to a policy by ourselves.’ Don't get them wrong, it's not that they don't have ideas for fixing a system that is straining under the weight of an ageing population; the Dilnot report, released earlier this year, gave them plenty of recommendations to work with. It's just that they don't want to be the ones to implement the tax hikes or spending cuts that will be necessary to fund it. If they can talk it through with the other parties — the thinking goes — then this crucial policy area can be detoxified, the blame spread more or less evenly.

Well, folks, the 2012 model of Ed Miliband looks and sounds rather like the unfancied 2011 model. Just compare the New Year message that he released today with the one that he issued a year ago; the similarities are plenty. His main argument this year is that the Tories are the party of gloom — resigned to years of stagnancy, unemployment, pestilence, etc — whereas Labour are the party of a bright new future, there to show that ‘optimism can defeat despair’. Or, as he put it at the end of last year, ‘Even in these tough times, we must keep the flame of optimism burning.’ There are some differences, though. Compared with last year, Miliband talks much less about the coalition going ‘too far, too fast’ with deficit reduction.