George osborne

Nick Clegg’s interview in The Times today presages a major Lib Dem effort to try and promote policies to reduce youth unemployment. With figures out on Wednesday expected to show youth unemployment going over a million, the Lib Dem leader is keen to show that the government is acting. But as The Times reports, the quad—Cameron, Osborne, Clegg and Alexander—are divided on what to do about the matter. The Tories are keen to do Beecroft for young people, removing some of the employment protections that make firms so reluctant to hire new staff. But given how the Lib Dems have set themselves so firmly against the Beecroft review and its principal idea of replacing unfair dismissal with severance pay based on length of service, they won’t accept this.

The Bond Bubble is growing even larger over Britain, pushing 10-year yields down to 2.1 per cent. The FT splashes on it this morning, and uses the “safe haven” line, which is also being advocated by the Conservatives. Understandably. If I were George Osborne, I’d spin this as a standing ovation from the markets for my deficit reduction plan. In fact, it’s just a grim reflection of the fact that Britain’s low-growth, high-debt economy is less unattractive than Italy’s. But it does have another side effect, that people won’t quite admit to. Osborne’s cost of borrowing is going down (partly due to expectations of more QE) and since the Budget, ten-year yields are off about 130bp.

George Osborne’s attack on the European Commission and his fellow finance ministers, for wasting time talking about a financial transactions tax when it is not going to happen, is quite a significant moment. It marks an attempt by Britain to knock this idea, which would hit this country far harder than anywhere else in Europe, off the agenda.   The Treasury, the Foreign Office and Number 10 have become increasingly exasperated about how this issue keeps coming up again and again. This feeling has been intensified by the fact that this issue is being discussed even as the crisis in the Eurozone is worsening by the hour.

This week's issue of The Spectator hits the newsstands today. Here, for CoffeeHousers, is James Forsyth's Politics column from it: Last week’s rebellion by David Cameron’s backbenchers in support of an EU referendum ended eight years of peace in the Tory party on the European question. Now, the offer by the Greek Prime Minister of a referendum on the bailout package — designed to appease nervous Greek Socialist party backbenchers — means that the uncertainty surrounding the eurozone will drag on into the New Year. George Osborne regards the confusion surrounding the future of the single currency as the single biggest obstacle to a British economic recovery.

The growth number for the third quarter of this year is out, and it's a little bit better than expected: 0.5 per cent. Many economists were saying that we'd have to hit around 0.4 per cent to recoup the growth lost to the Royal Wedding and Japanese Tsunami in Q2, so we've managed that. But, that aside, this is not the time for party poppers and champagne corks. It may not be Econopocalypse, but it's not Mega Growth either. We are still living in a bleak, borderline stagflationary environment. Besides, I still reckon that we oughtn't get especially worked up about these quarterly figures anyway. For starters, the obsession over micro-percentage points can obscure the fact that many parts of the country are already in effective recession — and have been for decades.

The games have started a day early, folks. The latest quarterly growth figures are set to be released tomorrow morning, but already Ed Balls is waxing insistent about what they have to be: "Simply to stay on track for the Office for Budget Responsibility’s most recent forecast, already downgraded three times, we will need to see growth in the third quarter of 1.3 per cent. And to reach the OECD’s latest and more pessimistic forecast, we will need to see a figure next week of 0.9 per cent." To be fair — and this is not something you'll read often on Coffee House — the Shadow Chancellor has a point, although he's not making it explicitly. When he says that growth needs to hit 1.

It has been a fraught and ill-tempered week in Westminster. And — whether it is the rumour that Tory backbencher Andrea Leadsom told George Osborne to "f**k off", or David Cameron's dismissal of Ed Miliband as a "complete mug" — most of it has had Europe at its root.  So it is, too, with the latest news of government strife. Iain Duncan Smith, it's reported, had a ferocious row with the Tory chief whip, Patrick McLoughlin, over the EU referendum . Apparently, he warned that, “If you ever put me in this position again, that’s it”. As it happens, there is more on IDS's disgruntlement in Charles Moore's column for the latest Spectator, out today.

David Cameron came out swinging today at PMQs. Knowing that Ed Miliband would try and exploit the Tory rebellion over Europe on Monday night, Cameron went for the Labour leader. He called him a "complete mug" and mocked him as being detached from reality. At the end of the exchange, Osborne gripped Cameron's shoulder in congratulation – a sign that the pair knew that they needed a strong performance today to calm their backbenches. The other notable aspect of PMQs was its emphasis on the new political battleground: women. The Labour MP Gloria Del Piero asked the PM why the government was more unpopular with women than men, which gave Cameron a chance to rattle off the government's female-friendly initiatives.

We thought CoffeeHousers might appreciate an advanced viewing of James' political column from tomorrow's issue of The Spectator, so here it is: In the hours after the coalition was formed last May, a minister and a group of Tory MPs sat around a table in a parliamentary cafeteria discussing what it all meant. One new MP said to the minister that it was a pity that, in the course of the talks, the Tories had agreed to ‘park Europe for the next five years’. The minister, high on the Panglossian spirit of the early days of the coalition, reassured her that this was for the best. The party could devote its full attention to Europe when the economic situation was less pressing.

For all the attention that is being focused in Westminster on the publication of the Cabinet Secretary’s report into the links between Adam Werritty and Liam Fox tomorrow, the real story is the countdown to Cannes. It is now three weeks since George Osborne declared that the eurozone countries had three weeks to save the Euro. So far, they haven’t done anywhere near enough. There’s also little sign that this weekend’s summit will see them make much progress. The Germans are already busy playing down expectations. From a British perspective, the intriguing question is: what does the coalition do if the eurozone continues to show no sign of getting its act together?

Labour may have a narrow leads in the polls, but they continue to lag behind the Tories on the public's number one issue: the economy. Today's ComRes poll finds that just 18 per cent trust Eds Miliband and Balls "to make the right decisions about the economy", compared to 30 per cent for Cameron and Osborne. Worse, the two Eds don't even have the confidence of the majority of Labour voters: only 48 per cent trust them on the economy. YouGov also find Labour behind when it comes to the economy. 30 per cent think the Conservatives would handle it best, while just 26 per cent think Labour would. And that's despite the fact that 58 per cent of the public think the Coalition is managing the economy badly.