George osborne

George Osborne will make a brief statement to the house this afternoon, responding to the Office for Budget Responsibility’s revised growth forecasts. Reuters reports: ‘As expected, the Office for Budget Responsibility raised its 2010 growth forecast to 1.8 percent from its 1.2 percent June forecast to factor in a surprisingly strong performance in the middle of the year.’ The upgrade fuels Osborne’s positive narrative: the coalition pulled Britain from the abyss and international confidence in Britain's economy is growing. These forecasts vindicate the government’s ‘cut with care’ strategy. Concrete savings are now being made and they enable the Chancellor to announce that public sector net borrowing will fall.

In all likelihood, George Osborne will rise this afternoon to groans if not jeers. Britain looks set to lend Ireland £7bn as part of multilateral and bilateral bailouts. Many, particularly the Eurosceptic right, question our involvement, given our straitened financial circumstances and the apparent fact that Britain is sustaining the eurozone’s monetary and debt union, and will have to borrow to do so.     George Osborne has been adamant throughout: Ireland is too important to Britain’s recovery to risk collapse – British and Irish banks are closely linked, debts and borrowing are often co-dependent, trade is very profitable. That the bailout should strengthen the euro is a natural consequence of Ireland being a member of the euro.

Over at the FT's Westminster blog, Alex Barker asks why it is that David Cameron's expensive personal pledge on pensioner benefits has survived the spending review while Nick Clegg's personal pledge to scrap tuition fees, which would have cost roughly the same amount, has been spectacularly ditched. As Alex argues, one reason is that Clegg himself was not particularly attached to his pledge on fees. Indeed, he had tried to change the policy several times in opposition. The other is that George Osborne, who is the Tories' chief election strategist as well as the Chancellor, is determined to protect the Cameron brand.

Labour’s spin is less dexterous now that Alistair Campbell and Peter Mandelson have passed into night; but it can still artfully disguise politics as principle. Douglas Alexander is at in the Guardian, fanning the dull embers of George Osborne and IDS’ summer spat. He renews the offer of cross-party dialogue that he made on Andrew Marr last Sunday, before retreating, saying: ‘But beneath the talk of "we're all in this together" (a phrase specifically recommended for repeated use by Republican pollster Frank Luntz), what the chancellor announced on welfare was largely a laundry list of cuts that penalise the vulnerable and the working poor.

In The Guardian today, David Laws argues for increasing funding for the pupil premium to £5 billion in the next parliament. But, revealingly, rather than talking about achieving this through the Liberal Democrat manifesto, Laws want to secure the increase this side of the next election and so writes about how it relies on persuading George Osborne of the premiums’ worth. Laws appears to be putting down a marker that increased funding for the premium needs to be part of Osborne’s pre-election spending review which should be in autumn 2014. If everything goes according to the coalition’s economic plan, the coalition will be able to announce plans to cut taxes and increase spending in the months before the next election.

May 2015 is an age away in political terms. But the question of what happens to the coalition after the next election is too politically interesting to be able to resist speculating on; even if this speculation is almost certainly going to be overtaken by events. Over at ConservativeHome, Paul Goodman asks if Cameron and Osborne share Francis Maude’s view that the coalition should continue after the next election even if the Tories win an outright majority. My impression is that they do. If the Tories won a majority of between 10 and 30, I’d be surprised if Cameron didn’t try and keep the coalition going. There are four main reasons why I think the Tory leadership would want to keep the Liberal Democrats in the government in these circumstances.

There are several interesting columns on George Osborne in the papers today. In The Times, Tony Blair’s former speechwriter Phil Collins warns Labour to stop underestimating the Chancellor, who is defining the political battle on his terms at the moment. Peter Oborne, by contrast, is highly critical of Osborne in his Telegraph column, warning that Osborne’s partisan presentation of the cuts risks undermining support for the whole project. For once, I find myself disagreeing with Peter. I think Osborne is doing some of the political heavy-lifting that Cameron could not do without undermining his standing as a national leader; Osborne’s praise for the 2004 Republican campaign is instructive in trying to understand what is going on here.