Labour party

I suspect that when we look back at this year, we might conclude that today’s PMQs was a turning point. David Cameron has had a poor January but today he was back on form, winning – as Lloyd Evans says – PMQs for the first time this year. Perhaps more significantly, there was real noise from the Tory backbenches, which have been noticeably quiet in recent weeks. It was as if the party was pulling back together after a relatively trying period. It was also significant that Cameron stayed on the offensive throughout; he didn’t get drawn into conducting the debate on Labour’s terms despite Brown’s best efforts. Gone was

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 “unprotected”  departments could start pushing 24 percent. That would be around 23 percent if current Tory plans are extended over the same time period. UPDATE: Here’s the graph which relates to the “five year” observation above, from page 195 of the Green Budget.

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 came more or less immediately, with the IFS director Robert Chote’s introduction. His point was that the next government will have to introduce “more ambitious” fiscal tigthening, going forward to 2015, than that set out in Darling’s PBR. But he added that there shouldn’t really be more spending cuts and tax rises this year. The

Gordon Brown’s proposal to bring in a referendum on electoral reform has a beautiful symmetry with Tony Blair’s pledge to do exactly the same thing in the 1997 manifesto. That pledge never came to pass, once Mr Blair discovered the usefulness of a majority of 178, compared to dealing with the Lib Dems all the time as coalition partners. And Mr Brown’s conversion to electoral reform has the mirror-image motivation: making the system kinder to losing parties has a certain attraction, if you are heading into opposition. Debates about electoral reform are rather strange. A very small number of very passionate people can talk for hours about the minutiae of

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 “Mr Cameron to be clearer about what he would do on the economy”.  And 24 percent think the Tories would have ended the recession sooner, against 69 percent who don’t.  They’re hardly positive findings for CCHQ, but, by themselves, they don’t quite add up that that two-line scarehead. The main concern for CCHQ is how

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 private but dependent on government funding. And that was before the private sector jobs bloodbath since 2008. Manchester University’s Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change calculates that of the 2.24m net new jobs created in 1997-2007, 1.27m were state or para-state (the latter includes the likes of rubbish collecting, government funded private nursery education and

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 announced so far aren’t really that much deeper – and most folk in Tory circles were waiting for George Osborne’s potential Emergency Budget to see whether that would change.  So, when Cameron says that his party wouldn’t introduce “swingeing cuts” this year, the position is still remarkably similar: we still need more details to judge

Smarting from the savaging he received in Mo, Peter Mandelson characterised David Cameron’s “no swingeing cuts” comment as a u-turn, and compared Cameron and Osborne to Laurel and Hardy. This is a bit rich considering the government’s obvious confusion over the timing and extent of cuts, and that the immortal line “That’s another fine mess you’ve gotten us into” should be the Tories’ campaign slogan. Cameron’s comments are a clarification, not a u-turn. As Jim Pickard notes, Tory policy has to respond to last week’s withered growth figures. Whilst still recognising that cuts have to be made now to avert a fiscal crisis, a distinction that the government fails to