Labour party

The conventional wisdom in Westminster is that the election will be on May 6th. But a few shadow Cabinet members have told me that they think Brown will actually go in March, an idea that they have been pushing for a while. Their argument is that this quarter’s GDP figures will be quite good, boosted by the Christmas rush, and Brown would want to go to the country before, another more disappointing set of numbers came out. Second, Brown will want to avoid people seeing the effects of the new tax arranegements which will come into force in April. Finally, if the election was on May 6th, the first week of the campaign would be lost to the school holidays.

The potentially huge exposure of UK banks in Dubai, depreciating some UK bank share prices again this morning, is a reminder of just how much UK bank lending grew in recent years. The above chart shows the growth in external claims of the UK owned banks around the world over the past decade. The sums lent almost quadrupled to nearly $4 trillion in 8 years.  Anyone interested in discovering which bubbles the UK banks (and now taxpayers) have funded can find the data on the Bank of England website - $1.2 trillion in the United States, $125 billion in Spain, $183 billion in Ireland, $50 billion to the UAE/Dubai. Bank profits soared, and the “New North Sea Oil” of booming bonus pools was taxed to fund ever growing government spending.

Yep, it's that time of the year again: the run-up to the Pre-Budget Report, when we hear tales of splits between Number 10 and the Treasury on how they should approach the fiscal mess we're in.  According to today's Sunday Telegraph, and going off rumblings on Whitehall, Darling is pushing for a more expansive package of cuts.  Whereas Brown – and Ed Balls, natch – would prefer to emphasise all that investment, investment, investment. In which case, I was tempted to just copy-and-paste a post I wrote last year, on a similar subject, and at almost exactly the same time in the political cycle.  Its point was that stories about tension between Brown and Darling could work to undermine Labour's overall economic message.  As it happens, that's still the case.

The greatest challenge facing a new government may be that Britain’s national security institutions are not fit for purpose. They were built for a different era and focused on a set of now obselete threats. Notwithstanding a few exceptions, like the Cuban Missile Crisis, the threats during the Cold War were slow-moving and predictable. Even in the immediate Cold War period, threats were nasty, but rarely novel.   Now, however, Britain faces all manner of fast-moving, asymmetric threats. Terrorists and insurgents can get inside our decision-making loop. In Helmand, the Taliban stage attacks around their media strategy, not the other way around as we do it. Countries like Russia and China can bring a range of assets to bear, many of which are not even governmental.

There are plenty of noteworthy snippets in Mehdi Hasan and James Macintyre's interview with Alan Johnson today, but it's this passage which jumped out at me: "Johnson even chooses to defend the Tories on immigration, saying they represent a 'mainstream, centre-right' party engaging in a 'decent, centre-ground debate on immigration'. This, despite the Tories having stuck to the 2005 pledge, under Michael Howard, for an immigration 'cap', which - along with campaign posters asking 'Are you thinking what we're thinking?' - led to accusations of 'dog-whistle' politics." It's a truism that in order to have a sensible debate, you've got to be willing to actually have a debate – so it's encouraging that Johnson is taking this more conciliatory approach to the question of immigration.