Treasury

Yes, I know, cause and correlation aren’t the same thing – but Mike Smithson’s latest graph over at Political Betting is still incredibly striking.  It shows that the Tories’ strongest poll position over the last few years coincided with a high in the petrol price.  It also shows that the smallest gap between Labour and the Tories coincided with when petrol prices were at their lowest.  Which all makes today’s Telegraph story about petrol potentially hitting a new high of 120p a litre, as the election approaches, very resonant indeed. The problem for the government is twofold.  First, rising petrol prices are something which millions of people will understand and

So now we know.  Gordon Brown has just announced that the Budget will be on 24 March – which strongly implies an election date of 6 May.  Brown could dissolve Parliament on 6 April, the manifestos would be published on 12 April, and then we’d be into the campaign proper.  Which means even more speeches, polls and dread speculation than we’re getting now. As for the Budget’s general flavour, we’ll probably get an idea of that today, too.  Brown’s currently giving a speech in which he’s brushing over recent tremors in the markets, to say that we are “weathering the storm; now is no time to turn back”.  Which comes

Has another dividing line faded into the sand?  It sure looks like it, going off this Times report on how both Labour and the Tories are considering hiking VAT to 20 percent.  If you recall, it was thought that Brown blocked Alistair Darling’s plan to introduce the rise in last year’s Pre-Budget Report – and all so he could attack the Tories over reports that they would do similar.  The PM will find it a lot harder to stage that attack after this morning. A few weeks ago, the rumour was that Labour would make keeping VAT at 17.5 percent a “main election pledge”.  Whether that pledge now appears, or

Well, well, well – Darling’s Times interview, which James reported earlier, sure is a significant moment, and one which more than deserves a place on the spending cut timeline which I put together last week.  In fact, let’s see what it would look like alongside a few of the most recent entries: 9 December 2009: Pre-Budget Report 2009 forecasts Public Sector Net Borrowing of £176 billion, and Public Sector Net Debt of £986 billion, in 2010-11. 10 December 2009: Alistair Darling puts in a bizarre performance on the Today programme, claiming that the PBR implies that departmental budgets would remain “pretty much flat.” 10 December 2009: The IFS works out

It has started. The Labour attack unit is out today talking about a “Tory VAT rise” – as per Paddy Hennessy’s scoop. Osborne stated his (to me, relatively paltry) position on the deficit: that he’d reduce it faster than Labour but can’t say how much. The Labour attack unit keeps partying like its 1999 with the “Tory cuts” line, now augmented with a “Tory tax rise.” Here are the words which the attack unit has crafted for Stephen Timms, chief secretary to the Treasury: “George Osborne refuses to say what services he would cut or what taxes he would increase in order to cut the deficit ‘further and faster’ than

How can you tell if you’re being lied to on budget day? Normally its easy: Gordon Brown’s lips move. But, today, there’s a handy guide. You can compare Darling’s fiction with the independent average calculated by HM Treasury. I have pulled out the relevant tables:

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