Uk politics

As the speaker for yesterday's Davos British business leaders’ lunch, Boris Johnson had the audience in his hand in his usual colourful way. I grabbed his very new Chief Economic Adviser, Dr Gerard Lyons, former Chief Economist at Standard Chartered, on the way out. How did he think we are doing economically? He told me the last big economic gathering was the IMF last October in Tokyo.  There, he said, the mood about the global economy was pessimistic, but now, three months later, the mood had improved, if only slightly.  There was more confidence about China and the US but still a lot of caution about Europe.

‘Cameron’s speech on Europe is badly timed; we must stop this endless European bickering when facing such huge worldwide political challenges’.  That’s the view of Neil Selby, the London-based Director of Executive Education for the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business but who at the moment is, like me, here in Davos. ‘Let’s think instead of the links we can make with East Asia’, he tells me. It’s very disconcerting: while in Britain most columnists and commentators seem to be congratulating Cameron on his big Europe speech, here at Davos there’s no enthusiasm. Most of the people around me think the emphasis was all wrong. At a lunch on East vs.

The GDP figures for the final quarter of 2013 are out tomorrow morning, and with them will come the usual round of commentary from government and opposition. They're not expected to be good: Citi predicts that the ONS's first estimate will show a contraction of 0.1 per cent in Q4. So perhaps that's why Nick Clegg decided to get in early and taken a shot at his own government's economic policy this evening. Speaking to Paul Waugh and Sam Macrory in the House magazine, the Deputy Prime Minister had the following to say: 'If I'm going to be self-critical, there was this reduction in capital spending when we came into the Coalition government.

And then David Cameron has to go and spoil it all by telling porkies about what his government is doing to our national debt. The party election broadcast the Conservatives have just released is so astonishingly dishonest that it really would have disgraced Gordon Brown. In it, the Prime Minister tells an outright – how to put it? – untruth. He says:- “So though this government has had to make some difficult decisions, we are making progress. We’re paying down Britain’s debts.” listen to ‘David Cameron: "We're paying down Britain's debts" 23 Jan 13’ on Audioboo David Cameron’s policy is to increase Britain’s debt by 60 per cent, more than any European country. To increase it more over five years than Labour did over 13 years.