Uk politics

Has anyone seen George Osborne’s £3 billion? The Chancellor seems to have lost it. His government had expected to net £2.5 billion more than it spent last month, as July is normally a good month for tax receipts. Instead the figure has come in at a £600 million deficit. This is a major shock to the City, and analysts are spending today reworking their forecasts. Sure, we know the economy has flatlined. But we didn’t know that the impact on the tax haul would be so bad. As you’d expect, Labour has gone on the attack. But the Ed Balls line (being voiced by Rachel Reeves today) sounds less convincing than ever. They say that Osborne is cutting too far, too fast, and that he should more slowly and, ergo, borrow more.

Too many taxes are buried in prices. From Value Added Tax to the cost of extravagant subsidies for renewable energy, all people see is the shop charging them a higher price. That is convenient for politicians trying to hike our taxes, but it distorts democratic decisions over the level of taxes and spending, and which taxes to increase and decrease. That is why we have seen steady increases in Employers’ National Insurance. It is why climate regulations are structured so a huge part of the cost is buried in the electricity market. And it is telling that the taxes people resent most are the lump sums they have to write a cheque for each year.

Danny Boyle had us all fooled. There we were, thinking the dancing nurses and luminous NHS logo in his opening ceremony for the Olympic Games were part of a piece of 'Marxist propaganda', when actually he was sneakily paving the way for what Labour this morning derided as the 'rampant commercialisation' of the health service. Yes: it turns out that the Olympic opening ceremony was just one big fat right wing advertising ploy to entice the world to buy into Brand NHS. Whoops. The government is opening an agency called Healthcare UK, which is designed to set up contacts between world-respected NHS operations and private clients overseas.

Your local council owns prime real estate and could sell it to build new social houses. Housing Minister Grant Shapps says the appeal of this idea promoted by Policy Exchange is 'obvious'. With a potential pot of £5.5bn to build up to 170,000 affordable homes, what’s not to like? Plenty, apparently: Labour MP Karen Buck warned of a risk to communities, and the importance of mixing groups within our population. Lord Prescott called the idea ‘gerrymandering'. The empty slogans come from both sides. When someone says ‘nobody has a right to live in’ Chelsea they ought to remember that some people do have a right to live there, and that they pay for that right.

Has nanny finally blown it?  That was what we sought to find out.  After having the state tell us what to eat and drink, how to exercise, and even how to cook turkey, anecdotal evidence suggests people are growing tired of it all and would like nanny to stop being so bossy.  A small group of self-styled 'experts' who think they know better than we do how to live our lives seems to have persuaded government to bully us into compliance. In 1998 the Adam Smith Institute surveyed, with a polling organisation, the attitudes of the younger generation.  We found then that they didn't expect government to gain them a job, they scored politicians and civil servants low in the admiration stakes, and nearly half (48 per cent) wanted to run their own business.

Here's a policy that looks like it could be a vote winner while helping to solve Britain's housing crisis: selling off expensive council homes. Think tank Policy Exchange has published a paper this morning proposing that local authorities be allowed to sell luxurious properties in their boroughs as they become vacant in order to raise money for new, cheaper social properties. The report's author, Alex Morton, believes this could lead to 28,500 expensive properties being sold off each year, raising £5.5 billion for new housing construction. The idea is also, unsurprisingly, quite a popular one with voters.