Uk politics

On Tuesday next week, The Spectator will hold its third annual Schools Revolution conference. On the agenda will be the striking failure of new 'free schools' to keep pace with the rising pupil demand. Michael Gove, the education secretary, will be our keynote speaker. To book tickets, click here. A couple of month's ago, Fraser warned that the recent baby boom would lead to a schools crisis, with demand for places outstripping supply. Today's new figures from the Department for Education show that the crisis has already begun. This year, there are more primary school pupils than there were 30 years ago, but 3,800 fewer primary schools.

Last Thursday Mervyn King said ‘the case for further monetary easing is growing’, and today’s surprise inflation figures give the Governor and his policymakers more leeway to introduce the next round of QE, probably as early as next month. Consumer price inflation fell to 2.8 per cent in May from 3.0 per cent in April, below analysts’ average forecast of a flat reading. It’s the weakest monthly inflation since November 2009, with the main contributors being falling food and oil prices. This is good news indeed, especially given that inflation has been – and still is – eroding savers’ earnings by about 8 per cent over five years.

The Keynes vs Hayek debate is at its sharpest on the issue of employment. Can government create jobs (as Balls says)? Or does large public sector employment simply displace economic activity that would happen elsewhere (as Osborne says)? A fascinating study has been released today by the Spatial Economics Research Centre at the LSE showing the damage done by public sector employment to the real economy. Drawing on a huge amount of local-level data over an eight-year period, it’s a serious piece of research that is worth looking into and deserves to impact our economic debate. 1. First, what is seen. In the short term, hiring someone to work for the government means another worker, who in turn spends.

‘You attack poverty by knowing what you do changes the lives of those people.’ In that phrase on this morning’s Today programme, Iain Duncan Smith summed up the difference between his approach to combating poverty and Gordon Brown’s. As Fraser has put it, Brown saw poverty as ‘a statistical game… his great spreadsheet puzzler’. The aim of the game? To reduce the number of people living in households below the ‘poverty line’ — set at 60 per cent of median income. The easiest way to achieve this is to move people from just below the line to just above it by giving them a bit of extra cash (in the form of tax credits). Brown called this ‘lifting people out of poverty’.

It all seemed innocent enough. I even found myself in the rain at Somerset House watching the river pageant (for the kids, you understand). The street party in my road meant I met neighbours I had never spoken to. And the high-kitsch of the Diamond Jubilee concert seemed to give the world a lesson in how not to take yourself too seriously. But then came Shiv Malik's scoop on the unpaid Jubilee pageant stewards shivering under the bridges with sodden food and no shelter from the elements. It is hard to imagine a more powerful image of our divided nation. Sometimes a news story emerges which has a symbolic power beyond the mere facts it reports. This is one of them.

 The expense of the Jubilee celebrations was always difficult to justify in these straitened times.

Even as the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee BBC Concert rocked on outside Buckingham Palace (amid the slightly worrying news that the Duke of Edinburgh is in hospital), some bad economic news came in — rating agency Egan-Jones has cut the UK’s credit rating to AA-minus with a negative outlook, from AA. ‘The over-riding concern is whether the country will be able to continue to cut its deficit in the face of weaker economic conditions and a possible deterioration in the country's financial sector,’ Egan-Jones said in its statement, according to Reuters. ‘Unfortunately, we expect that the UK's debt-GDP [ratio] will continue to rise and the country will remain pressed.