Uk politics

Friday

James Forsyth

George Osborne is making the going

From our UK edition

There are several interesting columns on George Osborne in the papers today. In The Times, Tony Blair’s former speechwriter Phil Collins warns Labour to stop underestimating the Chancellor, who is defining the political battle on his terms at the moment. Peter Oborne, by contrast, is highly critical of Osborne in his Telegraph column, warning that Osborne’s partisan presentation of the cuts risks undermining support for the whole project. For once, I find myself disagreeing with Peter. I think Osborne is doing some of the political heavy-lifting that Cameron could not do without undermining his standing as a national leader; Osborne’s praise for the 2004 Republican campaign is instructive in trying to understand what is going on here.

Peter Hoskin

Labour’s Kill Clegg strategy

From our UK edition

One question swirling through the sea of British politics is this: how will Ed Miliband act towards the Lib Dems? The Labour leader certainly didn't flinch from attacking the yellow brigade during the leadership contest, at one point calling them a "disgrace to the traditions of liberalism." But surely he'll have to soften that rhetoric in case the next election delivers another bout of frenzied coalition negotiations. Which is why Andy Burnham's article in the Guardian today is worth noting down. In making his point – that the Lib Dems haven't won the pupil premium they sought – he does all he can to force a wedge between Nick Clegg and his party. It's "Clegg's failure". It's "Clegg's ideological journey". It's a "problem for Clegg," and so on.

David Blackburn

Labour loses the last semblance of its economic credibility

From our UK edition

A quiet but important change to Britain’s political landscape took place in Brussels on Wednesday. The European Parliament passed a motion to increase the EU Budget by 5.9 percent, dashing, for the moment, government hopes that the EU might share in its citizens’ austerity. Labour’s MEPs were central to the motion’s success – 10 (one of whom glories in the name Michael Cashman) out of 13 voted against the Conservative-backed amendment to freeze the EU Budget.      As Alan Johnson took his feet and, like a gamey slim-line Falstaff, began to condemn public sector cuts, Labour MEPs saddled the over-stretched taxpayer with £900m in extra contributions – more than the odd nurse could have been saved with that tidy little sum.

Peter Hoskin

Clegg hits back at the IFS

From our UK edition

It's fast becoming a tradition: when the IFS calls the government's work "regressive," send for Nick Clegg to take the think tank on. He wrote an article for the FT debunking their analysis back in August. And, today, he does the same via an interview in the Guardian. It's pretty forceful stuff from the Deputy PM, as this quote testifies: "I think you have to call a spade a spade. We just fundamentally disagree with the IFS. It goes back to a culture of how you measure fairness that took root under Gordon Brown's time, where fairness was seen through one prism and one prism only which was the tax and benefits system. It is a complete nonsense to apply that measure, which is a slightly desiccated Treasury measure.

Thursday

Sam Bowman

International aid should be abolished

From our UK edition

The Comprehensive Spending Review was a step in the right direction, but I agree with Philip Booth and others when they say that there should be far more cuts down the line. But the biggest mistake was the announcement that the Department for International Development’s (DfID) budget will be increased by 37 percent by 2015. It undermines the narrative that the country will be suffering the cuts together and shows a tone-deafness in cutting spending at home while increasing it abroad. But worse, it exacerbates the problem that development aid does an immense amount of harm to the developing world, and this spending increase will only make things worse.

Peter Hoskin

IFS: The Spending Review was regressive – sorta

From our UK edition

The second half of the IFS briefing was all about the distributional effect of the Spending Review. And you know what that means: decile charts – and lots and lots of them. As it happens, there were some areas of agreement between the IFS and the Treasury figures. Both, for instance, say that the welfare measures set out in yesterday's Spending Review will affect the least well-off the most. But there was one main area of disagreement. The Treasury says that its combined tax and welfare measures up to 2012-13 will be broadly progressive. The IFS says that they will be regressive. This is exactly the same issue that cropped up in August, when the IFS was commissioned to write a report by the End Child Poverty Campaign.

David Blackburn

Nick Robinson earns his spurs

From our UK edition

Nick Robinson has won blogger of the year at Editorial Intelligence's Comment Awards. However, he deserves an award for this bit of heroism on College Green. Hat-tip: Will Heaven. UPDATE: Robinson has taken the time to pen an explanation for his sign rage, good on him. PS: Oh yes. To those of a sensitive disposition, please ignore the anti-war clips accompanying the footage.

Peter Hoskin

The ‘progressive’ debate re-opens

From our UK edition

Busy times indeed for the numbercrunchers and policy wonks. I'm at what is, in effect, the Institute for Fiscal Studies' third post-Budget briefing of the year: one for Darling's final Budget, one for the Emergency Budget and one, now, for the Spending Review. We're half-way through, but we've already been served a hefty chunk of meat: the IFS's analysis of what yesterday's Spending Review meant for public spending and for welfare. So far, there are mixed tidings for the coalition. The IFS's acting director Carl Emmerson - who is filling in now that Robert Chote has departed for the OBR - set the tone with his opening remarks. "By 2015," he pointed out, "departmental spending will be lower under this government than it would have been under Labour".

Fraser Nelson

More to Osborne’s plan than gambling

From our UK edition

Paul Mason's review of the cuts for Newsnight last night (from 10:20 into the video here) was one of the most powerful critiques of Osborne from the left. His package majored on Osborne's decision to cut a further £11 billion from welfare and pensions, to soften the departmental cuts. Adopting a rather funereal tone, Mason declared that, "if you are poor, your life is about to change". He produced a decile graph, showing the poorest are hit second hardest. It foreshadowed this morning's Guardian cover: "Axe falls on the poor". Danny Alexander was fed to Paxo: "You said you would not balance your budget on the backs of the poor - when did you change your mind?" (Alexander performed very well - stunningly, even, given what he was doing only six months ago).

Wednesday

James Forsyth

The Tory response to Osborne’s Spending Review

From our UK edition

George Osborne was well received by the 1922 committee of Tory backbenchers when he addressed them on the spending review earlier. There was much thumping of desks, the traditional sign of approval at meetings of the ‘22.   Talking to Tory MPs this afternoon, they are pretty happy with the package. They are glad that the money being taken out of the welfare budget means that the departmental cuts are less than expected. Overall, they think the package is politically sellable and has denied Labour that many targets.   One concern is about how local councils, including Conservative ones, might react to a 28 percent cut in their funding from central government.

Ed Holmes

Osborne blunts the axe – slightly

From our UK edition

As expected, the Chancellor announced reductions in public spending – though not quite as severe as indicated in the Emergency Budget last June.  Government expenditure will fall by 3.3 percent over four years rather than 3.6 percent as expected, leading George Osborne to state – correctly – that departmental budgets will be higher than those pencilled in by Labour – an outcome many may not regard as desirable.  In fact, Osborne will be spending 2 percent more in 2014/15 than Gordon Brown was in 2008/9. Departmental spending will fall 10 percent rather than 13 percent - largely paid for by more optimistic assumptions about savings on welfare and debt interest payments.  Capital spend was hit the hardest - being cut by 28 percent.

Philip Booth

A long way to go

From our UK edition

George Osborne has probably done enough to ensure that the public finances are back on track and that the national debt will not run out of control.   He has, however, taken only the first step on the road to reducing the size of the state. The government will spend the same proportion of national income in 2015 as it did in 2007. In other words, the size of the state will be no smaller when David Cameron goes to the country than when Gordon Brown left the Treasury.   Much more could have been done and low-hanging fruit has been left on the tree. Child benefit should have been scrapped for 16-19 year olds. Universal payments to pensioners (winter-fuel allowance, free TV licences and free bus travel) and the aid budget have been left untouched or increased.

Patrick Nolan

Doing things right, but in the wrong way

From our UK edition

In today’s spending review, George Osborne was absolutely right to hold the line on eliminating the structural deficit within one parliamentary term. In the Emergency Budget released earlier this year the coalition won fiscal credibility (and breathing space from international financial markets) by setting that goal. Failing to follow through on this goal at the first sign of difficulty would have damaged the government’s credibility and reputation in the eyes of international markets.   The Chancellor was also absolutely right to highlight the need for public service reform and to look to the welfare budget to provide some large and early savings.

James Forsyth

Not as deep as expected

From our UK edition

The cuts are not as bad as expected because the government has managed to make AME, annually managed expenditure, take much of the strain. The coalition is finding another £7bn from welfare to go with the £10bn of savings announced in the Budget. There is also another £3.5bn coming out of other bits of AME, more than half of which comes from the planned changes to public sector pensions. The child benefit change is also raising significantly more revenue than originally announced. This is because at the time of the announcement at Tory conference the coalition was planning to end child benefit at 16. This is now not happening.

Fraser Nelson

Ten points about the Spending Review

From our UK edition

In the end, George Osborne didn't flinch. The Chancellor is a clever political operator – too clever, sometimes – but the result is a cuts package that has surprisingly broad popular support. And this has been achieved, in part, by including measures that strike the likes of me as economically unwise. So much of this budget was known in advance that we didn't find out much new today. The below points are my thoughts not on the overall package – which I strongly support – but the pieces of it that we learned today: 1) Total state spending is falling by 3.3 percent in real terms over the next four years, at a lower level than the 3.7 percent forecast in the Budget.

Peter Hoskin

The chart that could cause trouble for the coalition

From our UK edition

Just as they did in the Budget, the coalition have produced a chart showing the impact of the Spending Review's tax, spend and benefit measures on different income groups (see above). In many respects, this is a noble effort: it's a good deal more transparency than Gordon Brown could ever manage in his Budgets. But it also sets a trap for the coalition. As we've pointed out before, these kinds of analyses don't account for measures that can't be quantified in terms of the money handed out to, or taken away from, the public. So policies that might improve the life chances of the least well-off, such as better schools or benefit reform, don't get a look in.

Peter Hoskin

The departmental cuts

From our UK edition

The Spending Review document is available here, but we've collected the cuts facing some of the main departments in the table below. This is not the complete picture of Osborne's announcements today: much of the action takes place in the separate social security budget, but we'll have more on that shortly.

Lloyd Evans

Cameron’s warm-up act for Boy George

From our UK edition

Cameron was a mere warm-up man at PMQs today. With Osborne’s statement due at 12.30 the session felt like a friendly knock-up rather than the main fixture. Ed Miliband rose to thunderous cheers from his backbenches and he tried to capitalise on their support by opening up an ancient Tory wound – heartless attitudes to unemployment. Spotting Cameron chinwagging with Osborne instead of listening, Miliband chided the PM for not paying attention. ‘Well, it’s a novel concept,’ said Dave smoothly ‘but in this government the prime minister and the chancellor speak to each other.’   Ed’s problem was that the OBR has predicted rising employment for the next three years. Bad news for the opposition leader.

Peter Hoskin

PMQs live blog | 20 October 2010

From our UK edition

QUICK VERDICT: More heat than light today, but Cameron easily got the better of Ed Miliband. Now to the Spending Review live blog. 1230: Cameron says that as cuts are made, the government will have to reform the way it does criminal justice. This is a prelude for the deep cuts that the Home Office and Justice department are expected to face in the spending review. 1228: The Lib Dem MP asks whether Cameron believes that better-off graduates should bear more for their university costs. Cameron says that he agrees on principle, and claims that "everyone in the House" wants the "same thing": a fair and well-funded university system. 1226: Cameron says that the spending review will contain answers on social housing - but hints that the results may be better than expected.

James Forsyth

Osborne vows to play straight

From our UK edition

George Osborne’s statement is, I hear, about 40 minutes long. I also hear that there is no obfuscation in it about what is being cut. The coalition is determined that no one can accuse them of trying to disguise what they are up to. Given what we have learned from pre-briefing, the cuts must be just massive in the departments we haven’t heard anything about yet. There is word this morning that the legal aid budget is going to be being reduced by far more than was expected even at the weekend. It appears that legal aid is one of the things that took the hit as the Treasury tried to find some other money to make the numbers for the fairness premium and the defence review add up.