Uk politics

Thursday

Mark Bathgate

What happens when quantitative easing stops?

Where the Gilt market goes in coming months is going to be very important for the UK economy and politics. There is little history of countries being able to sustain deficits of the UK's magnitude, for very long, without serious market problems. At the moment, we're getting by thanks the sticking plaster approach of quantitative easing. The Bank of England has purchased £186bn of gilts so far this year, almost perfectly matching the £179bn the Debt Management Office has needed to sell so far. As long as the Bank is willing to support the market with a fast-rolling printing press, government funding at attractive rates is assured.

James Forsyth

Timing contrition

James Crabtree, a Labour SPAD turned managing editor of Prospect, has a good piece in the new Prospect about how the first step to recovery for Labour after the next election, assuming they lose, will be saying sorry. Crabtree argues that even if the Tory majority is small, Labour would be ill-advised to move straight into oppositional mode, attacking every Tory cut. Rather, he argues, the party needs to understand that its "brand is now nearly as contaminated as the Tories before it."   One of the challenges for the Tories should they win the next election will be bringing home to the public just what an appalling state Labour has left the public finances in.

Peter Hoskin

Brown’s class war could doom Labour for years

A lot of pixels have been expended on Labour's new class war and soak-the-rich strategies, so it's worth highlighting the in-a-nutshell argument which Tom Harris deploys against them on his blog: "Rather than using opinion polls as a basis on which to judge the wisdom of class politics, let’s take a rather different measure: general election results. In 1979, 1983, 1987 and 1992, Labour promised tax increases (but only for the wealthy) and got hammered. In 1997, 2001 and 2005, we pledged not to increase the basic or higher rates of tax. And golly! Look what happened!" Ok, correlation and cause aren't necessarily the same thing.

Daniel Korski

Pre-empting Chilcot

Sir John Chilcot’s Iraq inquiry has begun honing in on failures of US and British post-conflict planning. As General Sir Frederick Viggers told the inquiry, problems arose from “not having defined the ends, ways and means of how we were going to deliver this phase of the campaign.” None of this is particularly new. As further evidence is provided to the inquiry, it will become even clearer how unprepared the British state – the Government, civil service and military - were for the task at hand, and how soldiers, diplomats and development workers were expected to deliver near-miracles with limited resources, limited backing, limited security and limited public support. I was there and it was not very pretty.

Matthew Sinclair

The spectre at the climate change feast

Today the TaxPayers' Alliance is releasing a new report which sets out the huge and excessive burden that green taxes impose on families and business across the UK. At the moment, 14 percent of domestic bill costs are the result of climate change policies.  Increasing the price of energy hits the poor and elderly hardest - which, in turn, increases poverty and benefit dependency.  At the same time, 21 percent of industrial electricity bills are the result of climate change policies.  If we want to make our economy less dependent on financial services, driving up a major part of many manufacturing firms' costs isn't the way to do it. Despite these costs, the current approach doesn't appear to be achieving the desired cuts in emissions.

David Blackburn

A parting shot

I need a new radio for Christmas. Whilst listening to Dr. Sir Liam Donaldson tell the Today programme that parents should not offer their fifteen year old offspring alcohol, my pocket-radio had an altercation with a wall. The soon to be retiring chief medical officer said: “The more they get a taste for it, the more likely they are to be heavy drinking adults or binge drinkers later in childhood.” This latest soothsaying counts among Sir Liam’s other alcohol-related triumphs; he also gave us the inscrutable phenomenon of “passive drinking” - I don’t know about you but this guy makes me drink actively.

Peter Hoskin

What will today mean for the expenses saga?

So MPs have until the end of today to declare whether they're appealing against Sir Thomas Legg's request that they repay certain expenses claims.  Three have already done just that, one from each of the main parties: Jeremy Browne, Frank Cook and Bernard Jenkin.  You imagine that more may follow throughout the day, especially given the rumblings that the Legg review contained a fair few errors. Now, it's only fair that MPs have a right of appeal – but you still wonder what it will mean for the expenses saga more generally.  From the public's perspective, a swathe of appeals could look like MPs resisting reform.

Wednesday

Peter Hoskin

Unless they defuse the issue, the Tories will face Ashcroft questions every day until the election

If PMQs today showed anything, it's just how eager the Tories' opponents are to bring up the issue of Lord Ashcroft.  Vince Cable set the ball rolling by referring to the Tory deputy chairman as a "non dom", and Harriet Harman gleefully followed up by firing questions in William Hague's direction.  She was cut off – and rightly so – by John Bercow.  But the insinuations about the Lord and his tax status had already been made. Now, you could say that this is pretty low stuff from Labour and the Lib Dems.  After all, David Cameron pledged earlier this week to legislate so that all MPs and peers are UK taxpayers.

James Forsyth

The Tories need an attack dog

Iain Martin has a thought-provoking post up about how the Tories lack an attack-dog. Certainly, the Tories lack a shadow Minister for the Today Programme, someone who can be relied to go on when it is a bad morning for the party and deal robustly with a tough interview. This is a position the Tories will need to fill before the campaign gets under way. As Iain says, Chris Grayling was at one point used as the party’s attack dog. But this has come to overly define his political persona and he hasn’t really recovered from his Wire speech and a lacklustre conference, although his recent more thoughtful speeches on crime have been worth reading. I suspect that Sayeeda Warsi might soon be auditioned for this role. Andy Coulson is very impressed by her media skills.

James Forsyth

Tax cuts are a better form of stimulus than more spending

Greg Mankiw is one of the best academic economists out there and having been chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors has a good sense of how to turn theory into policy. His column last weekend in The New York Times is essential reading for anyone wondering about how Britain can avoid a double dip recession. In it, Mankiw summarises the recent academic evidence which shows that cutting business and income taxes is a more effective form of stimulus than increasing spending. The challenge for Osborne in drawing up his first Budget, if the Tories win, will be how to foster a private sector stimulus for the economy. Without that we could easily end up in double-dip recession, something that would doom the Tories.

Tuesday

Mark Bathgate

Inflation nation<br />

The inflation surge is now upon us. The CPI rate again “surprised” to the upside – Britain is the only major economy in the world to have inflation doing this. But given that the Bank of England’s printing presses have been working overtime to fund a fiscally irresponsible government then little wonder things are different here. To understand just how unusual the UK situation is, consider the below graph: despite suffering the longest recession in G20, we have one of highest rates of inflation in the developed world. The next few months will see this push higher, potentially reaching 4 percent in March and busting the 2 percent target.

Fraser Nelson

Meet Farmer Mandelson | 15 December 2009

Our Christmas double edition is out today, and is choc full of writers to keep y’all entertained over the festive season. Someone who certainly entertained me is Lord Mandelson. I interviewed him just after Charles Moore’s disclosures about the shooting party: he didn’t shoot, he says, but was at a large dinner chez Rothschild where Saif al-Gaddafi was present. What’s Gaddafi like, I asked? Is he all right kind of chap? PM: “I don’t regard him as an alright chap or a bad chap, I mean how can you judge?” FN: “I thought you knew him a little bit.

David Blackburn

The world’s favourite airline

Unlike Ben Brogan and Iain Martin, I don’t have a vested interest: British Airways weren’t going to be flying me anywhere this Christmas. Having spent days roasting on the aprons of the world, I’ve ceased to entertain the notion that BA is capable of flying me anywhere. I suspect the million or so who face the prospect of the grimmest ever escape to the sun will develop a similar antipathy. Cooked up by Len McCluskey, who cut his teeth with that doyen militancy, Derek Hatton, this strike has tragedy written all over it. As Billy Hayes and the posties proved, the unions rarely realise their unshakeable terms and conditions these days; it’s compromise or, in the language of Scargill, a fight to death.

James Forsyth

Should an opposition sell itself as a responsible government?

One of the Tories’ favoured lines recently has been that they are acting like a responsible government while Labour is behaving like an irresponsible opposition. But I wonder if this attitude is entirely healthy for an opposition, or whether it ends up blunting its campaigning edge. For example, the Tories’ refusal to say for definite that they will repeal Labour’s planned increase in national insurance stems from their view that they aren’t certain where they would find the £8 billion from. But given the number of black holes and blanks in the PBR and that the deficit is over £170 billion this seems slightly absurd.

David Blackburn

So what if Zac Goldsmith’s loaded

Hold your breath, the ‘Zac’s filthy rich’ furore is coming to a front page near you. In addition to scurrilous insinuation about his tax status and the fact that he has spent Walpolean sums on campaigning in Richmond, Paul Waugh breaks the news that the Electoral Commission intends to investigate an allegedly impermissible donation Zac made to the Conservatives. An impermissible donation is of course illegal, but Goldsmith is innocent until the local Tory association’s case that his was an honest mistake made during the interim between moving out of Kensington and Chelsea and registering in Richmond is disproved. Other criticism is simply bunk.

David Blackburn

The Labour leadership question hasn’t been answered

Rabble-rouser and bruiser-in-chief Charles Clarke has taken a hatchet to the government’s highly political Pre-Budget Report. Writing on his blog, Clarke argues: ‘He (Brown) felt that the main purpose of this pre-election Pre-Budget Report was to recycle his old political dividing lines.   This weakness can only come from fear of discussion of our past failures and fear that it is too dangerous to set out our future plans.   The real danger for Labour is that this weakness will pave the way to political defeat in 2010.’ The Labour leadership crisis has retreated from the limelight recently, but the spectre of internecine war after a whipping at the polls has not.

Peter Hoskin

The Tories should resist any temptation to go soft on debt

Of all the findings from today's ICM poll for the Guardian, I imagine this one will concern the Tory leadership most: "Just two months ago, 49 percent of voters said they thought Cameron and Osborne would do better than Darling and Brown, but that figure is 38 percent today." They're still ahead of Brown and Darling – who are langushing on 31 percent – but the drop is still pretty striking.  What's more, it seems to go against conventional wisdom about fixing the fiscal mess we're in.  While they could still go further in setting out a few specifics, the fact is that the Tory pair have spent the last couple of months railing against the the twin debt and deficit burdens, and stressing the need for spending cuts.

Monday

Peter Hoskin

Only Ireland and Iceland have had a bigger debt explosion than the UK

An argument put forward by some Labour types is that we're not really facing a debt crisis at all.  "Yes, the national debt levels are bad," they say, "but we started off at a low level in comparison to other countries, so we can absorb the deficits we're racking up." Well, you can take issue with the idea that we had "low levels" of debt before the crisis kicked in – but the real mistake this statement makes is to ignore the rate at which we've accumulated debt.  As the latest OECD data shows, UK debt is set to rise faster than any other nation save for Iceland and Ireland: The picture would probably look even worse if you accounted for all the off-balance sheet fiddles, like the toxic bank assets and PFI.

James Forsyth

Exceeding expectations

Today’s Guardian has an interesting story on the success of the New School Network, an organisation set up to get parents’ to take up the opportunities offered by the Tories’ planned school reform. The Guardian reports that 200 parents groups and 100 groups of teachers are interested in setting up schools. I suspect that take up of the Tories new schools will exceed expectations. One person involved with the New Schools Network told me recently that they would judge the policy a failure if it did not lead to the creation of a 1,000 new schools in the first two years.

Peter Hoskin

Things the Speaker shouldn’t discuss in public

As Andrew Sparrow says, it's well worth reading Iain Dale's interview with John Bercow in the latest issue Total Politics.  It's a fun read, mostly because the Speaker is remarkably candid – a quality that's normally to be admired in a politician.  But I can't help thinking that he made a mistake in admitting this:   "I received various approaches from various senior people in the Labour party saying: 'Aw, you know, we'd love to have you on board. We think you're being discarded by the Conservatives. We think you'd be quite at home with us.' Senior people, not in a formal setting, but people sidling up to you – ex-ministers, current ministers, backbenchers, whatever.