The party conference season is over and we’re back to business as usual — except that in the current financial and economic turmoil, political business is anything but normal. Last night the US Senate voted for the Bush bailout plan by a large majority, which should keep the markets happy until the House of
I was scheduled to have dinner with Martha Stewart, America’s very own domestic goddess, in London next week — but not any more. She was due to arrive for an extended visit to the UK this weekend. But the Home Office has refused her application for a visa, presumably because of the time she spent
When Gordon Brown entered Downing Street for the first time as Prime Minister he talked about the excellence of the education he received at Kirkcaldy High School in Fife. He even invoked the school motto – “I will try my utmost” – and claimed: “I wouldn’t be standing here without the opportunities I got there.”
To Liverpool to chair the annual conference of the British Chambers of Commerce, stout yeomen of the country’s small- to medium-sized businesses. I’ll let the train take the strain, I thought, and burnish my green credentials, even though I planned to travel on a Sunday, which meant the normal two-and-a-half-hour trip would take an extra
Coffee Housers will soon be piling in with their own take on Alistair Darling’s performance on BBC1’s Andrew Marr Show this morning — he seemed to accept the abolition of the 10% income tax band had created serious problems by promising to return to the matter in future budgets (maybe even this year’s pre-Budget Report)
Cameron is making an effective attack on Darling and his non-Budget. He is rightly concentrating on the government’s consistent and substantial underestimating of budget deficits. But if the deficits are really that bad, then why do Cameron’s Tories promise to match Labour’s tax and spend for the next three years?
The TV pundits still don’t seem to grasp the enormity of the Chancellor’s borrowing binge to come, all the more significant because of the borrowing binge we’ve already had. The sustainable investment rule, for example, is no more. It states that national debt must not exceed 40% of GDP. Even on the Chancellor’s own forecasts
He’s sat down already! So much for the spin that he would speak for an hour. He barely had enough for half an hour and eked that out to 50 minutes. A raft of minor predictable and predicted measures … the only real story is borrowing, with the government now wading in an endless sea
The bottom line of this budget so far: lower growth and higher borrowing … indeed higher borrowing for as far as the eye can see. There is not a surplus in sight … even though the Chancellor is predicting continued growth … indeed on his projections, after over 20 years of consistent economic growth (1992
We’re already into padding … a penny here, a penny there on various pet spending projects (schools, apprentices) which have already underperformed despite the billions thrown at them … and new targets suggested (80% carbon cuts by 2050 instead of 60%) so far in the future that Darling and the rest of the cabinet will
Consider the response of America and Europe to the current financial turmoil. In Washington, the US Federal Reserve slashes interest rates by 75 basis points and the Bush administration proposes a $150bn stimulus package of tax cuts, which will probably win bipartisan support in Congress. Back on this side of the Atlantic, Gordon Brown
New York’s famed zero-tolerance approach to crime continues to work its magic. This year murders are on track to fall below 500 for the first time since reliable records began 44 years ago. As of Boxing Day, 484 murders had been recorded in the city during 2007, by far the lowest number since 1963,
I gave two big Christmas bashes this year, one in London, one in New York. Both included friends who are celebrities, such as Joan Collins, Michael Winner, Tina Brown, Harry Evans, Candace Bushnell, Michael Heseltine and Emily Maitlis, as well as many more friends and colleagues who are not celebrities but who are always a
On the way to a birthday party in Bucks on Sunday night we were delayed by a long tailback on the elevated section of the A4 out of London by what turned out to be a broken down van. On his way back to London over an hour later my driver reported that the van
British politics used to be dominated by the country’s relentless economic decline. Long before James Carville’s mantra for Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential election bid — ‘It’s the economy, stupid’ — it was the economy which determined British general elections and alternative economic policies which most divided the parties. I spent most of my early career
Of all the insights that Friedrich August von Hayek bequeathed to us, one in particular shines out today. It is that running through the ideological and political divisions of human history are two distinct and different ways of looking at the world. One Hayek called constructivist rationalism; the other evolutionary rationalism. Hayek spent a lifetime
Andrew Neil says the English should stop worrying about the invading Jocks: the northern grip on the nation’s politics, media and business is being irrevocably weakened by the dumbing down of the Scottish education system They gathered to praise Robin Cook in the forbidding Presbyterian aisles of Edinburgh’s St Giles’ Cathedral last Friday but the