Fraser Nelson is a Times columnist and a former editor of The Spectator.
From our UK edition
The truth about the Pre-Budget Report was revealed today by the Institute for Fiscal Studies: the new National Insurance tax will hit everyone on £14k or over, not £20k – and there are implied 19 per cent cuts of some £40 billion in the “non-protected” areas. The event was sold out, because it now has the reputation as
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So Alistair Darling today repeated the same trick he used in April’s Budget – referring only to rising “current spending”, so as to hide the full extent of Labour’s spending cuts. Current spending is only one component of total spending, and when you add in some of the other components – as we have done
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The Treasury have just banned transcripts of the all-important briefing they give to journalists after the budget. Coffee House broke the mould after the April budget by producing the first-ever transcript – releasing to the public the spin which journalists are given in the precious few hours they have to write up the Budget. This
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I’m not that worked up about the National Insurance increase. Sure, a tax on jobs is the best way to choke a recovery – but this is only due to come in April 2011 by which time Darling will be collecting the royalties on his memoirs. It only matters if the Tories support it, which
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As I suspected, Darling has cooked the figures by laughably unrealistic growth forecasts. He is predicting a sustained economic sprint that will mysteriously come to Britain the April after next. Table B1 of the PBR shows that he expects 3.25% growth every year for a whole four years: from April 2011 to April 2015. How
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How can you tell if you’re being lied to on budget day? Normally its easy: Gordon Brown’s lips move. But, today, there’s a handy guide. You can compare Darling’s fiction with the independent average calculated by HM Treasury. I have pulled out the relevant tables:
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It’s the eve of the Pre-Budget Report, and the lunacy has already begun. Tomorrow’s FT says that Darling will copy the Tories’ plans to protect the NHS budget – and throw police and schools in to the protected status as well. This is introduced as “the biggest squeeze in pubic spending for a generation,” with
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Things are shaping up nicely for Gordon Brown ahead of the Pre-Budget Report next week. The Tories were 17 points ahead on ICM in October – now it’s 11. Cameron would have a narrow majority on this basis but, given the margin of error, we’re back into hung parliament territory. And this has a self-reinforcing
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Anyone interested in climate change should buy The Spectator today. We don’t normally make such naked plugs here on Coffee House, but our global warming special has a line-up of the variety and quality which I guarantee you will find in no other British magazine or newspaper. As the FT’s Samuel Brittan says: we dare
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Last month, 1,000 emails leaked from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit. The institution is more important than it sounds: for decades, it has been at the centre of the global warming debate, keeping in touch with the close-knit group of scientists who guard the various projections about global warming. Or, as the
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Sky News invited me around for what I expected would be a civil debate on climate change at 2:30pm today – but for people like Bob Ward, there’s no such thing. He is policy director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change at the LSE. The debate proceeded along the bizarre path that these
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The Eton question came up on Question Time – is Labour right to use class in the run-up to the election? I have a piece in The Guardian tomorrow on this theme. The answer should be that which Andrew Lansley read out on Question Time: that this shows Labour is living in the past, what
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How seriously are we to take Lord Stern on the economics of climate change? At the LSE yesterday, he rather hysterically claimed that the Copenhagen summit will be “the most important international gathering since the Second World War”. Crucially, he added that the cost of dealing with the problem may reach 5 percent of GDP.
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Whenever a London bookmaker made odds on Scottish politics, my former colleagues at The Scotsman used to make easy money*. The world of Holyrood, where yours truly served a one year tour of duty, has its own political weather system that it’s hard to understand from a distance – so likelihoods are given very high
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Do we still have the will to win in Afghanistan? If so, the question the Iraq inquiry should be asking is not “how did we get into this war” – we have had a number of separate inquiries into that already – but “why were the military defeated on the ground in Basra?”. If the
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Is the British economy turning Japanese? Since asking the question last year on Coffee House, the evidence has been piling up – and it makes for a cover story in this week’s magazine (which I have written with Mark Bathgate). The similarities are as follows: 1. Japan’s bust followed years of debt-fuelled growth which vain
From our UK edition
Zombie banks and high unemployment look set to curse our economy as they did Japan’s, say Fraser Nelson and Mark Bathgate. A Conservative government could avoid disaster, but only if it is prepared to face the painful reality To say a country is turning Japanese has a very special meaning to economists. It means entering
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Last night, Michael Heath, The Spectator’s brilliant cartoon editor, won a lifetime achievement award at the Cartoon Art Trust Awards – and what a lifetime. His first illustrations for The Spectator appeared in the mid-1950s, and have long since become a mainstay of the magazine. To mark this special talent, we’ve pasted a selection of
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Cameron just made a very good point in his speech – namely, that Brown claimed just days ago that Obama would make an Afghanistan announcement in the “next few days”. Now, we have no idea when the announcement will come. But this isn’t Gordon Brown’s fault – it’s Obama’s. The way Washington is treating Britain
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All hail, Jeremy Hunt, the axe man. Cameron’s first tax cut will be a licence fee cut* – and Hunt is planning to axe some stations to pay for it. Hunt is thinking of axing 1Extra, apparently, with BBC3 and BBC4 already under threat. Also under Hunt’s axe would be the National Lottery’s runnng costs.
