Fraser Nelson is a Times columnist and a former editor of The Spectator.
A Labour-supporting friend of mine, who should know about these things, emails with a serious question: “Do you think that GB having to withdraw the YouTube doctrine on expenses is the biggest humiliation in Downing Street communications since the Women’s Institute? I can’t think of an equal.” Well, I can. The botched election and the
So Gordon Brown is in Afghanistan, pledging that Britain will provide 700 more troops “to allow us to do more during the election period. We are confident that we are shouldering our share of the burden”. I hear that he made this commitment for a pre-election troop surge at the G20 summit to suck up
Cameron is set to deliver a fiery speech to the Tory spring conference, but events are moving fast and he’s struggling to keep up. For a start, last week’s Budget implied 2.3 percent spending cuts for the three years covered by next year’s spending review. Cameron was still talking about spending “growth” in his Cardiff
All Labour budgets are essentially works of deception, and Alistair Darling’s speech on Wednesday was no exception. Once again, the Chancellor deployed the normal, tiresome formula: pyrotechnics intended to distract voters from an ugly truth lurking in the small print. Except this time, the distractions were obvious fakes. No one seriously believes the British economy
You have heard about Brown hurling staplers and mobiles in a rage before. But laser printers? A new one to me. Bloomberg, hardly a salacious source, says this in a story it has just released: “The prime minister, 58, has hurled pens and even a stapler at aides, according to one; he says he once
The IFS post-Budget briefing was laden with other fascinating points. It seemed like half of London was packed into the theatre they hired for the venue, but for those of you who weren’t there here are four other observations: 1. The 50p tax will not raise £2.4bn and may lose money. Crucially, when Darling estimated
Spending cuts are with us. Yes the truth always is dragged, shame-faced, out of a Labour budget the day after it’s delivered – and this time there was a real corker lurking in the statistical annex. Public spending is finally being cut, and significantly – by around £20 billion a year. Alistair Darling spoke with
This was a Budget of tricks, of bogus assumptions and of huge traps for the Conservatives. As Lord Lamont says, it was historic in its admission of failure. I do tire of the Treasury’s approach: every Budget we get pie-in-the-sky forecasts, which are torn up later. But the effect of these fake forecasts is to
Michael Saunders, chief economist at Citi, is, for my money, the best analyst out there. We use his stuff regularly at Coffee House. If you have the nerve (and if you’re not on Osborne’s Treasury Team, who would find what follows sickening), click after the jump for his graphs on projected deficits. As he says:
Earlier, I referred to a Treasury briefing for journalists. This is an event which takes place straight after the Budget for lobby journalists. As it is on the record, we at Coffee House figured we’d release a transcript. It’s an historic Budget, this is your money they’re talking about and the the Treasury’s thinking is
The first Big Lie in this Budget – and, frankly, I’d be surprised to find a bigger one – is that the UK economy will enter a sustained three-year economic sprint of 3.5% A YEAR from 2011. David Cameron instantly and brilliantly ridiculed this as the theory of the “trampoline recovery”. We journalists just had
Two bombshells have landed pre-Budget. One: tax receipts are falling even faster than we thought (central government revenues down 12% in March, a record drop) and the 2008-09 deficit to £90bn, double the £43bn Darling forecast in his last Budget. Black hole, anyone? Next: claimant unemployment is now 1.46m. Last October, in his PBR, Darling
Life is about to get worse for Ed Balls. Remember Ken Boston, the sacked head of the QCA exams quango who was sacked over the SATS exams fiasco? Well he is now released from the purdah of his contract, and we have been waiting for a while to hear his side of the story –
Forget the Budget. The IMF’s Global Financial Stability Report has just produced the figures Gordon Brown didn’t want you to read: the cost to the UK taxpayer of the banking crisis. The Treasury’s approach is to airbrush banks out of the picture, and kid us on that we’ll get the money back eventually. The IMF
America has deflation: Britain doesn’t. Really. Not at all. In fact, rude as it may be to point it out, prices are soaring here. Britain has the highest inflation in any European country. Sure, the RPI index is in negative territory – as you’d expect given the collapse in interest rates. But the average British
Finally, Gordon Brown has at last done something to cheer us up – and released what is perhaps the funniest video ever to come out of No10 (watch it after the jump). Now that his dirty tricks unit has been exposed, he’s trying to come across all friendly and cuddly – and has given a
Perhaps the two most dangerous words for any Labour politician to say right now are “green shoots”. Spend long enough in the economic desert and you can hallucinate, and many of the blips right now – an upturn in some property prices, a slight recovery in sterling – could be taken by anxious politicians as
My, how Balls is rattled. He has made Liam Byrne throw his body in front of the bullets with a statement declaring that he co-chairs those Wednesday afternoon attack meetings. Not that he’d regard them as such. Here are his words, with my thoughts: LB: “The Sunday Times’ write-up of the weekly meetings I co-chair
Is the trail leading to Ed Balls? It seems that it was more than James and myself who found his “Damian who?” interview on Radio Four outrageously implausible. It was enough to have someone inside No10 tell all to Isabel Oakshott from the Sunday Times. It was Balls, he says, who recruited McBride from the
So – what went wrong with the British housing market? I interviewed Kate Barker, the economist and Monetary Policy Committee member, yesterday as part of The Spectator’s ongoing inquiry into the causes of the recession. Many thanks for your questions. As she is an MPC member, her words can come out at regulated intervals –
