Fraser Nelson

A long, long time ago, when it was still quite unlikely that the Conservatives would form the next government, George Osborne made a promise that, at the time, I thought he'd come to regret. He said a Tory administration would publish online every item of government expenditure over £25,000 - an idea from the Taxpayers' Alliance. Even they, I suspect, couldn't quite believe Osborne had taken such a low threshold rather than, say, £50k. Is this really doable? Well, a CoffeeHouser recently got in touch about this fantastic site from Missouri, where Missourians can track what their tax dollars are being spent on. This kind of accountability will have a transformitive effect on public spending.

Today's Andy Davey cartoon in The Sun (click at the bottom of this link to see it) deserves to go on Darling's fridge. Because two more pieces of data have just come out which can be confused for good news. One is that personal insolvencies are at a lower level than 2006 and, next, that manufacturing prices rose 1.5% in January. Both are freakish mirages, in the desert of Darling's misery. The personal insolvencies in 2006 were pumped up artificially when new laws made it easier to declare yourself bust. The far more important indicator is company insolvencies, and they are especially worrying. They're up 55% to the highest level since 1994 - but, crucially, this is just the beginning.

So how significant was Gordon Brown's claim in PMQs that the world is in a "depression?" Those accustomed to his word-mangling wrote it off as another verbal slip. But as Dizzy points out, the world's press were less sanguine. As a result No10 has spent much of the day trying to explain that we have a Prime Minister who mangles his words. And perhaps his slip was Freudian because it fits a trend. The other day, Stephen Timms, the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, told the Commons:  "Today, we are in a recession—the first to hit the UK since the early 1990s and face some of the harshest economic conditions for decades, and perhaps for a century." Worst in a century, Mr Timms, worse than the 1930s?  Even the worst-case scenario, a 5.

So why was Wen Jiabao, the Chinese Prime Minister, carrying Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments in his bag when he came to see Gordon Brown? My hunch is that his aides found it contained a perfect description of the man he was about to meet. I reprint Smith's almost Nostradamus-style description here. This is Brown in a nutshell: The "man of system" is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it.

Oh the weather outside may be frightful, but David Cameron went ahead with his education speech today - a subject on which he doesn't say enough, in my view, because there is so much to say. The policy he had to launch was a Carol Vorderman-led maths review, but there were plenty of other aspects to his speech. Extracts below, with my take after:-   DC: We envisage academy status – with all the freedoms it brings to generate success freedoms which have been used brilliantly here will become the norm for state schools. These big structural changes are crucial if we’re to have the sort of revolutionary change I think is necessary to make our schools the best in the world.  FN: Cameron does not exaggerate when he says “revolutionary”.

The prospect of a “British Jobs for British Workers” controversy will have haunted Gordon Brown long before he came up with the soundbite. He will have known, way before Fleet St did, that immigrants had taken (or created) 81 percent of British jobs. He'll have known - as he paid for the bills - that at least 5m Brits have been on various out-of-work benefits since 1997 despite his claim to have tackled unemployment. While morally deplorable, this situation was politically manageable as long as there were enough jobs for those who want them. But in a recession, when Brits start to compete with the 6.2m immigrants for these jobs, then it hits the fan. There is a basic political formula that works world over: mass unemployment + mass immigration = political explosion.

When Reform Scotland was set up, I feared for their prospects. Although Scotland was birthplace of the Enlightenment, its new parliament has failing strikingly to produce any new ideas. It has instead proved a reactionary force, priding itself in banning things before England does and using powers to reject reform introduced by Blair in England. So what chance do new ideas have? But Reform Scotland has today  produced a proposal that has set debate aflame: why not give a £10,000 schools voucher to parents from poor backgrounds? It's the subject of a BBC Radio Scotland phone in, which shows the paucity of the arguments on the other side. One is that private schools are just for the rich, who want their kids to mix with other posh kids.

So what will the Brown stimulus actually do? Suspiciously, we’ve never been told. In America, Obama has shown the public what they’ll get for their money – how his stimulus would boost employment and the economy. Seeing as no one in Britain has done this exercise, we at The Spectator commissioned Oxford Economics, perhaps the best economic modelers in the country, to have a look. It ran the Brown stimulus, which we define as the various measures taken in the 2008 Pre-Budget Report, through their computers – and the resultant graphs are fascinating. Here's the first:   So, in year one, there’s an effect – but we pay for it everafter. This year, the stimulus package is expected to stem the fall in GDP by 0.

"Why did nobody notice it?" asked the Queen a few months ago, at the LSE. The simplest answer is that inflation targeting was a disaster. People wrongly thought that if you controlled the prices, all else would follow. This was wrong, hopelessly wrong, calamitously wrong. Everyone gushed about what a great idea Bank of England independence was. In fact, monetary policy management in the last ten years was a disaster. Inflation targetting was a false god. And the fact that no one says so now is a sign of just how far we are from understanding what happened in the last ten years. As Friedman taught the world, controlling the supply of money is the key to stability. But the error was to think that inflation was a proxy for money supply.

Channel Four has just released a striking exchange between Sir Ian Blair and Boris over the de Menezes case, released from Freedom of Information. Boris had gone on the radio to say that one could argue that the police had been "trigger happy" in Stockwell tube that Saturday morning. Sir Ian wrote to him saying this was "outrageous" and made out like Boris was making a general slur on the Met. BoJo had none of it saying it was "hard to think of any other description of a catastrophe in which a completely innocent man ends up with seven bullets in his head... If this man was thought to be a potential suicide bomber, why the hell was he allowed on two buses, and then down the Tube?