Fraser Nelson

I said that Gordon Brown's VAT cut was too small to notice - yet I have just saved £15 on furniture imports from Bali. Of course, £15 is a serious, noticeable amount of money. Problem is, it only helps people who have £600 to fork out on furniture. And here this is another defect of Brown's useless VAT cut: it helps people like me - who are saving like mad to atone for their borrowing sins - instead of helping the lower-income groups who are most likely to spend extra money. The VAT and duty cuts announced in the last pre-Budget report are, in fact, perfectly regressive - helping the richest the most and the poorest the least. This should not be so - at least not in theory.

It’s not just the Germans. The IMF today has poured scorn on Gordon Brown’s useless VAT cut for reasons that any corner shop owner could have explained to the Prime Minister. Here is what Olivier Blanchard, the IMF chief economist, said today. “Temporarily cutting VAT, a measure that was adopted in Great Britain, does not seem to me to be a good idea - 2 percent less is not perceived by consumers as a real incentive to spend." Blanchard joins a small but growing chorus of international officials criticising Brown. Last week, I gave a list of other countries that are trashing Gordon Brown’s attempt to borrow his way out of debt.

Every Christmas time, a turkey emerges to be hunted in the festive news vacuum. From Tim Yeo to Charlie Whelan, many have found themselves with the misfortune to have done something wrong when nothing else is happening - so will be pilloried from here to Hogmanay. This season it's Bob Quick who is being stuffed, and rightly so. David Davis and David Cameron are both basting him, prior to the festive roasting. He's issued an "unreserved apology"  - but, as he'll know, it goes far beyond that.  It's a bit rich to complain about the politicisation of the police service and then describe then entire Conservative party as "corrupt". Quick's problem is that this cannot be dismissed as a slip of the tongue.

The ghost of Christmas Future has arrived at Kirkcaldy - and persuaded Gordon Brown not to hold an election next year. So says Ben Brogan, and it rings true. I've previously set out the case for a January election, and Trevor Kavanagh that for a February one.  But the PM hasn't taken our advice, and tomorrow he'll rule out a winter election.  His loss.  Every week he waits, his fingerprints will be ever more visible in the economic mess and the Tory majority will be bigger. Ben says that Brown's unofficially ruling out April, May and June too.

The Prime Minister's routine half-truths, exaggerations and Brownies may have bored the British public into submission, but every now and again we get foreign governments or organisations setting him straight. After the Germans (and everyone else - list here) now it's the turn of Abdalla Salem El-Badri, head of Opec, to gently point out that British petrol prices were so high because 72 per cent of the pump price is tax. The "highest in Europe", el-Badri said. He wasn't undiplomatic enough to accuse the Prime Minister of deliberately misleading the British public, but he did say this: "I think Mr Brown is very confused. If he is looking out for the interests of his people he should look at the taxes. I advise that he should really look at these high taxes..." Petrol is now 89.

It's twelve months of Nick Clegg's Liberal Democrat leadership today and he celebrates by giving an interview to The Independent, saying he wants to be taken seriously. "It would help if he didn't claim to have slept with up to 30 women," said Nick Ferrari on LBC this morning. Andrew Pierce then came on and pointed out that this was unfair: we don't know if they were all women. And this is the tragedy for Cleggover: this is all people care about. Last week in PMQs he said that a single mother with two children had come to see him in his constituency, and the House roared with laughter - the joke being that might well have been the father. (It shows what guilty minds these MPs have). Alas poor Clegg: what's up?

'Tis the season for Christmas receptions at Westminster, where the hacks like myself compare notes with people who know a lot more about life than we do. There's a distinct lack of bubbly this year - funny how ministers take special care over that, while the government overspend is (literally) enough to fill every bath in England with Moet - but the chat's been first class, especially at the Centre for Policy Studies bash last night. I thought I’d share some of it with CoffeeHousers. Much of the below may be obvious to y’all, but I found it interesting and thought-provoking. Here are my top ten points from the right-leaning people I cornered: 1) EXPORTS Utter rot being talked about the economy now.

David Cameron plans to lead Labour rebels into inserting an amendment into the government’s welfare reform plans, basically removing all threat of sanction from lone mothers of children of pre-school age. This, I think, is the upshot of his press conference today. “The state prodding, pushing, cajoling mothers of children so young is simply wrong,” he said. “We need to help families, and that especially is true for single parents. It won’t do any good for our economy, or our society.” He said he suspected James Purnell was engaged in “some macho positioning exercise” which he said was “pretty sick”. CoffeeHousers will be unsurprised to hear that I disagree with Cameron on this.

Gordon Brown is actually uniting the world, so far as his approach to the downturn is concerned, but not in the way he’d like us to think. From Tokyo to Toronto, finance ministers are saying that countries with a budget problem (like Britain) shouldn’t seek to borrow their way out of this. Slowly, a consensus is forming. Extra borrowing is fine for well-run countries that managed to pay off debt and run a budget surplus in good times. But countries like Britain – that blew her budget even in a debt-fuelled boom – will destroy their credibility (and currency) if they try to borrow even more now. It’s not just schadenfreude that makes the Germans so angry. They are making an important economic point: debt matters.

So much for supposed British electoral apathy: the final of the X Factor just attracted 8m votes - that stands pretty good comparison to the last election where Labour received 9.6m votes and the Tories 8.8m (and most under 35s didn't vote). Moreover most of tonight's electorate will have paid to vote - and gladly because, unlike the last election, the X Factor final made you feel proud to be British. It felt like a cross between the Last Night of the Proms and Mamma Mia: a real feelgood production that did tug the patriotic heartstrings of sentimental old fools like myself. The show isn't about the music, just as Strictly isn't about dancing. It's about characters, their background and the dreams they represent.

When Gordon Brown urges the bank to "pass on" the interest rate cut, why doesn't he lead by example with his very own state-owned mortgage company, Northern Rock? Because NR is up to no good - and the Financial Services Authority has given us a rare glimpse into exactly what its game is. It released a banking report (here, note 9.47) which confirmed that NR's loyalty is to the state: that is to say, it must "focus on repaying its government loan". Deplorably, it is doing this by deliberately overcharging those too poor to get a better deal. Here's now it works. Many millions (including myself) took up NR's low fixed-term rates.

How much is Britain’s true national debt? Gordon Brown says 37% of GDP, the ONS says 43% of GDP – but this is just government debt. The reason Britain is in so much trouble is that our corporate and household debts are huge. It is the combination that makes us such a credit liability – but no one has ever put together a combination. Until now. Michael Saunders from CitiGroup has calculated ‘external debt’ – ie, what Britain owes the rest of the world. It is not 40% but 400% of GDP, the highest in the G7 by some margin. The next down, France, is 176%. America, flagellating itself for blowing such a debt bubble, is just 100%. Japan is about half America. The below graph shows ‘external debt’ – both in mid-2008, and five years ago.

That three-hour debate on Damian Green really was a waste of time. A poll of MPs shows 30 want Michael Martin to go, but how many say that to in the chamber? Nada. We have some honesty from  Douglas Carswell and Bob Marshall-Andrews and that's about it. Some rebellion. All they were left with was innuendo. Dennis MacShane saying that sergeants don't fall on their swords, officers do. Wink, wink. And that was about as tough as it got. So this pointless committee of grandees will go off, boycotted by the Tories and the LibDems, to report after Green has been cleared. And report on what? We know pretty much what happened.

This year has seen a gruesome series of stories bearing out the Broken Society narrative, starting with teenagers shooting each other and ending with Karen Matthews abducting her own daughter in search of a McCann-style reward. Look at most of these stories, including Baby P, and there is a common theme: they take place in welfare ghettoes, those oases of deprivation in every British city. While we should condemn the evil, we should also condemn something the system that incubates the evil. There was a reason that Beveridge called idleness a “giant evil”. As I say in my News of the World column today when you pay people to do nothing you mess with human nature.