Fraser Nelson is a Times columnist and a former editor of The Spectator.
From our UK edition
Are UK drugs seizures really going up? The Home Office said exactly this in a press release last week but closer inspection reveals the most extraordinary statistical manipulation, rumbled by my colleague at the Centre for Policy Studies, Kathy Gyngell, who blogs on it here. Here’s the scam. The Home Office boasts about “a record
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A nanosecond is easily measured in Westminster as the time between a politician’s hearing of a colleague’s impending resignation and wondering ‘What’s in it for me?’ It takes perhaps a full second to construct a theory as to why the unfortunate soul had it coming and probably deserved it. It takes about a minute to
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Estimated number of households in negative equity, 2003-10 If you’re a homeowner, turn away now. CoffeeHousers may remember recent reports of 1.2 million houses at risk of negative equity – well, that may just be the start of a negative equity tsunami. This Citi graph, the latest in our occasional series, shows what would happen
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Like Darling’s Mais lecture, Osborne’s speech to the LSE was rather long with no discernable points of action. No matter how much you say the word “responsible” (ten times, in his case), it just doesn’t add up to a policy. First the good news – Osborne uses Japan as an example of Keynesian spending. That’s
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Now that even Nigel Lawson says tax cuts are not the right way to go, why am I calling for them in my column? Lord Lawson did not issue a fatwa on all tax cuts, but warned against “massive tax cuts.” He is wary of so-called Keynesian fiscal activism – borrowing massively, to cut taxes.
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Alistair Darling has not set out a new fiscal framework in his much-delayed Mais lecture – but he has read the last rites over the so-called the financial rules. “To apply the fiscal rules in a rigid manner today would be perverse,” he says. Not to say impossible: the rules set a 40% limit on
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Finally, the right line from Prime Minister’s Questions – and it’s one that Gordon Brown will fear the most. “What people need now is more money in their pockets. He could deliver big tax cuts for people who desperately need help”. It was from Nick Clegg. You can argue – as I do – that the Liberal
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I was joking when I said a few weeks ago that Gordon Brown spoke about the recession as if it were the SARS virus. But at his press conference this morning, and just now at the press conference with Sarkozy, he has used a new phrase: “stop the contagion”. Contagion? If it is, it was
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Danny Finkelstein argues that I am not “precise” when I say that the Tories have been equating tax cuts to instability – and, as ever, he’s right. This is, happily, a historical argument as the Cameron project has evolved substantially since the first weeks when this “stability before tax cuts” slogan was implied. One does
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The debate about taxes was successfully closed down by Gordon Brown when he persuaded the Tories to equate tax cuts with instability. Actually, even Brown didn’t go this far – this “instability” point was Oliver Letwin’s. Even now, when the disastrous effects of Brown’s economic policy are painfully clear, it’s still hard to get a
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It’s funny to hear politicians solemnly talk about “debt-financing”, as if the cash comes down on a moonbeam from the lending gods. In truth, some poor souls have to buy the gilts the Treasury are flogging – and with what? Governments may well find it as hard as the rest of us to find creditors
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The sterling crash has now begun in earnest. The pound has today (today!) fallen 9% against the Yen and is off 4% against the dollar to a lowly $1.56 with forecasts of $1.40 or lower next year. Against any other currency you may mention, it’s now plunging. The proximate cause is news that the UK
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Phil Woolas has only been immigration minister a few weeks, and is already controversial enough a figure to be pulled from Question Time. A humiliation for him? I suspect his job is going completely to plan. His Times interview in which he called for the population to be capped at 70m looked part of a co-ordinated campaign, slated as
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In Uganda there is a law against annoying the president, and last night I met an incredible person who has been jailed 12 times for breaking that law. Andrew Mwenda, founder of The Independent newspaper, was giving the keynote address at The Bastiat Prize and asking why the West was so timid in defending free
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How bad are the Deripaska allegations for Osborne? At the very least, climbing on board that yacht raises questions over his judgement. But, as with so many Westminster scandals, all hangs on what more is to come. Labour will gun for him as hard as they can, knowing how important he is to Tory strategy.
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He’s done it. I blogged a while ago about how Gordon Brown lost his battle to have Northern Rock struck off the books, causing trouble for his oft-repeated Brownie that he has reduced debt from 43% to 37% of GDP. In August, the ONS showed National Debt was 43.3% – and had actually been at
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Much as though I applaud David Cameron’s plan to give struggling small companies a VAT holiday, a rather large obstacle occurs to me. Wouldn’t this be illegal under European Union law? The Sixth EU VAT Directive mandates all states to apply VAT the same way as long as the main rate is a minimum of
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Few would dispute that, in the last fortnight, Gordon Brown has shown why he has been a fixture for so long at the very apex of British politics. His economic model has imploded and his debt pyramid collapsed. The taxpayer is up to his neck to the tune of half a trillion pounds to clear
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I’ve read and re-read Cameron’s speech on the economy, hoping that I had somehow missed the radical message to answer Gordon Brown. I have given up. Britain is facing a tsunami of unemployment, two years of recession if we’re lucky and what do the Tories have to say? They’ll set up a new quango, and
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British households are far less able to deal with the credit crunch because taxes have risen by the equivalent of £6,520 per household compared to 1996/97 levels. This ratcheting up of the tax burden has been a steady feature of the Brown years but it is being felt with particular force now. During the boom
