Fraser Nelson

Fraser Nelson

Fraser Nelson is a Times columnist and a former editor of The Spectator.

Wednesday

Fraser Nelson

A bumper pack of Brownies

From our UK edition

Just as Mr Brown’s jokes are no laughing matter, you imagine his facts are not supposed to be taken seriously anymore either. His statistics go over the heads of the public and one almost tires of correcting them here. But as Simon Mayo mentioned CoffeeHouse on air on Five Live and our fondness for “Brownies” (a word, alas, he didn’t mention) here is a list of today’s top PMQs Brownies. 1. “We now have the second biggest defence budget in the world”. This dodgy figure is cooked up by looking at military spending in nominal terms – rather than adjusting for purchasing power parity (PPP).

Fraser Nelson

Clegg shines at PMQs

From our UK edition

I watched PMQs from the vantage point of Simon Mayo’s Radio Five studio today, with John Pienaar. We both scribble furiously during the PMQs – John has to select clips and present a narrative instantly. Now Cable has gone, only Cameron provides the jokes. And he was on especially good form today. John spotted that Cameron used the word “useless” three times. This must have been deliberate. I can easily imagine Andy Coulson in a meeting saying Brown’s main claim to fame is being dull-but-competent. Strip out competent, and you’re not left with much. “The Prime Minister has a nerve to accuse me of inconsistency,” said Cameron. “I said he was useless a year ago, and still think he is now.

Tuesday

Fraser Nelson

Osborne lays out the Tory vision, the Treasury lays on the drinks

From our UK edition

Just back from two great functions – George Osborne’s excellent speech to the Centre for Policy Studies and the HM Treasury summer reception. Osborne’s speech was basically the best Cameron ideas without any of the dodgy ones (like that Chapter 11 malarkey) – and a full narrative, focusing on worklessness and Labour’s failure in unemployment. Osborne said the most important statistic he wanted us to take away was that youth unemployment is now higher than the OECD average where in 1997 it was way below. “Know that fact, and you will know why Labour has failed There were lots of powerful points in Osborne’s speech. None new, but put together in a powerful way that may make – dare one say – a Tory narrative.

Fraser Nelson

Why I still think importing Chapter 11 is a bad move

From our UK edition

Today is one of those days when I had a Tom Harris moment and realise the perils of blogging. I checked PoliticsHome (as I do pretty much ever hour) to see that I was referring to “Cameron’s ‘disastrous’ left-wing business plan.” Hardly a wicked distortion of what I wrote – but not what I meant either. For the record, I don’t considerer Cameron’s entire business plan to be intrinsically left wing. I was referring only to the introduction of a Chapter 11-style insolvency law to Britain, which I oppose. I also believe that in proposing it Cameron is positioning himself to the left of Labour. I consider this to be significant, like his NHS plans and his proposal to tax non-doms. As always, CoffeeHousers make intelligent criticisms.

Fraser Nelson

Food price inflation is now in double-digits

From our UK edition

Let’s quickly unpack today’s horrendous inflation figures. According to the Consumer Price Index, food inflation is now a staggering 10.6 percent year-on-year. I had previously predicted double-digit food price inflation by Christmas. But this double-digit rise in the price of food is concealed in today’s headline inflation figures of 3.8 percent CPI and 4.6 percent Retail Price Index – which factor in a 7.5% dip in clothing. In Cabinet today, Brown was expounding on his narrative that this is a global problem. But one of the biggest factors behind this is sterling’s loss of value – 13 percent against a trade-weighted index - which is of the same magnitude as on Black Wednesday.

Fraser Nelson

Cameron’s left-wing chapter

From our UK edition

Some of the most left-wing things David Cameron says involve his plans for business. Take his plan, announced this morning, for a “Chapter 11” for British industry. Even Labour’s most influential voices in business like Gerald Frankel failed to have it adopted by Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. Why? Because it’s a potentially disastrous idea which throws a lifeline to badly-managed companies, and can be used by the least scrupulous to launder their balance sheet and re-enter the market with prices that well-run rivals simply can’t compete with.

Monday

Fraser Nelson

Brown’s unemployed army

From our UK edition

Ever since JFK established the Peace Corps, policymakers here have been keen on a British version of it. The latest idea is from the new knife crime tsar, Alf Hitchcock, who tells the Daily Mail that he’d like all young unemployed to do a kind of national service. It’s a seductive thought, but has he thought about the scale? Gordon Brown has raised an army of 686,000 under-25s claiming out-of-work benefits (DWP breakdown here)—more than six times the strength of the ever-thinning British army (105,090) and larger than even the United States army (525,482). Add in all the British under-35s kept on out of work benefits of various kinds and there would be 1.57 million – more than the US Army, Navy and Air Force put together.

Sunday

Fraser Nelson

Loving the trend

From our UK edition

I’m in Austria for a wedding this weekend, as yet another one of my friends has got hitched to a European. It’s becoming a trend. Of the five closest friends I had when I was 21, four of us – including yours truly – started a cross-border relationship which ended in marriage. This has to do, of course, with love – but also, if I may be so nerdy, with technology and economic trends. My generation, born in the mid-70s, was perhaps the first to be able to enter long-distance relationships armed with the new tools of communication and transport. The old narrative of a long-distance relationship was meeting up every couple of months, slowly finding you had drifted apart and cursing the time you had wasted. Now, technology has closed the gap. Here’s how.

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

Labour needs someone with the guts to tell the party what it must do to avoid disaster

From our UK edition

Gordon Brown is not used to being spoken back to in Cabinet, which made a recent session on tackling David Cameron all the more memor-able. The civil servants were sent away, as is the custom at political Cabinet meetings, and the Prime Minister laid forth the Gospel according to St Gordon. The Conservatives had not changed, he said, and the next election would be a choice between Tory cuts and Labour investment — the narrative of the 2001 and 2005 campaigns. When he finished, there was an embarrassed silence. Then, one by one, his colleagues told him why he was wrong. This time last year, the Prime Minister could have told them that the moon (or Mr Cameron) was made of green cheese without fear of contradiction.

Friday

Fraser Nelson

Top economist: UK will enter recession this year

From our UK edition

The City economist I mentioned yesterday, Michael Saunders from Citibank, has today revised forecasts and believes the UK recession will start this year and expects growth of 0.3% next year with a feeble 0.6% in 2010. He says: “Recession is not certain, but seems more likely than not. Our base case now has GDP falling in both Q3 and Q4 this year, although the general outlook of severe weakness is more important than the exact quarterly path of GDP…. “A hangover of high private debts, low household savings, elevated house prices, weak export performance, relatively high wage growth, and weak fiscal position… .

Fraser Nelson

The Glasgow East by-election shows us the two Scotlands

From our UK edition

My wee film about Glasgow East will be shown on BBC Daily Politics today. I’ve blogged plenty about this, but if CoffeeHousers will indulge me here’s my take on the debate so far. There has been some controversy about the claim that life expectancy there is worse than the Gaza Strip; part of this is down to the left’s inability to comprehend the extent of the poverty their policies have nurtured there. But the Gaza comparison is actually a gross understatement. Male life expectancy for the whole of Glasgow, including its lush suburbs, averages 70.7 years - worse than Gaza’s 71.01 years. In East Glasgow, it goes right down to 53.9 years in the Calton ward (see here for a full rundown).

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

House price crash the worst since the war

From our UK edition

For months we’ve been hearing that however bad it may be with Brown, it was worse under Major. But new house price data from the Halifax shows that this is not the case. House prices have declined more sharply than at any time since 1983. Prices have dropped 8.7 percent year on year, 8.5 percent in the last six months and 5.9 percent in the last three months. So Brown has already broken Major’s unwanted record on house prices, as well as sterling depreciation. The quarterly house price data, which started in 1955 never showed significant downturns. And real estate rose steadily in the post-war years. The razor-sharp Michael Saunders from Citibank concludes today that: “The recent decline in house prices is probably already the greatest for over 50 years.

Fraser Nelson

Labour’s factions

From our UK edition

Talk about how to depose Gordon Brown is widespread in Labour circles, but for journalists it is hard to know how to convey it. There is no real news story, insofar as there has been no rebels’ meeting (that we know about) but the whispers have reached such volume that it has become an event in itself. In my political column for the magazine today, I lay out the three camps. The Insurgents: This includes but is not limited to Blairites. They want to use the recess to dump him, arguing that the longer he stays the more damage Labour will sustain and the larger the Tory majority will be.

Wednesday

Fraser Nelson

What’s really happening in the credit market

From our UK edition

As Joni Mitchell said, you don't know what you got till it's gone. Only when cheap credit is over do we realise how much we relied on it, and that what Gordon Brown wrongly labelled "prosperity" was a debt-fuelled mirage. The key to making sense of the credit crunch is to ditch the old measurements and find new ones. The Bank of England base rate doesn't matter anymore, mortgages have a life of their own. Today the Bank showed what's happening. Base rates may not have moved, but interest rates certainly have. The average interest rate on a 75 percent LTV (loan-to-value) two-year fix jumped to 6.63 percent last month from 6.26 percent in May. Ouch. It is up a full point since Christmas.

Fraser Nelson

The campaign in Glasgow East

From our UK edition

Drive around Glasgow East and it seems the SNP is making most of the headway. Its simple yellow fluorescent logo is everywhere. When I was in the constituency yesterday, I saw the same SNP van in four different parts of the seat– blasting out music and with “on your side” written in big letters on the side of it. There’s no doubt about it, the Nationalists are making their presence felt. Their message is: “You’ve voted Labour for decades – and what has it got you?” This resonates. The Nats have a head start. It is a delicious irony that Gordon Brown called the Glasgow East by-election early so as to catch the SNP unawares. Yet it is his own party that has run around clueless, trying to find a candidate and being knocked back by four.

Tuesday

Fraser Nelson

What I saw in Glasgow East

From our UK edition

I'm in Glasgow East for the day, making a short film of my column in the current Spectator for the BBC. We've just been in perhaps the most run down housing estate I have seen – there is a doll in the doorway next to a dead rat. Houses were boarded up, and you'd think it was condemned if it wasn't for a postman making his way inside. It made it all the more appalling to see two kids stepping over this junk to go back home. I spoke to them briefly - twins, aged 12. They said it was okay on the estate, aside from the gang fighting on Fridays. Their complaint was that it there was nothing to do here. I asked why all the houses had been vacated. Vandalism, they said – people having their windows put in.

Monday

Fraser Nelson

Scottish sectarianism

From our UK edition

Is it significant that Cameron will speak in a Catholic church in his visit to Glasgow East today? You can bet any Scottish politicians would have avoided any church in a constituency where sectarianism remains a factor – and one not very well understood in Westminster. Church observance may not be high, but the east of Glasgow is still an area where pubs are known as Catholic, Protestant or mixed. It is still shaking off a long and deep legacy. My father grew up in one of Glasgow East’s council schemes, and in those days Protestant kids like him simply didn’t know any Catholics. The self-segregation was complete. It has got better now, but it is still there.

Sunday

Fraser Nelson

A reconstruction report-card 

From our UK edition

Like James, I’ve been admiring the new issue of Time – what caught my eye was its superb report on the Kajaki Damn in Afghanistan. This is Britain’s top reconstruction project in the Afghanistan and it’s taken an American publication to give us the low-down (and a stunning collection of photographs) on how Our Boys are doing. Here are my top five extracts…. 1. Military officials say the insurgency doesn't have the numbers to win a conventional fight. But the Taliban doesn't need to win. It just needs to outlast the will of foreign nations. Few Afghans believe that the Taliban offers a better alternative to the current government, but many are convinced that it will be around longer 2. There are only 8,500 British troops in Helmand.

Fraser Nelson

Situation soon to be vacant?

From our UK edition

When John Reid was given his last-ever appointment, he’d have fun introducing himself at meetings by saying “I’m John Reid and I am the current Home Secretary.” It was a good joke, both at the instability of the post and his own itinerancy. But if you Google “Labour” then its first line of introduction is “Britain's democratic socialist party currently led by Gordon Brown”. I just love that “currently”. If I were the Labour Party webmaster, I wouldn’t put anything more permanent there either.

Friday

Fraser Nelson

Why Brown will be cheering on the Tories in Glasgow East

From our UK edition

David Cameron is heading up to Glasgow East on Monday to make a visit with Iain Duncan Smith – and they will be campaigning like mad. You may think they’d take their foot of the pedal and leave it to the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders (aka the Scottish National Party). But it suits the Tories better when Brown clings on. They want him wounded, but surviving. He is, after all, the Tories’ most powerful recruiting sergeant. Remember this is a 13,500 majority on a 30,900 turnout – ie, Labour had a stonking 61% of the vote last time and the SNP 17%. Cabinet members I have spoken to uniformly predict defeat, as do bookmakers. I disagree. The SNP has two advantages. One is momentum. The other is superior intelligence on the ground.