Fraser Nelson

Has Glasgow East influenced the postponed 2p increase in fuel duty, as David Cameron implied today? I doubt it, for a depressing reason. The place is so poor that most households in that constituency – 59% to be precise – simply don’t have access to a car (let alone own one). For the record, here are the car ownership figures for some of the estates in Glasgow East (from the 2001 census). In Parkhead North, 77.2% have no car. In Easterhouse it’s 71%. In Banlanark, 71%. In Bridgeton, 64%.  I can understand why, in Westminster, they may have a vision of the motorists of Glasgow East punching the air in response to today’s news. But there is another area of government policy that matters more to the electors of Glasgow East.

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.

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.

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.

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.