James Forsyth is former political editor of The Spectator.
Besides the Budget, there’s been another important political development today: the failure of Brown to achieve a consensus among the party leaders on reform of MPs’ expenses. This is hardly surprising since Brown issued his proposals yesterday without consulting Cameron or Clegg. All parties have tended to be cautious about making too much politically out
On the BBC News site at the moment, the Budget headline is: Tax rise as UK debt hits record Brown’s diversionary tactic doesn’t seem to be working.
The Tories have just released their Budget briefing. It includes this statement: Our priority is to avoid Labour’s tax rises that affect the many not the few, like the increase in National Insurance which is a tax on everyone who earns over £20,000 This echoes Phillip Hammond’s remarks straight after the Budget. But it is important to
The 50p rate is a political measure not a fiscal one. In government terms it will raise peanuts. It is designed to stoke up Labour’s base and to split the Tories. Brown will be delighting at the bind it has put the Tories in. If they oppose it, Labour will try and paint them as
Even the Red Book says the government will get more revenue from increasing the tax on jobs than the 50p rate. The Red Book says that increasing the rate to 50p on income over £150,000 would raise £1,810 million in 2011-12. By contrast, raising employees’ national insurance contributions by 0.5 percent brings in £1,960 million
Hamish McRae, one of the few economic commentators whose reputation has been enhanced by the current crisis, has a fantastic column in The Independent today. In it, he argues that to get out of the economic mess of the 1970s we had to work out how to produce monetary discipline and that we now have to
All New Labour Budgets contain an apparently good news story which has not been briefed out in advance. The idea is that this then becomes a key part of the Budget day story. One rumour doing the rounds in Westminster tonight is that tomorrow’s surprise will be that the cash will be provided to put
Torture is not a pleasant subject to discuss. But it is intellectually dishonest to argue that torture is always ineffective. Marc Thiessen, a former Bush official, writes in the Washington Post about what information was obtained by torturing Khalid Sheik Mohammed: Consider the Justice Department memo of May 30, 2005. It notes that “the CIA
The Retail Price Index for March was -0.4 percent, the first time this measure has been negative since 1960. The Consumer Price Index, however, is 2.9 percent–considerably over the government’s 2 percent target.
Guido flags up the news that Damian McBride is facing expulsion from the Labour Party. His local MP, Rudi Vis, has said that he supports expulsion and that he has “never even heard of [McBride] before”. Now, I’m sure some Coffee Housers will be applauding Vis, who has been the MP for Finchley and Golders
The latest release from the Institute for Fiscal Studies is going to restart the whole 45p rate debate: “If people respond as they did to the last set of changes to the highest income tax rates, in the late 1980s, then the new 45% band will actually reduce the Government’s revenue slightly, as the existing
It is no secret that there is real hatred between some ex-Blairite Cabinet Ministers and the Brownites. But this quote in Trevor Kavanagh’s column shows just how poisonous relations are: “We’re down to 26 per cent, but there is nothing to stop it going lower,” said an ex-Cabinet minister. “We are in freefall. “People accused
Tales of Gordon Brown’s temper are not uncommon in Westminster. Some, I am sure, have grown in the telling. But this one from Tom Bower, who wrote a prescient biography of Brown, has the ring of truth about it: “Witnesses to Brown’s reaction to defeat for the Labour’s leadership in 1994 mentioned his volcanic temper,
Alastair Campbell’s commentary on the activities of the Brownites has been full of wonderfully barbed comments, but I think this one takes the biscuit: “I see both Alistair and I appear in a list of people allegedly smeared or briefed against by a unit run by Ed Balls. All I cay say is if so,
As Pete noted last night, Ed Balls is being drawn into the heart of the row over the political culture of Brown’s inner circle. An editorial in The Sunday Times declares: “when a senior minister seeks even greater power through being at the heart of a smear campaign, it is time to cut him down
I expect that the selection of a Labour candidate in Erith and Thamesmead would normally be of limited interest to Coffee Housers. But the contest there, which has had to be suspended because of a broken seal on a ballot box, is a sign of the coming internecine war in the Labour party. Erith and
It is normally a pretty safe bet that when the Budget comes around, there’ll be increases in the taxes on cigarettes and alcohol. These are taxes that you can raise without encountering too much political opposition. Now, though, the public finances are in such a dire state that such measures can’t do much to fill
There are many aspects of the Damian Green affair that are shocking—the breach of Parliamentary privilege, the decision to arrest an opposition MP for essentially doing his job and the role of the permanent secretary at the Home Office—but I think this might be the most disturbing: The police checked his e-mails for information on
Barack Obama announced yesterday that there will be no prosecutions of those CIA operatives who interrogated suspects using sanctioned methods that the US government now repudiates as torture. I think this is the right call. It would be, and I realise this is a subject where people get particularly passionate for understandable reasons, wrong to
PR Week has had a string of scoops about the inner workings of Brown’s Downing Street and this week it has another one. David Singleton reports that: Well-placed sources told PRWeek there was mounting fear in the heart of Downing Street that fresh revelations about senior MPs could emerge over the next few weeks and