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The most curious thing about David Miliband’s article for the latest New Statesman — which is causing quite a stir this morning — is that it should appear now. After all, the Roy Hattersley essay that it purports to be responding to was published, so far as I can tell, last September. That’s five months
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As promised earlier, here’s my more detailed supplementary take on today’s IFS Green Budget. I’ve distilled it down into six points, but obviously there’s much, much more in the actual document itself. I’d recommend that you read the chapters on public sector pensions and pay, the 50p rate, and child benefit, in particular, if you’re
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It’s the halftime coffee break here at the launch of the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ Green Budget, so I thought I’d send CoffeeHousers a quick update. But first, just to be clear, that’s green meaning green, not green meaning environmental. This is the IFS’s annual, different-hued version of the Treasury’s Red Book. It’s their overall
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And so Fred Goodwin has lost his knighthood. Here’s the Cabinet Office statement (and some of my previous thoughts here): ‘It will soon be announced in the London Gazette that the Knighthood conferred upon Fred Goodwin as a Knight Bachelor has been cancelled and annulled. This decision, not normally publicised in advance, was taken on
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If you wanted proof that Cameron has softened his stance towards Europe since the hard chill of December, then just look to the Lib Dems. Nick Clegg, unlike then, was sat next to the Prime Minister as he gave his statement to the Commons this afternoon. And the questions that followed from the likes of
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Ed Miliband is not naturally a eurospectic, but he certainly sounded like one during his appearance on ITV’s Daybreak show earlier. ‘I’m very concerned about what David Cameron has done,’ he said in reference to the PM’s equivocation over Europe yesterday. ‘He’s sold us down the river.’ Whether this is Miliband committing towards the sort
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‘We will insist that the EU institutions — the court, the commission — that they work for all 27 nations of the EU.’ So said David Cameron, back in December, suggesting that he’d block Europe’s ‘fiscal compact’ countries from using EU-wide institutions to enforce their, er, fiscal compact. But now this component of his ‘veto’
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How about this for a claim by Nicolas Sarkozy, made in a TV appearance yesterday? ‘Europe is no longer at the edge of the cliff.’ It’s quite some statement, so let’s hear it again: ‘Europe is no longer at the edge of the cliff.’ Of course, Sarkozy has reasons for saying it beyond mere pre-electoral
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First there was Fred Goodwin, now there’s Stephen Hester. The chief executive of RBS is fast becoming the bête noire of the British banking system, thanks to his roughly £1 million share bonus which, we learn in the Sunday Times (£) this morning, may be topped up with an extra £8 million over the next
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A-ha! Labour have hit on a line on the benefits cap, and Liam Byrne is peddling it in the Daily Telegraph this morning. ‘Now, there are some people who are against this idea altogether,’ he writes, ‘Neither I, nor Ed Miliband are among them.’ The way he sees it, he goes on to explain, is
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It has been quite a few days for transparency in Westminster. First, Ben Gummer’s ten minute rule bill for tax transparency — which would see every taxpayer in the country receive a statement detailing what they owe and what the money’s being spent on — earned itself a second reading in the House. And now, today,
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Reading Cameron’s speech to the suits in Davos, one thing stands out: he’s in no mood to stop ‘lecturing’ the eurozone, as Nicolas Sarkozy would put it. The whole thing is saturated with firm advice for our European brethren, from generalities such as ‘Tinkering here and there and hoping we’ll drift to a solution simply
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Newt channels JFK, sorta, in Florida last night: Although, sadly for moon colonists (and Jurassic Park enthusiasts), Romney has now pulled level with Gingrich in most of the Florida polling — and is now, slightly, the favourite to take next week’s primary.
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Remember those Lib Dem calls for a mansion tax at the weekend? I said at the time that, ‘the Lib Dems appear to be drawing more attention to which of their own policies they are fighting for within government, whether those policies make it to the statute books or not.’ Well, now they’re at it
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PMQs 25 January
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I’m still of the mind that Westminster fusses too much about these quarterly growth figures, particularly when parts of the country have been in economic decline for decades. But there’s no doubting that they have the capacity to shift the political mood, both here and around the country. There is something disheartening about the idea
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More here.
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A Romney-seeking missile. That was what much of Barack Obama’s State of the Union Address amounted to last night. He didn’t mention the Republican presidential challenger by name, of course. That would have been too obvious. But he did dwell on those sorts of issues around taxation and jobs — including his ‘Buffett Rule’, by
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If you were in a particularly soggy mood, you’d almost feel sorry for Chuka Umunna. He’d managed to force Vince Cable into the House this afternoon, to announce the coalition’s plans for curbing executive pay a day earlier than planned, and he must have been feeling pretty swell about it. This was, on paper, the
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There are Lib Dems everywhere today, CoffeeHousers, and they’re differentiating like crazy. We had Nick Clegg himself on the Andrew Marr show earlier, waxing lukewarm about Boris Island, and there have been moments of assertiveness from his party colleagues as well. Here’s a quick round-up: 1) Chris Huhne. The embattled energy minister hasn’t taken to
