Is there a recovery underway and what effect might it have? After a cold and dark winter, the sight of spring flowers defiantly if tentatively piercing the earth and braving the still chill winds is always something to raise the spirits; a pointer to sunnier days ahead. Â As with nature, so with economics: recoveries from recessions are usually patchy and slow to begin with but there comes a point where despite the bitter blasts from the continent, growth is at…
Do Dave & George simply look like push-overs? There’s a good piece by Speccie editor, Fraser Nelson, in the Telegraph on the corrosive impact that successive U-turns are having on the government. “..It sometimes feels as if Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne do not regard themselves as being in power, but instead believe they are trapped – by the opinion polls, by the Liberal Democrats, by the Civil Service, by the bond markets, or by all four. Downing Street insiders…
Is the bigger risk keeping him at No 11 or easing him out? These last four weeks have not been George Osborne’s finest. It began with a Budget which was leaked to such an extent that there was precious little for him to say on the day that was a pleasant surprise. Consequently, the coverage focussed on those parts that were unpleasant surprises, especially where these appeared to hit people on modest incomes at a time when the super-rich were…
In spite of current problems this seems a good bet After all his tribulations since the budget William Hill now make George Osborne a 14/1 shot EVER to become Prime Minister. This seems a remarkable price given that the same bookmaker is offering a skinny 9/2 against George being next Tory leader. In the current circumstances it is hard to see a grateful Tory party turning to George once Dave has stood aside to spend more time with his DVD…
Can it be fitted into the localism agenda? Earlier this week, Francis Maude gave a speech in which it was trailed that he may signal the end of national pay structures for the civil service. In the event, he didn’t touch on it, which caused some, such as Paul Waugh, to wonder whether the government decided that it was a battle too far at the moment. Perhaps, although it might simply be that the policy’s just not well enough developed….
Are incapacity benefits the new battle-ground? While so many were, it seems, watching the football or discussing the aftermath, the chancellor was giving more details of his plan to attack the country’s massive welfare bill in order to find savings. This has made the front pages of only three of the papers but the scale of his plans is enormous. The idea is to protect as much departmental spending as possible by trying to find big cuts in the £190bn…
Observer Did the paper even see the full data? The big story in the Observer, under the heading “Half of Liberal Democrat voters ready to defect after VAT rise” is based, though it is not immediately obvious, on private polling that was carried out by YouGov for the Ed Miliband campaign. There were two questions which are being made public (because it’s a private poll YouGov does not have to reveal the rest) and the first was on the child…
Was Osborne’s aim to stop Labour doing this again? For me the above Labour PEB was by far the best piece of campaigning by any party at the election. It was designed to sow doubts about what a Tory government would do by focussing on key issues that affect middle income voters. The child credit was its first main point. If there was a single reason why Labour recovered so well in the closing days campaign it was because they…