Adam Lent

In the highly technical world of fiscal stimulus analysis, we often have to pay due regard to the ‘oomph quotient’: a precise measure of how stimulating any package is.  The US stimulus package announced earlier this year was very oomph worthy.  As I wrote on this blog some time ago, the US Government sent £85 billion worth of tax rebate cheques to 130 million taxpayers.  Those cheques were worth on average £650.  That initiative bought the US a quarter of unexpectedly high growth.

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Nigel Stanley

Nick Robinson reports the effect of the planned tax rises for the top one per cent.

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Richard Exell

Last month 10,000 people came to the End Child Poverty rally in Trafalgar square to urge the government to keep the promise to halve child poverty by 2010; the key measure we were demanding was an extra £3 billion in tax credits and benefits for children. Did today’s pre-budget report move us closer to this goal?

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Nigel Stanley

This is our detailed press reaction to the PBR:

TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber said:

“The Chancellor was right to inject this extra money into the economy. We welcome the significant extra cash that he has put into the pockets of low and medium paid workers, and the extra help for pensioners. The new Ofgem probe into energy prices has the potential to reduce fuel bills if pursued with vigour.

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Tim Page

The use of this year’s Pre Budget Report (PBR) to bring foward Government spending on large infrastructure projects was trailed so long ago that it feels like old news. Nevertheless, today saw details of those projects announced by the Chancellor.

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Brendan Barber

The Chancellor was right to inject this extra money into the economy. He has changed the political debate by breaking the taboo that the super-rich should never pay more tax.

He did about as much today as he could to boost the economy but we will need further interest rate cuts and action to get credit flowing to effectively bear down on the recession.

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Nigel Stanley

Liveblog of Alastair Darling’s Pre-Budget Review 2008

Can we take the Chancellor’s words about the lack of compensation schemes in off shore jurisdictions – ie tax havens – as a sign of a shift away from the UK’s quiet support for its dependent taxhavens such as the Channel Islands?

Inflation down to half per cent next year!

And the economy could shrink as much as 1.25% next year – though will start to recover in the third quarter.

It’s a £20 billion stimulus. Big in historic terms - but not as big as some think necessary given the depth of the downturn. It’s one per cent of GDP. One and half per cent would have been better.

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Our thought are over here, but what’s the rest of the UK blogosphere saying? Mick Fealty, Richard Murphy,  Conservative Home, Dizzy, Lib Dem Voice and Iain Dale are watching closely too.

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Nigel Stanley

This is our first live blogging event. We plan to do it like this.

TUC policy experts will all be sitting in the General Secretary’s office watching the television coverage, and discussing what’s said.

I will distill that into pithy comments while the Chancellor is speaking, and add them to a rolling post.

(Of course anything that looks particularly perceptive in the cold light of tomorrow will be all my own work. Anything that doesn’t look that good will be items where I have only acted as the scribe.)

Once the Chancellor has sat down we will get out a quick press reaction as soon as we can, which we will also post here.

Individual policy experts will then go through the detail and post analysis or anything interesting that we discover here, and we may well do a more detailed media response too.

Let us know what you think, and send us links to anything you’re blogging that we should know about.

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Nigel Stanley

I am not sure that anyone much talks about Hugh Dalton these days. He was Labour’s Chancellor in the great 1945 reforming government and his time in office is probably best remembered for nationalising the Bank of England.

But it is the manner of his departure that has probably earned him his footnote in history. As Wikipedia puts it:

“Walking into the House of Commons to give the autumn 1947 Budget speech, he made an off-the-cuff remark to a journalist, telling him of some of the tax changes in the budget, which was printed in the early edition of the evening papers before he had completed his speech, and whilst the stock market was still open. This led to his resignation for leaking a Budget secret.”

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