Nigel Stanley
I missed a poll that the BBC’s Daily Politics show commissioned last week (full results pdf).
It does not show overwhelming support for George Osborne’s deficit reduction package. Here are some of the results:
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Nigel Stanley
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Philip Pearson
More and better Government leadership and interventions, both at national and local level, are essential if we are to cut our CO2 by 30% by 2020. This so-called “30% World” outlined by Lord Turner today in Meeting Carbon Budgets – the need for a step change means, at national level, more market interventions to accelerate investment in power supply and electric vehicles. And locally, a new green role for local government is essential for the street-by-street programme of home energy savings the Climate Change Committee is calling for.
With the right leadership, this programme can create tens of thousands of new jobs and cut our CO2 at the rate needed.
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Owen Tudor
Reading David Cameron’s speech to Conservative Party Conference, and the speeches of Conservative spokespeople on foreign affairs and development, there is a great deal of continuity with what the Labour Government is doing internationally - along with a fair amount of effort to create the impression of clear blue water. Some of what is suggested is welcome – either because it retains what is good in what Labour is doing (such as the commitment to meet the overseas aid target of 0.7% of GNI by 2013), or adds things that Labour currently isn’t stressing. There’s not much bad – except for their stance on European rights for workers – but the real “clear blue water” isn’t between Labour and the Conservatives – it’s between the Conservatives’ approach to public spending domestically and internationally: given Conservative plans to slash and burn public expenditure, what will their international policy cost? And if we take their commitments at face value, why is it a good thing to spend Government money abroad, but not at home?
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Nigel Stanley
Patrick Hosking is very rude about the National Association of Pension Funds in the Times today. He makes two charges. First:
Few have more reason to complain about the reckless greed of bankers, yet there has been barely a peep from the sector. The National Association of Pension Funds (NAPF), the body with the authority, credibility and firepower to make its voice heard, has stayed schtum.
This seems to me to be fair comment, and indeed we have already said roughly the same if more politely. But his second charge is wrong.
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Nigel Stanley
We didn’t analyse David Cameron’s speech here because it was light on policy. (That’s not a criticism by the way. There’s a lot to be said for setting out ideology and vision when politics is often so managerialist and driven by whatever this week’s media obsession happens to be.)
But I’ve been pondering what I think is a big logical flaw in the politics he set out – and that of compassionate conservativism in general. Some of his arguments were clearly influenced by so-called red Tory Phillip Blond. I heard him speak at a couple of fringe meetings at the Labour Party conference and found his views (well set out in the New Statesman here) interesting.
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Nigel Stanley
Readers may have noticed we don’t like the TaxPayers’ Alliance very much here on Touchstone. So three cheers for the Guardian’s expose today.
Clifford Singer has done most of all to take the TPA on over at The Other Taxpayers Alliance so I’ll defer further comment to him.
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The Tax Justice Network have been very busy investigating tax havens, and have now published a huge amount of data at this valuable new site.
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Chris Dillow harbours doubts over the media's economic literacy
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Tom P doesn't understand why the Conservatives are spending money on reversing the tax changes that they wrongly say lies behind the decline in DB pensions.
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Nicola Smith
Earlier this week David Cameron told us that the Conservative Party was committed to to “fight for the poorest“, and that he wants every child to have the same opportunities that were afforded to him. He is concerned about the problems of “poverty, crime, addiction, failing schools, sink estates, broken homes.” And at a conference fringe Andrew Selous (Shadow Minister for Work and Pensions) reportedly informed attendees that the Conservatives would be focused on dealing with “the root causes of poverty in a rigorous ways”. What does this mean?
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Johann Hari claims in the Independent that the current mania for slashing public spending is based on a faulty reading of economics.
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Nigel Stanley
Former CBI boss and Trade Minister goat, Digby Jones, has attacked public sector pensions:
We are heading towards an apartheid,’ said Jones. ‘If we are not careful we are going to get an ever-decreasing private sector to pay the tax in order to have an inefficient public sector.