Nicola Smith

In addition to its top line commitments to significantly accelerate the speed to deficit reduction ‘with the main burden of deficit reduction borne by reduced spending rather than increased taxes’ the Coalition Agreement gives us some new information on future cuts. These are:

• Cutting costs in the Ministry of Defence by 25%
• Cutting administration costs in the NHS by a third
• A fundamental review of Legal Aid to make it more ‘efficient’
• A cut in the number of non-departmental public bodies
• The Government Office for London will be cut, with other Government Offices at risk of closure
• ‘Many further education quangos’ will be abolished
• The Infrastructure Planning Commission will be cut
• The Standards Board regime will be abolished

In addition, existing commitments to cut Child Trust Funds and Child Tax Credits for ‘high earners’ (the threshold is not yet defined) have been re-stated.

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Tim Page

The Con Lib Coalition has published its full agreement this morning. The agreement runs to 36 pages, which makes it impossible to cover in any great depth here. There are, however, a few points that deserve an immediate mention.

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Adam Lent

John Cridland of the CBI described George Osborne’s speech last night as “manna from heaven”.  Time to panic, in my view, since the CBI had an identical perspective on the light touch financial regulation that has served us so well in recent years.

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Tim Page

We are now five days away from the first really signficant economic announcement of the new government. On Monday, we will be given more details of the £6bn spending cuts for 2010-11, which were previously opposed by the Lib Dems as a threat to economic growth, but which will now be introduced by their Chief Secretary to the Treasury, David Laws.

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Owen Tudor

The campaign for a financial transactions tax is a bit off and on, but the Greek crisis has given it a major boost – especially in Germany – and now the EU Finance Ministers have joined the call, with their most forthright statement yet. The Financial Times‘ Tony Barber reports that “eurozone ministers, some of whom have spoken harshly about the role of financial markets in the debt crisis, made clear they would press ahead with their campaign to persuade the US and other countries to impose a tax on global financial transactions”. Luxemburg’s Prime Minister Jean Claude Juncker said:

“We shall advocate more global taxation on financial transactions.”

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• Working Mothers in the Great Recession
  A new report from the US Congress' Joint Economic Committee on how working mothers have been affected by the downturn. The report concludes that while the vast majority of American jobs lost were lost by men, a substantial number of jobs were lost by women. From December 2007 to April 2010, women lost 46 jobs for every 100 jobs lost by men. By comparison, during the 2001 recession, women lost 17 jobs for every 100 lost by men and women lost less than 2 jobs for every 100 jobs lost by men during the 1990s recession. The report concludes that women's increased vulnerability to the business cycle has important repercussions for families’ economic security.

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Adam Lent

Download the 3rd TUC Labour Market Report

The TUC’s Labour Market report tries to make sense of the latest jobs and earnings data. The latest issue (number 3) is published today.

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Adam Lent

It was predictable that Osborne would claim to have found further cases of fiscal irresponsibility once he got in to No.11.  But given that the Tories have spent the last year or more telling us that the markets are on the brink of ramping up interest rates to compensate for the higher risks of UK debt, surely these comments are deeply irresponsible and will only damage the economy further.  Or maybe they don’t really think the markets are that concerned.

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Adam Lent

I almost fell off my chair when I read the headline above in The Observer. Could it be that the Lib-Cons were about to break the taboo and look at the real cause of poverty - low pay?  No such luck unfortunately: one review of public sector pay and a separate one on poverty.

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Owen Tudor

The DGB is the German TUC, and I’m at its four-yearly Congress. In the opening speech, President Michael Sommer has asked the Chancellor of Germany, Christian Democrat Angela Merkel, how she intends to deal with the damage inflicted on the real economy by hedge funds and the rest of the financial sector, including by imposing a Financial Transactions Tax.

Of course, trade union leaders always throw down such rhetorical challenges to political leaders at their conferences. But at the DGB Congress, it’s not a rhetorical flourish – the Chancellor is the next speaker and will have to respond. The DGB certainly handles relationships with political parties rather differently from the TUC.

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