Duncan Weldon

According to the advance briefings Cameron’s conference speech today will feature a call for households to ‘pay off their credit cards’. This seems an odd call to be making at a time when we now know that the economy hasn’t grown for 3 quarters and  household consumption has fallen for four consecutive quarters. Indeed Q2 of this year saw the largest fall in household spending since the dark days of the recession.

I can’t think of a time that a major political leader has ever stood up and essentially argued – ‘we face a renewed risk of recession – therefore you should probably spent less’,  if an opposition figure made the same case they would undoubtedly be accused of talking the economy down’.

But what makes this call doubly odd is that the Office of Budget Responsibility’s forecasts are premised on a large rise in personal debt. They forecast household borrowings to rise from £1,560bn in 2010 to £2,126bn by 2015, an increase of 36.3%.

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Philip Pearson

Is the FT right to report the Chancellor has “signalled a retreat from the green agenda” in his speech on Monday? Osborne blamed environmental regulations for “piling costs on the energy bills of households and companies. We’re not going to save the planet by putting our country out of business.” Climate change might be a “man-made disaster”, but Britain would cut its carbon emissions “no slower but also no faster than our fellow countries in Europe.”  Yet  a million people now work in the expanding green sector. Are environmental regulations really holding back growth?

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Owen Tudor

Since the European Commission published its proposals for a Financial Transactions Tax (FTT), the problems that the Robin Hood Tax campaign had in getting the story into the papers – in particular the Financial Times – have melted away. Battle has clearly been joined. This is good, because even where the articles are negative, they are underlining some key arguments which favour our campaign. These are that FTTs are feasible, that they need to be carefully designed, and that they would tackle some of the worst features of the contemporary financial sector. Even better from a campaigning angle, the most vocal opponents of an FTT look the most partisan, self-interested and out of touch with ordinary life.

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Richard Exell

I have a post at Left Foot Forward looking at George Osborne’s plan to restrict access to justice for unfairly sacked workers. The evidence doesn’t back up his claim that it will create jobs; in any case, the UK has one of the least regulated labour markets in the developed world.

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Owen Tudor

Andrew Mitchell is apparently under fire again for being the International Development Minister charged with spending what the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats pledged to spend on overseas aid (the UN recommended level of 0.7% of gross national income) - and first reports suggest he has completely failed to mention the pledge in his speech to Conservative Party Conference, perhaps worried it would fan the flames.

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