Month: Apr 2009

http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f8/1570028817

I wonder how many times Gordon Brown rehearsed this video? For all of his hard work he seems incredibly ill at ease and entirely unauthentic.

It is very smelly that Brown is launching this today before the budget and proposing to steam roller his proposals through next week. Trying to change the subject by any chance? Apparently he hasn’t even talked to the opposition leaders yet. Is he going to spend all of next week shouting I tried to fix MP’s expenses but the Tories and LibDems ruined my plans?

He wants to control MP’s expenses by removing the Additional Costs Allowance and introducing a per diem. What is wrong with just claiming justified expenses against receipts like everyone in the business world? Brown is also trying to bring paid work into the picture which is a valid debate to be had but in trying to put expenses fiddling in the same category as paid work he is moral equivalencing theft and hard graft which only a socialist could do.

What Brown is not telling you is that Parliament cost a whopping £461.5 million in 2006/7, that is about £350,000 per member. See some figures here. They don’t feel obliged to publish any statements of accounts anywhere you and I can find them. Brown’s video is small beer. Let’s sharpen the axe on this budget first.

On Wednesday 22nd we will hear about how our government is going to lead us to the promised land and save us from the Credit Crunch. Fat chance. Instead this weekend the reality is more stories of how venal and corrupt our Labour masters are. We are the masters now. Yeah right.

In the Sunday Times we hear how Ed Balls is that the centre of the web.

In the News of the World we hear how the Labour General Secretary is implicated.

Clearly Rupert Murdoch and News International have turned.

Today Tim Montgomerie at the excellent ConservativeHome points out two stories about Boris Johnson in the Evening Standard and talks about “Good juxtaposition”. For me a more striking juxtaposition was between these two stories:

Yesterday the Sunday Times carried reports of an interview with Chancellor Alistair Darling admitting that he and his Treasury officials had got it wrong over the length and severity of the recession and that he will be forced to tear up his economic predictions. The Today programme this morning bought confirmation, if any was needed, that the assumptions made in last year’s Pre-Budget Report (PBR) were indeed too optimistic. Although the PBR signalled a fiscal tightening (ie less spending or more taxing year on year) of about £38 billion a year the Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) reckons we “need about the same again”. The IFS’s paper published today spells out how another £40 billion will need to be taken out.

I was pleased to hear Shadow Chancellor George Osborne later on the Today programme, click here and move the slider to 7:42, say:

Well I haven’t ruled out further tax rises although I will work hard to avoid them because I think where the bulk of the strain needs to be borne is on spending restraint.

Don’t forget that although the PBR talked about both employer’s and employee’s National Insurance going up by 0.5% and a new top rate of tax at 45%, both after the next election naturally, this only amounted to about one fifth of the tightening required, four fifths came from Labour’s cuts which the government has done its utmost to avoid talking about. Indeed Gordon Brown’s overturning of his own fiscal planning regime by cancelling the summer’s planned comprehensive spending review demonstrates just how bloody public spending is going to get. As Andrew Rawnsley in the Observer said two weeks ago:

A comprehensive spending review was due this summer. Gordon Brown has quietly told Alistair Darling to scrap it. To publish forward-spending figures now would be to advertise the terrible state of the public finances in neon lights and stick a “Kick Me Here” sign to the backsides of both the chancellor and the prime minister. It would also unleash the bloodiest Whitehall spending negotiations in a generation. Below the radar, the Treasury is already trying to do some mild slashing and burning, seeking “efficiency savings” of £5bn from departmental budgets. Some of the spending ministers are squealing about that even though it is peanuts in the context of the awesome size of the problem.

Public spending is going to get very difficult very soon. Whoever takes over after the next election is going to have to make some truly eye-watering spending decisions. Make no mistake that it is in large part the fault of one man – Gordon Brown.