They Blog For You

                 First we are told that providing a new loan to Greece, or Ireland, or Portugal, creates a line in the sand, prevents the contagion spreading. As each sucessive loan demand showed, that did not work. The incoming tide of debt erased the lines. The contagion spread. The mixed metaphors [...]

Have you noticed your pint going up in price recently? Firstly there was the VAT rise in January, which saw an extra 6p added to the price of a pint and then at the end of March, the 7.2% increase in alcohol duty added on another 4p. I know beer [...]

Yesterday is being termed as "Black Wednesday" for families - the day the Government introduced cuts to tax credits, childcare support and child benefit that will only add to the squeeze that low and middle income families are already feeling thanks to January's 2.5% VAT increase and the affects of [...]

As has often been said, the banks have a policy: privatise their gains, socialise their losses.   However we should have a different policy: make the banks pay for what they have done and restructure them so that they can never do it again.   Fat chance of course that anything like this [...]

It’s worrying that Ed Miliband in launching Labour’s local election campaign seemed so defensive and uncertain about his economic case, when it is actually very powerful.   Economic growth by itself, on the Government’s own forecasts, will halve this year’s Budget deficit within 5 years without a single public expenditure cut [...]

                 The media and politicians concentrate on the coming squeeze on the public sector. It is struggling to live within an extra £485 billion overdraft to tide it over the next five years, and to live with an increase of just £93 billion a year by Year 5 for current [...]

                  Based on doorstep conversations recently, and visits to speak to Conservative Associations, I encounter the following attitudes. Many Conservatives now see the Coaliti0n government as heavily Lib Dem influenced. They tell me they want changes in policy, to reflect the poor financial condition of the country and the preponderance [...]

We like to think of Britain as a free market economy. But are we? In a little over a decade, state spending as a percentage of GDP has increased from around 35 percent to approximately 50 percent. That's higher than in certain former Soviet republics. It is not simply that so much economic [...]

                  The Chancellor said in his budget the Revenue will study the effects of the 50% tax rate on tax revenues.                 The Adam Smith Institutue has already published some of the important findings. (In the Revenue and Growth effects of Britain’s high personal taxes)They show that the Howe Lawson income tax [...]

Another week, another transfer of power to Brussels. Today the House of Commons takes note of approves the "start of a new cycle of economic governance in the European Union .... designed to apply to the EU as a [...]

It emerged in the Budget debate which ended today in the Commons that the need for spending cuts is far from the inevitability that Osborne has always claimed.   The independent OBR estimates of growth for the next 5 years, albeit recently scaled down, are still 1.7% this year, 2.5% next year, [...]

You're no doubt sick of me going on about the Budget now, but I did want to draw attention to a small victory. Last Wednesday, the Chancellor announced that he would not abolish Community Investment Tax Relief, despite being advised by the Office of Tax Simplification to scrap it. I [...]

I just did an interview on the Daily Politics about public spending cuts - and why the government was actually finding it rather more difficult to curb spending than the rhetoric suggests. It is a mathematical fact that total public spending is actually set to rise from £669 Billion in the last year of Labour, to a projected £740 Billion [...]

                     I am against the waste of money on the census. The government tells me they do not like it either, but it was too late to cancel it. They are  still going ahead spending more on sending it out and collecting it in. A picture of dumping the forms [...]

It is astonishing that the banks, having cost the country £68bn in bailouts plus an additional £850bn in loan guarantees, asset protection schemes and enhanced liquidity, have not been reformed in any way in structure, pay, bonuses or lending.   True, the Vickers Commission is due to report later this year and [...]

A demo with everything. Well done TUC.  500,000 people who walked 30 deep and took 4 hours to pass through Parliament Square. 24 news outlets broadcast ten hours of interviews with the sensible moderate young and old demonstrators. The pictures were strong and appealingThe speeches were restrained and persuasive.  The violent scenes [...]

If there is one single indicator illustrating the political health as well as the economic health of a government, it is RPDI (real personal disposable income).   Year on year that tracks changes in the value of household income after taking account of inflation.   For 20 years till 2005 it rose [...]

KEVIN Brennan MP has accused George Osbourne of giving with one hand but taking it away with the other over his plans to cut 1p off fuel duty - weeks after his VAT rise added 3p.The coalition Government increased VAT by 2.5% in January which pushed petrol prices up by [...]

The capital gains tax paid this year will reflect transactions at the old rate prior to the hike from this government. The OBR forecasts £3.2 billion in receipts. For 2012-13, when the new higher rate system will be bedded down, they forecast just £2.9 billion, a fall of a tenth. [...]

This Budget does nothing to help families in North Wales who currently face real challenges and...

This Budget does nothing to help families in North Wales who currently face real challenges and from April will find a real cut in their incomes, nor does it help our businesses to grow.   Before yesterday’s Budget Labour called for a re-think to George reckless plan to cut our public [...]