Monthly Archives: July 2009

Prudence was divorced long ago by the government, as we can see from the state of the public finances. Now Prudence is to be penalised and punished, If you have saved, you will be offered practically no interest on your savings. If you have saved through a pension fund, it now has to pay tax [...]

The government today will announce carbon budgets for all, with precise targets for reductions by 2020 and 2050. All this comes from a government which still has not learned how to run a cash budget for its spending. Never have the public accounts be so out of control as they are currently. I doubt the [...]

Yesterday was another day that captured the mood of a broken Parliament and a government in steep decline. Jack Straw was the main performer. He is one of the few government Ministers that takes Parliament seriously, and does understand the need to respond to the debate. Yesterday he laboured under two severe handicaps. His bad [...]

Today we are promised a statement from UKFI on the future of the nationalised banks. I expect to agree with them that Northern Rock should be an early disposal, but I do not agree that all its tricky liabilities should remain with the state. The point of the sale should be to get rid of [...]

There are fewer marriages and more divorces. Iain Duncan Smith is about to produce some more work on what could be done to keep more marriages alive, fending off divorce, and how people could be helped before entering a marriage to give people more chance of long term happiness. These are good intentions. People with [...]

This morning I heard that Michael Crick for the BBC is going to produce a programme on the growing taxpayer cost of politics. I am glad they are going to draw attention to this trend, which has gathered huge momentum in the last decade. Labour is happier with politics as a great nationalised industry. There [...]

The advent of the public spending crisis has encouraged the Lib Dems and some left wing Labour MPs to return to the idea that the UK should not renew its nuclear deterrent. It is touching that even they now understand that the UK public sector is spending too much and needs to rein in its [...]

Alastair Darling used a strange phrase when describing what he needs to do on public spending. Maybe he has a sharp sense of humour. He promises to tell us more about the lie of the land: more than the PM wishes to tell us, less than a full scale public spending review which would need [...]

Eight young soldiers dead in a single day in Afghanistan is a heavy price. It has woken the media up to the dangers of Afghanistan, and led to the start of a debate about what we are doing there, for how long we might be doing it, and what winning might look like. We all [...]