Monthly Archives: October 2011

              The MPC meets today. We hear they might authorise more money printing today, or warm us up for more next month. (They announced £75 billion more QE -ed)             They have clearly long since abandoned their Statutory duty to control inflation. They regularly report inflation at more than twice the target level on [...]

            Yesterday there were new figures for the year to June 2011. They showed overall growth had slowed to just 0.1% in the last quarter of that year. They also showed that public spending had gone up by 1.3% in real terms over the twelve months.            When I first revealed the big cash [...]

             I took the train to Manchester. I had pre booked a heavily discounted first class ticket months ago.  My outbound ticket cost £59, and my return ticket a very reasonable £34.50.           The Monday morning train was scheduled to depart at 9.00 and arrive at 11.07. It did leave on time, but half [...]

              Fear at last stalks Whitehall on EU issues. We hear that they are crisis gaming what to do if Euroland plunges rapidly towards more integration. Officials seem to see this as some kind of threat rather than an opportunity for the UK. They are worried that the UK will be excluded from meetings [...]

             Whilst we were meeting in Manchester to debate the economy, world markets took another beating. There was alarm about delays to getting the Greek deficit under control. There were fears that the next tranche of money to Greece would not be made available. There were worries about a Belgian bank.           There were different [...]

  Apologists of our membership of the EU always like to minimise the budget costs to the UK. They do this by telling us how small the net contributions are, and by ignoring the huge administration and compliance costs that fall on UK government and companies. My colleague Bernard Jenkin has been digging the figures [...]

    As this subject seems to have broken out amongst spin doctors and media commentators, fuelled in part by Mr Tyrie’s comments,  it is time to dust it down again. There are five main runners: 1. Spend and borrow more in the public sector – the even larger fiscal stimulus. I dismissed this idea [...]

            I was astonished by a letter I received this week from Theresa Villiers, railway Minister. It seemed to say welcome to the EUSR, as Bob would write. It invited me as an MP to make all sorts of representations at various periods over the next two and half years, as the heavily nationalised [...]