From 1997 to 2010 the UK built very little extra road space. The Labour government welcomed in many more people to the country. More people bought and used cars, vans and lorries. Congestion got worse, time and money was wasted in traffic jams, and the environment suffered from more needless pollution as a result.

The Coalition wanted to improve the road system. For the first couple of years a shortage of money and the absence of inherited plans that could be built delayed matters. More recently the government is embarked on numerous improvements, led by the introduction of so called smart motorways where emergency lanes become additional traffic lanes to provide more capacity.

Roads are supplied free at the point of use and paid for out of general taxation and public borrowing. This has its advantages. It allows people of all incomes to enjoy access to the roads without worrying about cost. It obviates the need for specific revenue collection. It also means there is no price rationing, making it difficult to assess how much roadspace we need. It means we have rationing by queues and inconvenience rather than by price.

The missing decade and a half of road building made a not very good position in 1997 far worse. There is still no south coast dual carriageway all the way from the channel ports to Southampton, although this is a very busy area. There is still no continuous dual carriageway from  the busy south east to Exeter along the A303. There is inadequate road capacity to the east coast ports, no full motorway to the Scottish border in the east, limited cross Pennine capacity. The plans I left in Wales for a main route across the top of the valleys from the A40 in the west to Swansea has not been completed (A465) .

Big roads lead to better economic development. Most industrial and commercial parks these days are located near to motorways and trunk roads, rather than next to railway lines. The next government needs to make a better national road network a priority. It also needs to do more to assist the motorist, van and lorry driver. Instead of treating all drivers as potential criminals and concentrating on taxing and fining them, government needs to see the provision of road space is a necessary public service where the users pay large fees for the privilege of using their cars and roads. Of course road safety and responsible driving matters. So should it matter that road blockages by the authorities are kept to the minimum, that they do not block roads close to each at the same time other making lives impossible, and they should be constantly improving junctions with a view to easing congestion. They need fewer traffic lights and more roundabouts.

I find it extraordinary that some people are proposing a grand coalition between the Labour and Conservative parties after the next General Election. As someone who has helped construct the Conservative Manifesto, there is no way I could reach agreement with Labour on a common government after May 7th. Conservatives want a renegotiation with the EU and an In/Out referendum. Labour opposes that implacably. Conservatives want English votes for English issues. Labour opposes that and refuses to recognise the case for England. Conservatives want tax cuts, Labour wants to impose extra taxes. Conservatives wish to remove the deficit next Parliament. Labour thinks that is going too far.

Those who argue for a grand coalition are being premature and pessimistic about their party’s chances of winning. Why not fight out the election first, with the intention of winning outright? More importantly, they are recommending something that would do great future damage. Far from saving the union and providing wise government, a grand coalition would undermine the principles and credibility of both parties and make it far more difficult for either to win outright the following election. Whilst in a close race it makes sense to help define each party by asking with whom among the minor parties they could do business, it makes no sense for the two main parties summing up the main differences in the election to stifle that choice by saying they could combine.

On the continent, where grand coalitions or collaborative actions between centre right and centre left have been used to keep the Euro and its policies alive, they have usually resulted in grave further electoral damage to the parties concerned. In Greece the centre right and centre left invented the idea of giving 50 extra seats to the party with most votes as a way as they saw it of keeping in business the alternation of the centre right and centre left in government. Instead  they gifted the latest election to Syriza. In Spain and in Italy the two main traditional parties are struggling to command just 50% of the vote between them, because electors know that whatever they promise the cruel logic of the Euro will dictate many of their policies once in office.

Going into grand coalitions compromises principles, results in torn up election promises, and above all stifles electoral choice. If both main parties in a country work together they do indeed both become the same with respect to government policy. That impedes true democracy, or stimulates new parties to arrive and overturn them. The differences between Labour and Conservatives in today’s UK are large and important. They do not allow forming a common government in 9 weeks time.

In February 2013 the Prime Minister in agreement with Germany negotiated the first 7 yearly financial framework for the EU to cut their budgets. The limit of Euro 908 bn for the 7 years was Euro 35 billion lower than the limit for 2007-13,and Euro 80 billion lower than the Commission wanted. So far so good.

Unfortunately after this deal the EU announced changes to the figures it used to assess UK liability to contribute based on VAT and national income which were heavily adverse for the UK. A country which grows more quickly than the rest of the EU is penalised by having to make larger payments.

The UK has to pay 10.97% of the EU budget cost. (2014 after rebate) The UK’s contribution after rebate has been as follows:

2010 £12.15bn
2011 £12.21bn
2012 £12.64bn
2013 £14.46bn
2014 £14.36bn

The UK has received back around £4bn a year in payments. I do not net these off because UK taxpayers have to pay for the gross contribution, and not all the payments are on items we would chose to spend if we had domestic control of these budgets. There is certainly no need to feel grateful for these spending programmes. The UK is one of just 10 net contributors to the budget, and the second largest after Germany. The UK also sends the EU overseas aid money to spend on its behalf.

This week there was a rare event. The European authorities said the UK had the better of the legal argument with the ECB over whether institutions in the UK can trade in Euros. The ECB was threatening a new protectionism to place more business within the Eurozone.

It looks as if the European authorities have at last decided that a very provocative move against UK business and trade would be a bad idea when an important part of UK opinion already thinks the UK deal in the EU is a bad one. To lose a chunk of the City now would weaken further the pro EU forces in the UK. The last thing the EU wants is to lose the UK’s generous payments into the EU, let alone our big and profitable export market for them.

The unusual good legal result may lead more to conclude that the UK will only be taken seriously and given the occasional support it needs if it continues to complain. The danger in a union is parts of the Union feel they have to threaten or be difficult to get attention and better treatment. The very disobliging things that they have to say or do both damages the union, as it reduces trust and common feeling, and may get results.

We see this pattern in our own Union. Scottish Nationalists decide they will continuously complain and demand more,as making demands in the past has got them some of what they want. In a more extreme form Greece has shown us within the EU and Euro area taking an aggressive stance can bring dividends for the complainer.

Here we have the paradox of unions. If a party to the Union is unhappy, they will demand change and express unhappiness. In doing so they drive a wedge into the Union. The Union will normally accommodate part of their grievance but by no means all. It just sets itself up for another grievance and more disputes

Something remarkable happened yesterday in the Commons. All the Ulster parties present joined with Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives to advocate lower taxes for Northern Ireland. They told us that a lower tax rate in the province would lead to new investment, more company formation, more private sector jobs and greater prosperity. The Commons duly approved unanimously a measure which will allow Northern Ireland to cut its Corporation Tax rate from 21%, the present UK rate, to 12.5%.

It was remarkable because many of the people who now think a lower tax on business profits is a good thing are usually dreaming up ever more higher and new taxes to hit anyone who does well or makes a profit. Normally we are told that higher and wider taxes are crucial to good public services, without a thought for any damage they might do to jobs, incomes, and investments. I asked them to reflect on what they had been saying and to draw some conclusions on other taxes, and on business taxes elsewhere in the UK.

Taking Corporation tax down below 20% will lead to a loss of revenue – I agree with the Treasury about that. This is not a straightforward tax cut of the kind I often advocate which will increase the revenues.

The new Parliament will need to do a lot of thinking about the new tax settlement which is emerging. Scotland will have its own Income Tax and Stamp Duty land tax. Northern Ireland will have its own Corporation Tax. Wales will have its own business rates. The new Parliament has as a result to settle two difficult matters. The first is the familiar one of who speaks for England? The second is how much grant will devolved governments receive, bearing in mind they will be responsible for raising more of their own revenue. The formula will matter and will not be easy to settle.

On Monday Parliament held a debate on devolution in England. Many MPs just wanted to talk about devolving more powers to Councils. I made the point that before you can fairly devolve power within England you first should devolve power to England. The Departments of Health, Local Government and Transport are largely or wholly English departments. Parliament should reflect that in its voting and debates. Our English Ministers in these departments should recommend to Parliament what parts of their powers would best be devolved to Councils.

Giving more powers of decision to Councils may or may not be a good thing. It depends on what the power does, and it depends on the quality of leadership and management of the Council you are giving it to. Some people both dislike centralisation, and they dislike a “postcode lottery”. In each case you have to chose. If you like more decentralisation, you must like postcode lotteries. The whole point of more devolution is to get different answers and different spending priorities in different places. If they all wish to end up doing the same it would be cheaper and easier to have centralised control and management.

I gave a couple of examples from transport policy in my area where I would accept different answers on devolution of power. Wokingham Borough has devolved responsibility for the A329M. We would like to continue it over the river into Oxfordshire to make it an even more useful road. Oxfordshire refuses. Were it a national rather than a local road the central government could make a decision without having problems over powers.

Wokingham does not have powers over the budget of Network Rail. Network Rail is owned by taxpayers and spends large sums of tax revenue. It controls important pieces of land, and its rail tracks create substantial road congestion owing to the difficulty of crossing the railway. It would be good to delegate some of Network Rail’s budget to Wokingham to allow us to spend some of this money on improving the railway, the access to it and the crossings over it to help our general transport system. Network Rail has been persistently unhelpful in my experience.

No amount of transferring budgets and powers to Councils within England can make up for the lack of any devolution to England. When Scotland choses her own Income Tax rate, so should England. That is not a job for Councils, but for English MPs at Westminster.

O n 25th February the Commission issued a Communication entitled ” A framework strategy for a resilient energy union with a forward looking climate change policy.” It is remarkable for the scope of its ambition, allied to the absence of detail on where the huge sums of money will come from to pay for all the investments and research the EU wishes to see.

The Energy Union has five main characteristics.

The first is “Security, solidarity and trust”, which is the EU’s way of presenting its intention to take over the strategic direction of energy policy in each member state, and to integrate each state’s energy and energy policy into an EU wide system under their control. The EU wishes to take over negotiating supplies of energy from outside the EU. “Particular attention will be paid to updating the strategic partnership on energy with Ukraine”. They wish to cut dependence on Russian gas (crucial for 6 member states at the moment) by saving energy, by switching more to non fossil fuels, and by importing more US gas and worldwide LNG.

The second is a fully integrated internal energy market. They wish to establish EU regulatory control over electricity, and ensure at least 10% of a country’s power is governed by interconnector arrangements to other EU states. They wish to integrate the transmission and computer systems.

The third is energy efficiency improvements to cut demand. They wish to “promote the use of road charging schemes” to cut private road transport and wish to electrify both trains and cars.They wish to decarbonise energy as their fourth aim, with a target of a 40% reduction in CO2 by 2030 compared to 1990. They wish to increase renewables further, and biofuels.

They fifthly want a union for research and innovation. Co-ordination and working together is designed to produce smart grids, demand reducing consumers, better homes, and electric transport.

Nowhere does this document give us any figures on how the mighty costs of this programme will be financed. There is mention of a large investment programme which they hope the private sector will undertake. There is little mention of the current very high costs of EU energy, other than to tell us EU gas prices are more than twice those in the US. There is just the hope that we will get better at renewables so they will become cheaper. There is no comment on how the massive Euro 120bn of current subsidies to energy will be eliminated.

The EU’s energy policy is its second worst EU disaster after the Euro. It is hostile to business, it is deindustralising much of the EU, and unfriendly to consumers. This document will make it worse.

In 2010 the IMF lent Euro 30 billion to Greece as part of a much larger package to support the ailing economy. The IMF explained at the time that it had lent 3200% of quota, well over its normal limits for a country in difficulty. It gave Greece “exceptional access to IMF resources”. The IMF cited the need to prevent the crisis spreading to other parts of the EU and to defend the Euro.

It is an extraordinary tale of bad decisions and policy that a first world country with many advantages in the world should end up a pensioner of the IMF, and should need such unusual treatment, getting far more in loans than very poor countries that are more normal recipients of IMF money and policy advice. The IMF recognised that Greece had both a severe fiscal problem (spending too much) and a competitiveness problem (not selling enough abroad to pay the bills). The IMF opined that in the Euro Greece needed to cut wage costs to tackle the latter and needed to cut spending. The IMF did not think a debt write down was needed, as it thought the running deficit was the main issue. It looked forward to a recovery in the Greek economy from 2012, after the cuts had depressed the economy in 2010-11.

In 2012 the IMF decided to lend Greece a new Euro 28bn as part of a replacement loan package. It drew attention this time to a “significant large competitiveness gap” (stronger language than 2010) and to a high level of public debt. This time it agreed with a major write down of privately held Greek public sector debt ( (75% written off) and required cuts in the Minimum wage as part of its measures to improve competitiveness. Once again Greece received special treatment with a large loan. I queried why the IMF would do this for a country which is no longer sovereign in monetary and economic matters, as its status with the Euro prevents a normal IMF recovery package.

So what will the IMF do and say now that Greece once again has asked for help? Why is Greece still locked into a competitiveness problem and a fiscal deficit problem? Why hasn’t the economy grown as the IMF once predicted? Why hasn’t Greece been able to see her way out of the trap the IMF identified in 2010 by following IMF policies?

It looks as if IMF programmes need a state to be able to keep its own banking system liquid by creating money, and need it to be able to devalue as part of the changes to offset the public spending cuts. Greece is unable to do this. It seems that the IMF was dragged into lending to a Eurozone member for political reasons, when it should have stayed out. The IMF would not lend to a UK County or to a state in the USA if they were in need of loans. The IMF would tell that government to seek cash from the domestic authorities. So why then does the IMF lend to Greece, when it is not a sovereign state and needs to look to the rest of the Eurozone and to the ECB for help? How will the IMF now get its money back? When will it explain the failure of its recovery policy for Greece?

The Eurozone’s disciplines have been nicknamed the politics of austerity for good reason. Each state is meant to keep its budget deficit down to 3% of GDP – way below the large cyclical deficits the UK, US and other single currency areas allowed themselves in the great recession. Each state is meant to keep its total amount of borrowing to below 60%, though most of them have given up on that idea. No individual state can print more money, make its economy more liquid or devalue to provide a private sector stimulus. As a result when a Eurozone state cuts public spending it is likely to lead to a fall in GDP which the private sector struggles to offset or does not offset at all.

We have seen that cutting the growth rate of public spending substantially in the UK after 2010, and in the US cutting national defence spending and State level spending, did not lead to a fall in GDP. The private sector responded well to extra money being put into the system, to the gradual rebuilding of the banks and the spread of some more private credit, and to the available spare resources caused by the great recession. Both countries experienced a recovery despite or because of the action taken to control public sector budgets. Both benefitted from the continued low interest rates, made possible in part by growing control of state borrowing. In the UK real public spending did edge up a little as well. I was criticised recently for quoting deficit reduction as a percentage of GDP rather than in cash terms. As I have often pointed out, the fall was bigger as a percentage of GDP, smaller in cash terms. I used this version on Thursday because I was dealing with those who said budget cuts would lead to another recession, and they always use the figures which show the biggest “cuts”

In contrast, the much harsher budget cuts in Greece have added to the collapse in GDP in that country. Greece today has a national income and output 22% below its peak in 2007. It is amazing that the policies which have created this disaster have been allowed to continue for so long. Even now the Greeks have voted in a government which rightly points out how damaging the policies have been, there cannot be much change as that same government bizarrely wishes to stay in the Euro, the origin of much of their trouble.

The enormous Greek recession has gravely reduced tax revenues. As a result there have to be most severe cuts in public spending to try to get the deficit down to the tough target levels – in Greece’s case even tougher owing to the debt covenants. The private sector so far has been unable to pick up the very considerable slack. owing to weak banks. Greece has no power to create more money, no power to lower its own interest rates further, no power to devalue to price itself back into more world markets. As a result they have experienced the misery of sliding from public sector cuts to less private sector demand, and from less tax revenue to more public sector cuts.

If you wish to see a true austerity policy then look at Greece. They have had major cuts in public spending, major cash reductions in wages and salaries, major job losses, and mass unemployment. Many businesses have closed. Any sensible person is against the kind of austerity policy inflicted on the Greek people. Unfortunately it just seems to go with being in the Euro.

It was inevitable that this very political Labour party would want to expose the student loan issue to offer maximum embarrassment to the Liberal democrats in the run up to the election. Sure enough on cue and probably on schedule- after leaks alleging delays – Labour yesterday launched its price cut for university courses, cutting the student payment from £9000 a year to £6000 a year from September 2016.
The prime aim of the launch seemed to be to remind left of centre voters that Lib Dems had promised to get rid of tuition fees, a prominent and oft repeated pledge before the election in 2010, only for a Lib Dem Secretary of State to dream up and push through a scheme which did the opposite. I am told it is called punching the bruise in modern political strategist and spin doctor circles.

What matters to most people is not what it does to the relative votes for the Lib Dems and Labour, but what it would do for our country, our students and taxpayers, in the years ahead were Labour to be given the power to do it. The first in the frame to express doubts are the universities. They like the certainty of getting the payments from the students. They will immediately lose a third of their UK student revenue. They will have to rely on government grant to make up the shortfall, and are worried in case that gets squeezed in later years.

The second group to complain will be those who have to pay the extra bills. Labour will need to spell out more of the detail of how it gets £3bn extra tax out of people saving for their retirement. Whilst they claim it will only hit people on high incomes, it may be they do not get anything like as much extra tax out of that group as they hope. Will they then spread the pensions tax lower down the income scale? Are they happy to be deterring people from pensions saving?

The third group who find the new policy does not help them very much are the groups Labour says it wishes to help – students from low income backgrounds and students who obtain lower income jobs after graduating. The first group is already helped by various scholarship and bursary schemes. The second group do not have to start paying interest or making repayments on their loans until their income is high enough to allow that.

Labour’s left wing critics point out that the winners from the scheme are the graduates who do get into better paid jobs, who will have to repay less capital and pay less interest on their debts as a result of cut. Some are already dubbing it a policy to help future hedge fund managers and City high fliers. The Labour response is they do wish to raise the interest rate people have to pay on their loans if they earn more than £42,000. That sounds complicated. To make such people worse off or no better off they will need to raise the interest rate on the loans by at least 50% to avoid the richer and more successful graduates benefitting.

Will it be worth all that hassle? Can we really believe Labour’s figures on all that extra tax from a few highly paid pension savers? Is this really the best use of the money? To me it looks like clever politics makes bad government.