A lesson from New Zealand

Ruth Richardson, the former reforming Finance Minister of New Zealand, set the benchmark for the Spending Review in a lecture for Reform on Wednesday evening. The coalition Government has framed the Review in the right way – as a chance to reshape and redefine the role of government rather than just shave a few percentage points off the existing structure with all its structural flaws. Ruth Richardson explained what that should mean, addressing each of government’s roles as spender, tax collector, asset owner and law maker.  Her full lecture is here and a summary here.
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How Humphrys got it wrong

The 8.10 Today programme slot this morning went to Nick Clegg. The programme wanted to discuss with the deputy PM the BBC’s finding that those areas most dependent on the state would be hit hardest by the coming cuts, for some reason this statement of the obvious is regarded as news. But John Humphrys, in his haste to interrupt the deputy PM, made some statements deserving of further scrutiny.
 
First, Humphrys suggested that the cuts will take place before Christmas. They won’t. Unlike the cuts announced in the immediate aftermath of the...

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Labour get the inquiry they wanted

To these eyes, this afternoon's phone hacking debate was a surprisingly sedate affair. Chris Bryant – proposing a motion to have an inquiry conducted by the Standards and Privileges committee into the News of the World's actions – seemed to go out his way to depoliticise the argument, and other Labour MPs followed his lead. And so there was relatively little mention of Andy Coulson, with the emphasis instead on the wrongs that might have been done to the House by the police and the media more generally. It was, then, little surprise that...

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Robert Chote is the new head of the OBR

Now this should dispel any worries that the Office for Budget Responsibility is partisan in the government's favour. Robert Chote, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies and scourge of Osborne's "regressive" Budget, has been appointed as the body's new chief.

It is, in many repsects, the most sensible and obvious choice. Not only is Chote respected across the political divide, but the OBR is an attempt to institutionalise the kind of fiscal oversight that his IFS has provided for years. I can't imagine that the Treasury Select Committee will try to...

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The coalition's shifting horizons

Nick Clegg’s speech today is meant to be one of a pair with David Cameron giving the other tomorrow. The speeches mark an attempt to set out an agenda for the government that goes beyond deficit reduction. The idea is that Clegg’s speech called ‘horizon shift’, which is all about making government policy more long term, goes hand in hand with Cameron’s speech tomorrow on ‘power shift’, the government’s plan to devolve power down. This twin-pronged approach came out of the political Cabinet at Chequers at the end of the last parliamentary...

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Clegg downplays the cuts

A noteworthy directional shift from Nick Clegg in his speech this morning. Instead of priming the us for "savage cuts," as he once did, the Deputy PM is now deemphasising the severity of what's to come:

"Some of the hyperbole I have heard is just preposterous – this idea, that somehow, it is back to the 1930s. After the spending round, we are still going to be spending £700bn of public money – more than we are now."

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A banking split

Blame Bob Diamond. Until the "unacceptable face of banking" (© the utterly acceptable face of politics, Peter Mandelson) was appointed chief executive of Barclays, the issue of banking reform was trundling along noiselessly in the background. But now it has spilled, violently, back out into the open. Critics of Diamond say that his very presence makes the case for splitting the retail and investmet divisions of banks – you can't, they say, have someone who made their money via "casino banking" presiding over a high street banking chain. But the banks are Continue reading...

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The Royal Mail - a tough sell

Some day soon – unless the coalition has already lost its bottle – a bill will be introduced to 'part-privatise' Royal Mail. It has to be done. But it will be a tough sell, for four reasons.

First, the market for the Royal Mail's product is shrinking. It's a big fish, but its pool is getting smaller. It carries 75 million letters a day, but that's down by 10 million just in the last five years. And 87 percent is mail sent by businesses. Apart from Christmas cards, the rest of us...

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The Brown handover ceremony

A delicious prospect in store for political comedy fans, if not for the next Labour leader, according to a post by Channel 4's Gary Gibbon:

"[Gordon Brown] feels, I hear, that it is right that he be seen to say some words before the new leader is unveiled and be seen to hand over the torch.

He doesn’t want people to think he is cowed or hiding. Final arrangements, a Labour source said, have not been agreed yet and they are 'in touch' with the various leadership candidates."

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