The Fall of Cameron?

It is quite spectacular how Cameron has collapsed.

A few months ago, he was a great man, a modern Churchill, having won the most audacious electoral comeback in recent history.

Then came his hopeless EU 'renegotiation', George Osborne's incompetent budget (which has possibly ended three political careers - Duncan Smith's, Cameron's and Osborne's - which is quite an impressive achievement), the Panama revelations and his shifty, mealy mouthed responses, and now further dubious looking behaviour with inheritance tax, the humiliation of polling behind Jeremy Corbyn and the possibility of LOSING the show referendum that he set up to placate his internal, anti-EU fifth column ... It's like the collapse of John Major's government, only playing at speed.

He indicated he didn't plan on fighting a third general election, but I imagine he planned on bowing out looking like a man leaving at a time of his choosing, not some family embarrassment being bundled out of the house after raiding the drinks cabinet and smashing an heirloom.

Events, my dear boy, events, as Harold MacMillan may have said.

Labour should take heed of this.  By absurd coincidence, they seem to have lighted on the perfect leader for the times.  Not because Corbyn is a great leader, but he actually seems to be morally righteous and incorruptable.  Just as Blair was the perfect leader for the 90s, almost seeming designed to make charges of Evil Red Intentions impossible, Corbyn is one of very few MPs who can (probably) castigate the Tories for their venality and not come across as an opportunistic hypocrite.  No-one can accuse him of adopting left-wing sanctimony as an electoral convenience, or of only being interested in winning power.

(Of course, a Corbyn castigation isn't exactly a terrifying prospect, but I think his unabrasive style is starting to connect with the public.)

Best of all, Corbyn is immune to the tired "Well Labour were in power for eons and did nothing about ..." and "Labour were no better when ..." counter arguments.  His position as perennial backbencher and malcontent gives him protection.  He had nothing to do with any of it.

Interesting times, and all that.

Skoolz

One minor measure in George Osborne's budget, which has been generally overlooked in the fuss about sugar taxes, is his scheme to turn all the schools in England into academies.  Academies are tax payer funded, independent schools which aren't required to follow the national curriculum.

Given the state of the national curriculum, post Michael "Memorise them Kings!" Gove, that might seem to be not a bad thing.  But it is.

Even Tories realise this.

Leading Tory councillors across the country, dismayed by key elements of the education white paper outlined by the government last week, are calling on education secretary Nicky Morgan to rethink her policy of compulsory academisation for all schools. 

Their concerns echo those of many teachers and parents, who took part in rallies in London and many other towns and cities on Wednesday, to protest against the government’s forced academy programme. 

Around the country, councillors – many of them lifelong Tories who have devoted decades to working with schools in their areas and in many cases improving attainment – expressed profound reservations about the changes. 

The government’s white paper, Educational Excellence Everywhere, says all schools that have not begun to convert to academy status by 2020 will be directed to do so under new powers. Councils will lose responsibility for the remaining maintained schools, the majority of which will be expected to join multi-academy trusts, regardless of performance. 

“I feel really angry,” said Melinda Tilley, cabinet member for education for Oxfordshire county council, which covers the prime minister’s Witney constituency. 

“If it’s not broke don’t fix it. I don’t think schools should be forced. We’ve been supportive of the government’s agenda. We were going along quite well, helping schools to convert where we could. Now all of a sudden they are going to force the rest of them. It makes my blood boil. I’m put in a position where I can’t protect schools. One size does not fit all.”

Educational Excellence Everywhere is a great name for a white paper on education.

Just as you can tell a country that ostentatiously includes the word 'democracy' or 'democratic' in its name is nothing of the sort, you can tell straight away that these measures will not foster educational excellence anywhere.

UK Polling

Another poll showing the Tory lead has evaporated:

CON 37
LAB 35
LDEM 7
UKIP 9

(And there was another one as well, showing pretty much the same thing)

So either the worthy yeomen of Britannia are falling in behind Corbyn and his Red Guards; or the Tories are so awful that people are willig to vote for anything; or we are entering that magical period where the polls diverge from reality.

Interestingly, in the perceptions of leaders, Corbyn now leads Cameron, though his numbers aren't exactly great:

Cameron -25
Corbyn -11
Farage -2
Farron -12

This is interesting as it was these metric, rather than the actual poll numbers, that held up in 2015. The Conservatives were always ahead of Labour in the economic competence ratings, and Cameron always beat Milliband as preferred leader. But things are getting messy.

Oddly, I think this might make Corbyn more vulnerable in some ways. Once it looks like Labour might be in with a shout, people will start to think about how much they want to be Prime Minister.  Suddenly Corbyn will find plenty of Cassius's seeking to plant knives in his back.  Even more so than he's had to put up with already, I mean.

I suspect his enemies will view this as a starting pistol for more scheming and plotting.  They will look for an opportunity - the Scottish elections, where Labour might be pushed back into third place BEHIND the TORIES might afford it.  Corbyn has smartly not involved himself in the problems of Scottish Labour, but it is a strategic problem the party is going to have to face up to.

(Though the first question any aspiring replacement needs to have yelled at them, loudly, is "What are you going to do about Scotland, you tube?")

I actually do wonder if the recent resurgence in Labour - oh, my giddy aunt, 35%! - might actually be because of, and not in spite of, Corbyn.  Having weathered a miserable first six months, and with an operation that is slightly less amateur than it was before, perhaps he is starting to register with the electorate.

Which might mean if he is pushed out in favour of a blandly electable Blairite, we might see those promising numbers slump once again.  And we'll certainly see a Hell of a civil war beak out.  And the right wing won't be able to so much as whimper, having schemed and plotted and conspired against Corbyn from the start.

As for the other side, obviously the Conservatives have had a dreadful couple of weeks, with the Worst Budget Evah from George Osborne, the Iaian Duncan Smith resignation and the continual, ongoing problem of Europe.  It is likely they will find the next few weeks even more trying.  And if it does drag out, the calls for Cameron to go will get louder.

Whoever thought a leader who delivered an outright majority would collapse rapidly and utterly?  Clearly, ten months is a very long time in politics!

Iain Duncan Smith resigns, immolating George Osborne in the process

It's a sign of how mental George Osborne is that even IDS has quit rather than impose his plans to harvest organs from beneficiaries and put taxes on breast milk:

Iain Duncan Smith has resigned from his role as Work and Pensions Secretary complaining of Treasury pressure to make cuts to benefits.

In a statement to the media, Mr Duncan Smith said he "incredibly proud of the welfare reforms that the Government has delivered over the past five years" but said he is "unable to watch passively whilst certain policies are enacted in order to meet the fiscal self imposed restraints that I believe are...distinctly political rather than in the national economic interest".

Even Scrooge can't stomach what Osborne intends for the proles!

it is an impressive piece of political shafting by IDS.

IDS might have been a dreadful leader, an awful minister ... but quitting like this just days after the budget, and calling the budget a piece of ideologicaly motivated national sabotage must have put paid to Osborne's leadership hopes.

Nothing in his political life became him like the leaving of it, as Shakespeare almost said.

Tory Leadership Slow Motion Apocalypse Underway

Get in now for front row seats as the Best Show On Earth After The American Election And Most Other Shows Even Cats gets underway.

Who will replace the red faced non-entity bumbler when he finally buggers off the political scene, having accomplished nearly nothing other than squandering a recovery, prolonging a recession and making Britain look stupid for the whole of Europe - even Greece (GREECE?!) - to laugh at?

Will it be Boris, effectively upping the buffoon quotient?

Or George 'Why did 80,000 people boo him' Osborne?

Or someone thing else?

Who will turn out to be the brightness in this dullness of Tories? The fastest in this loiter of sloths? The sternest in this gutter of wet bus tickets?

Relevant stuff:

Earlier this week there was a new YouGov poll of Conservative party members in the Times or, more specifically, two new polls of Conservative party members: YouGov polled the same party members before and after Boris Johnson came out in favour of leaving the EU to see what impact it had on the leadership race. Results are here.

At the simplest level Boris was ahead before, and was ahead afterwards, but there were some interesting shifts. Boris’s approval rating among Conservative party members dropped significantly after he came out (from 83% approval to 76% approval), but his position in the leadership race improved. Presumably he annoyed some members who saw his actions as disloyal or disagreed with his stance, but he consolidated the support from those who did not.

Almost unavoidably Boris coming out was going to upset some members – he has carefully avoided having many fixed political opinions over the years, so I expect many pro-European members would have assumed Boris agreed with them, many anti-EU members would have assumed Boris agreed with them. For once, he is forced off the fence and forced to upset some people – so his overall approval rating among Tory party members fell. However, in the race to be the next Tory leader his position has improved. 

43% now say they’d back Boris, up from 38%, with support falling for Theresa May and Sajid Javid, both of whom were seen as potential “outers” and both of whom ended up supporting Remain. Asked how they’d vote in a match up between Osborne & Boris the figures don’t change as much (Boris 55%, George 36% before, Boris 56%, George 38% after) – the broader balance between those party members who want Osborne as the next leader and those who don’t hasn’t changed much, it’s just Boris is now more clearly the “not-George” candidate.

Only a quarter of Tory party members said that the leadership candidates’s stances on the EU were an important factor in picking the next leader – 4% said they wanted the next leader to be someone who had campaigned for the UK to stay, 20% wanted the next leader to be someone who campaigned to leave, three-quarters picked other criteria as their main considerations. Far and away the most widely picked criteria was someone who will make a competent PM, picked by 67%, followed by someone who has a good chance of winning the next election on 52%.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, but if only Anthony Wells was a girl and there was a sort of heterosexual equivalent of being Gay Married, I'd do that with him in an instant.

Put the Labour Party out of our misery, please

From The New Statesman:

The tighter household benefit cap (cut from £26,000 to £23,000 in London and £20,000 elsewhere) was similarly crafted with the “welfare party” in mind. The speed with which Labour endorsed the measure reflected how Osborne has moved the political centre of gravity to the right. Shadow cabinet ministers told me that they had moral objections to the policy but believe they cannot allow themselves to be outflanked by the Tories again on such an emotive issue.

Good Lord. What the Hell?

Are Labour really as awful as all that? I'd have thought hungry kids in rags getting shovelled out of their homes by bailiffs would have been precisely the sort of thing Labour would have wanted to be 'outflanked' on?

Because it is just the sort of stuff that drives home to people what these polices mean to the people affected by them.

Almost everyone opposes $26000pa handouts when it is just a number. Most of us don't actually want to see degradation and hardship that it means, however. Why we continue to allow the right to define this as an issue of 'benefit scroungers' and not an issue of insuring all Britain's children are well looked after is beyond me.

Is the only 'strategic vision' possessed by Labour really the desperate desire to avoid negative headlines in the Mail and Sun? Truly pathetic.

The current Labour PArty, transported back to the late 80s, would have endorsed the Poll Tax because they feared being 'out flanked' on it. This is the same issue. We've got a budget that will pauperise children and reduce the income of the working poor by $2000 a year. And Labour are endorsing these cuts, rather than using them to fight back against this colostomy bag of a government? Are they too craven, or to unprincipled, or just too thick to make a fight on it?

I'd vote Lib Dem, if I could find one.

Only joking.

But I can't think why anyone would vote for anything so un-utterably useless as the current incarnation of the British Labour Party. It would seem Ed Milliband - who suddenly seems like a colossus in comparison to the pretenders to his throne - took the party's spine on holiday with him. He's been criticised for that. But you can understand why he would do it. I couldn't want to be around such a bunch of repuslse, supine sell-outs either.

Making Work Pay, George?

I do wish people would make up their minds.

Half of George Osborne's budget seems to consist of ideas nicked from Labour's manifesto.

A few weeks ago, we were told these policies were at best likely to be totally ineffective, at worst wildly irresponsible, veritable communism, class warfare, the politics of envy and pandering to the voter base. Now here we are, with the Times and the Mail and the Sun and Old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all, cheering on virtually the same policies as brilliant.

But brilliant this budget is not. The Daily Mail, in same moment of madness, has published this rather telling summary of how the measures will affect different groups of people:
















Paltry increases for some, and a whopping hit for the working poor. The only thing worse than this budget is Labour's response to it.

The artful dodger

Greedy Tories raking it in, as usual, courtesy of Channel 4 News:

Chancellor George Osborne's family business made £6 million in a property deal with a developer based in a tax haven, a Channel 4 News investigation has found.

Wallpaper firm Osborne & Little teamed up with a secretive corporation in the British Virgin Islands, to draw up plans to redevelop its former London headquarters into housing.

The companies jointly applied for planning permission for around 45 flats and houses, and once given the go-ahead, Osborne and Little sold its site to the offshore firm for £6,088,000.

A legal expert shown contracts obtained by Channel 4 News said Osborne & Little must have known the developer was based offshore, and had the potential to avoid millions in tax.

At the time, the Chancellor was the beneficiary of a family trust that owned at least 15% of Osborne and Little, so would have personally benefitted from the sale.

Now, it must be noted that the article goes on to state that "There is no suggestion the Chancellor, or Osborne & Little avoided any tax in the deal, or that they or offshore property developer Nightingale Mews Inc. did anything illegal."

Of course, I'm sure it's easy to do nothing illegal when you get to write the rules.

Just look at the man.  He must be guilty of SOMETHING.

Dickens, even if he'd had the imagination to envisage such character, would have decided not to include him in any tale because he would have seemed to grotesque.

George's Sheffield moment

George Osbonre had a bit of a disastrous encounter with Andrew Marr, where he was asked, repeatedly, about his claim that he would somehow manage to find £8 BILLION to spend on the NHS.

Marr, understandably, asked him how howas going to do this.

Osborne waffled and evaded. So Marr asked him again, and again. And again.

In total, he asked George Osborne how he was going to fund this spending increase (About 8% of the current NHS budget), FIFTEEN times. And Osborne failed to answer.

In 1992, Neil Kinnock is credited (unfairly) with losing the general election for Labour at the infamous Sheffield rally.

If the Conservatives lose the election - rather, if they fail to secure enough seats to let them cobble together a coalition - then it will probably be immortalised as the moment it happened; the moment the second most important figure in the party, asked a question about a promise he has just made, with his party's (grossly exaggerated) reputation for economic competence riding on his performance, was unable to answer.

Go back to making vacuum cleaners, George!

Osborne's dreadful performance has been mocked, rightly, in most media.   Yet the Mail, mysteriously, neglected to mention how Generous George couldn't answer a fairly simple question in spite of being asked (approximately) 500 times.

Instead, this very impartial and unbiased newspaper headlined their account of the interview:

You're as posh as me! Osborne tells Harman the class attacks 'wear thin' when they both went to the same private school

The story that follows even mentions health spending, and how it is funded:

Mr Osborne insisted, however, that the Conservatives had shown in government that they were able to make the savings necessary to deliver additional funding for the NHS. 

'We have a balanced plan to grow our economy, to make savings in government including in welfare to fund our NHS each and every year,' he said. 

'We have to make similar savings each year that we have made for five years of this parliament but for two years. 

'We have a track record in this parliament where we found almost £8 billion extra in real terms for the National Health Service in very, very difficult economic circumstances so we have proved our mettle, we have proved our ability to stand behind the National Health Service in this parliament. We can do it in the next.'

But no mention of how he failed to explain where he is going to find 8 billion a year.

Or  how he is going to 'deliver additional funding' by requiring the NHS to find 22 billion in 'efficiencies,' effectively cutting its budget by over 20%.

Generous George found some money down the back of the sofa

Astonishingly, George Osborne has just found £8 BILLION a year to spend on the NHS!

You'd think there was an election on, and the chancellor who has been banging on and on about austerity has suddenly realised he isn't actually going to be chancellor much longer if he doesn't come up with some pretty big rabbits, pronto.

You'll be surprised to learn there is a catch.

To get the money, we have to to wait until 2020. Until then, we'll have to make do with much smaller increase.

But Osbourne really, really promises us that he'll let us have the full 8 £billion, every year, in 5 years time.

Just like he really, really, promised us he'd eliminate the deficit in five years. And continued to promise, year after year, that it would be accomplished within five years. Without ever actually doing it.

Though if you look at what he actually says, it sound's a bit sinister:

The Five Year Forward View sets out a projected gap between costs and resources of up to £30bn by the year 2020-21. As the plan says, the majority of this gap, £22bn, can be made up through efficiency and reform

So the NHS has to find £22 billion in 'efficiency and reform.'   Wonder if that might mean cuts?

Enough is enough

Is George Osborne actually doing all these really stupid photos for a bet?  Whoever is planning his photo-ops needs to be shot.  Even I'm starting to feel sorry for him.

Is he not aware what century this is, and that the proles are not so impressed with gurning clowns patronising them for a few weeks every four or five years?

Is he actually trying to lose the election?  Is he a leftwing sleeper agent who has infiltrated the uppper echelons of the Tory party to undermine them at this crucial moment in history?

Or is the Conservative campaign so utterly clueless that they think this is a wise strategy?  One has to wonder, as thus far it has consisted of one old duffer ripping into Miliband, like your embarrassing uncle after he hits the sherry at lunchtime (affording Miliband the priceless opportunity to sound gracious in the face of this tirade), a stupid, measly bribe to rail commuters and the staggering news that Ed Miliband had a few girlfriends when he was younger.

(I'm still baffled at the colossal uselessness of that Mail revelation.  On what planet did it seem like the right time to lob that outstandingly dud grenade?  Who on Earth calculated that making Miliband seem like something more than a pathetic political wonk with no social skills at all was a strategic masterstroke?)

A few months ago, there was talk of Labour's 35% strategy - the idea they could attain power on just 35% of the vote, given how grievously the right bloc was divided and the way that Labour's vote was concentrated in urban seat that required fewer votes to win.

At the time, it was ridiculed as an admission of failure, a calculated exercise in political cynicism. Now  it looks like we're in a situation where the two big parties get 65% of votes, and there are parties that will be under-represented (UKIP, likely to get 15% of vote but only a couple of seats) and over-represented (SNP, likely to win about 80% of seats on less than 50% of the vote); and 35% seems like a veritable electoral Everest, for either party - and I'm thinking more the Mallory-Irvine, rather than the Hillary-Norgay.  The way the polls are lying at the moment, 35% would be a massive improvement for either party.

(Which raises all sorts of inevitable questions about the retention of First Past The Post.  Will the parties - spooked by two hanged parliaments in a row - actually acknowledge The System Is Broken and reform it?  Or will they seek to protect their privilege even more, as it is suddenly so threatened?  That was easy to do in the good Old Days when only the SDP-Liberal / Lib Dem vote was wasted.  Even the Libs sort of enjoyed the sense of being politely martyred by FPTP.)

Whoever can win over a couple of percentage points, and have at least one friendly party in parliament, will win. And maybe Osborne looking like a dick will encourage people to vote Tory, or maybe vote Labour. Or not vote at all. I don't know.

But enough is enough.  Not of the silly pictures of George Osborne.  As long as he's happy to make himself look like a fool, I'm happy enough to put them up here.  Payback for the hundreds of time Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband have been mocked for their appearance.  But enough of the antiquated electoral system that is corroding democracy.

Generous George at it again

Truly, George Osborne is the gift that keeps on giving:

Caption: "It's too late, George, the wheels have already come off the campaign!"

Still, he looks so happy there, tinkering about and pretending he knows what he is doing.  I recognise that face.  I often wear one like it myself.

And letting him goof about in a garage is going to have fewer repercussions than letting him stick a spanner into the economy.

Honing those skills employers seek

That's our George 'Gideon' Osborne, getting up to speed with menial tasks as he might be out of a job in a few weeks time.

Caption: "Nice of them to give that simpleton a job. Left to their own devices, people like that can be a menace to society."

UK inflation

Has just hit zero.

This is great if you are a pensioner or have money in the bank.

It isn't so great if you have debt. And UK household debt has just hit a record high:

Families have an average pile of debt of nearly £9,000 each, leaving millions vulnerable if interest rates start to rise, a new report has warned. 

The figure, which does not include mortgages, soared by £20billion or nine per cent last year to hit £239billion, the report from PwC found. 

After years of uncertainty about their jobs and finances through the economic downturn, families are now seeing the light at the end of the tunnel and are becoming more confident about borrowing again.

Could get interesting.

Politically, of course, this could be very bad for the British Labour Party. With an election weeks away, zero inflation could really screw up their 'Cost of living crisis' meme.

Which would be a real problem if Labour had not developed several other promising lines of attack.

Oh, wait a minute ...

Ahahahahahahahaha!!

The ultimate humiliation for George Osborne, courtesy of YouGov:

Exclusively for Red Box, we asked: "Do you think Gordon Brown was a better or worse chancellor of the Exchequer than George Osborne is now?"

- 33 per cent said better

- 29 per cent said worse

That's right. Gorgeous George loses out to Gordon "Gold selling, pension stealing, city deregulation, world economy wrecking, 'No more boom and bust'" Brown.

That'll be another prominent Tory looking at his place in history and feeling just a little bit disappointed.

Osborne grinds the faces of the poor in the dirt

That's probably a metaphor, but might be an actual headline describing literal events, the way things are going.

More than 270,000 of the poorest households in England face council tax hikes of £80 a year as the government's safety net is withdrawn, a survey of local authorities has revealed.

Using freedom of information requests, research for the Joseph Rowntree Trust has found that from April another 48 local authorities are reducing protection for vulnerable residents. 

Ministers cut funding for the means-tested benefit by £500m, around 10% of the total, last April and instructed local authorities to decide how the reduced benefit should be distributed. 

However, to cushion the blow ministers offered £100m in subsidies to councils that designed schemes that would offer some protection to the poor. This scheme has not been renewed, with the result that this year will be the first that the government will no longer provide a dedicated stream of cash to take the poorest out of council tax. 

The result of this – and further cuts to local authority budgets – is that more than a quarter of a million working-age households will see bills rise by an average of £78 a year, taking the amount of yearly council tax that they will have to pay to £176.

The true nastiness of this government is becoming clear, as 'safety nets' are taken away and who will be most affected by Osborne's bloodthirst becomes clear - the poorest and most vulnerable.  Afterall, they would never vote Tory, would they?  I think the scorecard needs to be updated ... that'll teach him!!

-1 ... Local government cuts, ordered by central government, hitting the poor. 

-1 ... Taking 500 Syrian refugees, which acknowledges there is a catastrophe, but only doing enough to generate a positive headline in the Daily Mail.  Was even Tony Blair this disgustingly cynical?

OVERALL: -6/10 Their heartless and wrong-headed domestic agenda and their humanitarianism-as-PR gives a truly nasty edge to the coalition.

Peter Oborne

... is fantastic. I've always said so. Repeatedly. You all remember me saying so, don't you? Top bloke. Wonderful. Even more wonderful than Vince "Wrong Sort Of Recovery" Cable.  And writing this sort of stuff in The Telegraph, would you believe?  Don't be surprised if we are told Mr Oborne has taken 'Stress Leave,' with immediate effect.

As someone who voted Conservative at the last election, I therefore found it profoundly shaming and offensive when George Osborne lowered the top rate of tax from 50p to 45p two years ago. 

The Coalition government has devoted a great deal of effort to lowering the living standards of the poor. I support this project because I believe that Gordon Brown’s welfare state forced some people into a life of dependency, thus taking away their human dignity. 

There have been many people on welfare who need much more of an incentive to return to work. But to make the rich richer at the same time as making the poor poorer – what George Osborne has been doing – is simply squalid, immoral and disgusting. The Chancellor of the Exchequer is leading the fight inside the cabinet to strip a further £10 billion of welfare payments for the very poorest. Any decent human being must surely feel sick in the stomach that he is taking this action at the same time as cutting the amount of tax paid by people earning more than £150,000. 

... 

A Conservative Party with decent values should not reward these people. It should support hard-working, honest people. If the Chancellor understood this point, he would have taken middle earners out of the top rate of tax, not given a bonus to people who are already affluent. 

So well done Ed Balls, who has had a hard time lately. He has given ordinary, decent people a serious reason for voting Labour at the coming election.

Pistol Pete should say more of this sort of thing. If he learns the correct method of addressing Osborne - his name should always be prefaced with "that revolting, loathsome and repulsive imbecile" or similar - I may make him an honorary leftie.

Seriously, there is a difference between a Conservative, and the sort of neo-liberal Friedmanite loons who have colonised the right-wing parties since the 1980s.  People who think like Oborne - who are conservative for essentially moral reasons, rather than (how can I say this politely?) economic imperatives - need to make themselves more.  I won't agree with them on everything much but at least a conservative and a democratic socialist are approaching problems from the same direction.  If the British Conservatives could expunge the Freidmanite Supply Side Maniacs (tm) it would bring the Conservative Party back into alignment with the people that actually vote for it.

After all, Labour had to go through a similar process in the late 70s and 80s, to produce the attenuated, somewhat rightwing social-capitalist party of the 90s.  And at least the prospect of a Conservative government would fill all right thinking people with horror.

Of course, the Freidmanites would resist it, utterly, and Oborne will probably catch a lot of flack from their shills in the press.  Supply-siders are parasitic - economically and politically.  Their creed repels 99% of the population - look at ACT's polling for proof of this.  They can not survive on their own, so they have to inhabit the larger body of a moderately right-wing, conservative party.  In doing so, they sap its vitality and sicken it, or - and here the metaphor may be slightly stretched, if one is not familiar with Gonchongs - possess it and supplant its personality utterly, turning it into a hideous facsimile of a Conservative party, mouthing conservative shibboleths to please the increasingly perplexed and embittered voters, and scapegoating the weak and marginalised to redirect that frustration away from where it belongs.  This is particularly true of Britain, where First Past the Post forces fringe pursuits like neo-liberalism to inveigle itself into larger, more moderate parties.  Even in New Zealand, however, where MMP theoretically allows the rightwing economic 'purists' to survive in their own party, the truth is they have to infiltrate National, as described in The Hollow Men, if they are to get their hand decisively on the levers of power.

It is time for New Zealand's own Obornes to speak up and reject the swivel eyed advocates of Freidmanite madness, who still exert a toxic influence on the National Party.

Recovery?

The provisional estimates of growth for 2013 show that the Tories - after 4 years of trying, almost doing as well as Labour!

However, manufacturing output and construction are both down in the last quarter. Dunno if that is seasonal variation (can't be much fun building things in the rain) but it rather undercuts the 'rebalanced economy' claptrap Osborne is peddling. Its more unbalanced and service dependent that ever.

As for 'Plan B,' a sensible economic policy would have delivered this sort of growth years ago. We're still poorer than we were in 2007 and other economies - which weren't madly flaying themselves with austerity - have recovered more swiftly.

And it did not have to be this way.  Britain had a perfectly good recovery underway in 2010.  From that bastion of rightwing thought and freemarket ideology, the New Statesman:

In 2010, a genuine recovery was underway, with the economy growing 2.4 per cent in the 12 months to Q3 2010, but premature austerity, in the form of the VAT rise and the dramatic cut in infrastructure spending, ensured that growth was snuffed out. To meet the OBR's original 2010 forecasts, the economy would need to grow by 1.6 per cent each quarter between now and the election. But Osborne has been the beneficiary of low expectations. Before the post-2010 downturn, below-trend growth of 1.9 per cent would have been viewed as a dismal failure.

Is Osborne some sort of political genius?  Perform so poorly that the robust growth of 2010 becomes some sort of folk myth, like King Arthur and the Loch Ness monster, and thus even the most mediocre performance is hailed as the works of an economic colossus?

Waffle About UK Economic Growth

So, the Financial Times is getting excited because the UK has managed the fastest quarter of growth in the past three years - a not-exactly-whopping 0.9% for June, July and August.  That's very nice.

Just a few weeks ago, people were getting excited about the 0.6% growth in the second quarter of the year (a proper quarter, not the rather spurious 'last three months' which is tantalising the FT).

The second figure is conflated in the first figure, of course, as there is an overlap in the periods being considered.  But even a grumpy curmudgeon such as I will accept that, yes, the economy is growing, slowly.  But it isn't terribly convincing, as it is based on internal consumer spending, not foreigners buying stuff made by Brits.  The FT notes - rather far down the article, I felt, that exports fell, particularly to non-European countries, and the trade deficit expanded between June and July - from £1.3bn in June to £3.1bn.
 
Britain is buying in more than it is selling overseas, so the recent growth isn't sustainable, unless the trade figures pick up.  It's a spending bubble, and will collapse as soon as the spending stops.

Yet the Tory boys trumpet the wussy growth figures as if it was a vindication of George Osborne's demented - and ongoing - attack on public spending.  Not so.

Ed and Ed - Milliband and Balls - warned that Osborne's  austerity drive would delay and reduce growth. I think that has been demonstrated to have happened. It was damn close to being a double dip and a miserable, potracted period of stagnation is nothing much to crow about.  The USA went for the opposite approach and has enjoyed comparatively strong growth.

It is worth bearing in mind that wages are stagnant here while inflation is rising; and Osborne has plenty of cutting still to do.

The crucial question is, have people become so inured to hardship that they will actually regard this mediocre growth as the dawn of a new Golden Age?

I suspect that may have been Osborne's strategy all along.

Awkward

Bit of a problem for George:

The Chancellor will announce £11.5bn of cuts for the 2015-16 financial year in three weeks – but so far only £2.5bn have been agreed, as senior members of the Government battle to protect their own departments from further suffering.

-snip-

Seven smaller departments have settled with the Treasury. The unresolved budgets include defence, education, business, transport, local government and the environment.

 Here 

Might be difficult to pick where the axe should fall. Unless, of course, that talk about the Greenest Government Ever was just that - talk.

I rather suspect the windfarms may be in for a hammering and anticipate James Delingpole to be made Under-Goblin in the Department of the Environment.