DARLINGS EMPTY GESTURE BUDGET

Labour is not interested in improving the country it purports to govern. It is interested only in retaining power. Its policies are shaped increasingly, if not exclusively, by considerations of how it advances the cause of its own people. Those who are not in that category – such as most of you reading this column – get what is coming to them.
An election is no more than a year away. The starting gun for its campaign was fired yesterday. At least there is – or should be – clarity in the battle lines. The middle classes are there to be bled white. Labour is now quite open about that. The question only remains of whether the Opposition will choose to defend the interests of its supporters as robustly as Labour is defending the interests of the clientele.
For be in no doubt about two things. First, the mess in this country – which Mr Darling, in keeping with Government policy, chose to depict as having happened almost by accident and as a result of global forces outside his control – has been aggravated by the practice of reckless economics. The few of us who saw this debacle coming required no genius to do so: it happened because the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, chose between about 2000 and 2007 to allow the money supply to grow by between two and three times the rate of inflation plus growth. This imitation of Alan Greenspan – who did the same in America to fulfil Bill Clinton's desire to make as many people as possible feel well off – fed our present catastrophe. Money was there to make everyone feel good – whether bankers or first-time buyers with silly mortgages. It seemed as though prosperity no longer had to be earned. The printing presses rolled: quantitative easing was happening long before we knew it. And even the Conservative Party, to its shame, was taken in, with its ludicrous line about "sharing the proceeds of growth".
Second, the desire to keep power means continuing to keep the clientele in the style to which it is now accustomed. This means generous benefits that do not become reined in as earnings in the private sector are. It means continuing to create jobs for the clientele in entirely socially unproductive areas. Jobs advertised in yesterday's Guardian for, among others, a "democratic services officer" in Hackney, or a "customer experience manager" for the Department of Work and Pensions give an indication of the care, and the ease, with which public money is spent. It is the Government's determination to continue to bribe its voters that causes not just the wealth-destroying taxes, and a further raid on pension funds, but also the insane levels of borrowing: £175 billion this year and £173 billion next. It was instructive, too, that when the Leader of the Opposition quite correctly attacked the Government for this atrocious profligacy, Mr Brown was pictured sitting on the bench opposite him laughing. It is moments like that that make some think either of strangulation, or emigration.
Mr Darling's failure, like that of the Government he serves, is abject. This is Mr Cameron's moment. And it is not just victory that awaits him if he seizes it, but success.

labours mini budget # Nov 2008

George Osborne made at least one telling point in his response to Alistair Darling's emergency Budget (and let us not be shy to call it that). This was a package of measures that had little to do with the economic cycle, and much to do with the political one. An election must be held by the late spring of 2010.
Given how dreadful things are likely to get, with perhaps 3.25 million people on the dole by then irrespective of what fiddling Mr Darling does, the Prime Minister may well want to go to the country much sooner than that, before the full damage becomes apparent. That was what the pre-Budget report was largely about.
It was an aggressively sectarian set of measures. Labour has identified its "people" - the client state of public sector bureaucrats, operatives and claimants sedulously created by Mr Brown since 1997 - and Monday's main purpose was to protect them. The notion that a piffling £5 billion of "efficiency savings" might be secured out of a total public spend of £680 billion in a couple of years' time said it all.
The raising of the top rate of tax to 45 per cent looks as much a gesture of spite as the two-and-a-half percentage point cut in VAT is a gesture of futility. The tax rise will raise perhaps only £3 billion in revenue, if that: the VAT cut will struggle to be noticed by consumers who are already managing to avoid far larger discounts in most of the shops.
Where it might have made a psychological difference - a few pence off a pint of beer or a packet of cigarettes - the Chancellor has simply raised excise duties to ensure the price stays the same. It wouldn't have done to have had all those toffs going off to Majestic Wine to load up with even cheaper champagne.
There will be a wide suspicion that the 45 per cent rate is simply a staging post to 50 per cent: as it doubtless will be, should Mr Darling's estimates of growth in years to come be as far out as those in the past.

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