2 big stories

As any fule kno, the chair of the Iraq enquiry Sir John Chilcot has ruled that as a default all evidence should be given to the enquiry in public. He has also indicated that he will be calling Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to give evidence. From the Guardian:

The move to open up his hearings, which came on the eve of a Commons debate tomorrow on the inquiry, shows that a wholesale change of the terms has been carried out since the inquiry was established by the prime minister last week. The decision to summon Brown and Blair for public hearings was disclosed by Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, who met Chilcot today on privy council terms. Chilcott held a separate meeting with David Cameron on the same terms.

Cross-party alliances are the flavour of the day. Today, David Cameron backed Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg’s successful campaign to overturn Labour’s shameful treatment of the Gurkhas. Meanwhile Lib Dem deputy leader Vince Cable has won the support of senior Labour backbencher Frank Field by tabling an early day motion highlighting the UK’s huge borrowing requirements, and calling on the Government to set up a special committee to investigate ways of balancing the national accounts.

Frank Field explains his reasoning in a stark article on his own blog, laying into both his own Government, as well as the Tories, for signally failing to address the UK’s crippling national debt burden:

Vince Cable and I have tabled today an Early Day Motion calling for a serious debate now, and not after the next election, on how to balance the nation’s accounts.

Both major parties are stringing the voters along, teasingly suggesting that big cuts in expenditure and tax hikes will be necessary, but neither has any intention of disclosing their plans to rational debate before the election. What both major parties overlook is that the money markets may not be compliant in a game of party politicking over the country’s future.

Even on the Government’s own figures, Britain will proportionally be trying to borrow more money to balance its accounts over the medium to long term than any other G8 country. …

The size of the State or – what Governments can do – is going to change. If we don’t have an open and full debate the new politics will quickly take on a reactionary bent. The new politics offers a once in a generation opportunity for radical politics. The first concern in increasing taxation is to ensure that those on modest to low incomes do not bear once again the main brunt of tax rises. …

The stranglehold on this debate by the two main political parties must be broken. Failure to convince the money-lenders than the country is serious about balancing its books could lead to a failure to raise the shedloads of debt any government must raise in the short run, resulting in a further collapse in the currency (already down by 30%) and untold economic chaos and misery.

If the two major parties fail to act, the House of Commons must seize the initiative to begin plotting a new safe course for the country.

Here’s the full text of Vince’s motion:

“Colourful and lurid fiction” and “hysterical over-reaction”: that’s how Treasury Minister Angela Eagle described Liberal Democrat warnings about the economy exactly a year ago today. A Lib Dem Opposition Day Motion had warned of an extreme bubble in the housing market and mass repossessions, but was dismissed by the Government as “scaremongering.” Eagle even compared it to a storyboard for “Apocalypse Now.”

Then, as now, Jeremy Browne, Liberal Democrat Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, spoke of the Liberal Democrats’ economic foresight. You can watch yesterday’s question time with Jeremy Browne on moneysupermarket.com in which he …

Jeremy Browne, Liberal Democrat Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, will be taking part in a live webchat on Wednesday 1st April at 1pm.

From moneysupermarket.com:

Jeremy is responsible for helping set the Liberal Democrats’ financial policies. Clare Francis, editor of moneysupermarket.com, will be putting your questions to him in a live webchat at 1pm on Wednesday April 1.

As always, your questions really do set the agenda. So if you want to know what the Liberal Democrats would do to tackle to recession and ongoing financial crisis and how their policies would affect your finances submit your questions now and come

…

The Beeb has already trailed this speech, and Vince is welcomed to the stand with an even longer opening ovation than Howard got.

14.44 He starts on, let us say, a dark note. The economic situation is dire, we are going to have nothing but bad news for some time. There has never been a more important time for politicians to be honest. But what do we have? A pantomime between Labour and the Tories.

14.47 He identfies the Tories’ motivation: for them, the worse the recession is the better. That way they can strengthen their own anyone-but-Labour vote and they …

Although Robert Peston has recently been criticising HBOS for the behaviour that led to it running up massive losses, a look through his book published as recently as last year shows him repeatedly praising HBOS for some of the very actions that are now being criticised.

For example, in late February, Robert Peston wrote on his BBC blog that,

For all the criticism of the alleged excessive risks taken by HBOS’s mortgage department – as per the charges levelled at the bank by its former head of regulatory risk, Paul Moore – the most reckless lending and investments were made by

…

Here’s a bit of historical context: in the last major house price slump, prices peaked in the third quarter of 1989*, hit bottom in the first quarter of 1993 when they were 20% lower and did not rise back above the pre-slump peak again until the first quarter of 1998.

What would similar timescales mean for us this time round? Prices peaked in the third quarter of 2007, so that would mean them not hitting bottom until the first quarter of 2011 and not getting back to their pre-slump levels until the first quarter of 2016. In other words, not only …

David Smith’s column in today’s Sunday Times caught my eye in part because of my recent experiences with suppliers the party uses. He wrote:

Something odd is happening. Recessions are grim but you expect compensations such as quiet roads, empty trains and helpful shop assistants.

This may be a London thing, but to me roads are busier and on train and Tube journeys I get closer to fellow passengers than is comfortable. As for shops, maybe the retail trade is too miserable, though it is common to find that, when you are ready to buy, the item is not in stock.

In …

David Bowie: the case for the prosecution

The idea that the credit crunch can in part be blamed on David Bowie is the, um…, slightly unusual thought thrown in the air by Evan Davis ahead of the broadcast of his TV documentary on the City. As Evan Davis put it in The Mirror:

Even when it comes to finances Bowie leads the way – and back in 1997 he did something called “securitisation”.

He thought, “I have a lot of money coming in over the next 10 years from my back catalogue, but I’d rather have the cash now and not have

…

David Smith is economics editor at the Sunday Times and today he writes of George Osborne:

Every day, sometimes on several occasions, an e-mail arrives in my inbox on behalf of George Osborne, the Conservative shadow chancellor.

Issued in response to a minor economic indicator or flaky forecast, these missives, apart from rather demeaning the office of shadow chancellor, are usually harmless enough and can be safely ignored.

Last week, however, came one that summed up the Tory problem: opposition by soundbite. For weeks, a debate has raged about whether central banks should engage in “quantitative easing”, the technique employed by the Japanese

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There’s an in-depth interview with Nick Clegg in today’s Telegraph – here’s a few highlights:

On his imminent fatherhood and paternity leave

Evangelical about the importance of parental leave, Mr Clegg and his party recently adopted a radical child care policy which would allow new fathers as much as nine months or more off work.

He himself plans to spend every minute of the current official entitlement away from the political vortex when the time comes … Wouldn’t an election spell the end of his plans to take proper paternity leave: the full two weeks off “wiping and cooing” as he puts it?

“Proper?” he splutters. “It’s only two weeks. It should be more. … We’re all agreed that one of the great crises in this country for children, particularly for boys, is a lack or absence of positive male role models. And we’ve got legislation that says you can take two weeks off when the baby’s barely aware of your existence. That’s not good enough.” Lib Dem policy is for parents to be given up to 19 months leave, split between the mother and the father; but could the leader of a political party really take months and months off?

“No, it would be really difficult for me,” Mr Clegg says, “But the problem is that no one feels entitled.

“I’m not going to be sanctimonious about this; people should make their own decisions. “I just feel that if dads don’t get involved with their kids early on in a meaningful way often they don’t remain engaged afterwards. I personally think two weeks is a pathetic amount of parenting.”

On the Lib Dems’ popularity