Tag Archives: economic policy

What should the Liberal Democrats do now?

We need to be careful with our responses to the government’s economic policy. We had been calling for a freeze of the energy price cap, and wanted it to be at the April level of £1,971. The government has frozen it at £2,500 a year, saying this will cost £31 bn, up to April 2023. They also responded to widespread demand to provide similar support for businesses at the cost of £29 bn for the six months they are providing it.

So we are broadly in favour of these policies, as with the government’s reversal of the National Insurance increase, which costs £16.96 bn over a full year.

Our own policy is to cut VAT by 2.5% for a year, which will cost £18.75 bn more. We have said that this cut would increase economic growth, perhaps in the region of 0.4%.

We have to consider priorities now, and we believe our first aim must be to protect the poor and campaign against a further rise in poverty. We wish to spend about £7.5 bn in a full year restoring the £20 a week uplift to Universal Credit and extending it to all legacy benefits. Unlike the Labour Party we do not support the proposed one pence cut in the basic rate of income tax, since we are still talking about the need actually to increase the rate by a further penny to pay for social care.

In paying for its proposed new taxes, expected to cost about £43 bn more, the new government is contemplating savings in welfare benefits and in local government essential services, all of which we need to resolutely oppose. We should point out that if tax cuts are paid for with public expenditure cuts there can be no increase in economic growth. Our own proposals to spend around £40 bn on capital spending on green growth and growing our regions outside London and the south-east are far more likely to promote economic growth.

The Tory financial mismanagement which is leading to thousands of home-owners now facing the prospect of having to pay hundreds of pounds more in interest payments on their mortgages means that there will be much discontent among the population at large, already struggling with the cost of living increases including the energy costs which were already greater than a year ago. But protecting the poorest may not seem a priority, if people also dwell on the massively increased borrowing costs the government is now incurring to pay for their tax cuts, although defending education, health care and social care spending remains popular, and wage claims because of high inflation often seem not unacceptable.

Posted in Op-eds | 77 Comments

23 July 2020 – the overnight press release

Lack of economic planning for a pandemic highlights Government failures

Responding to a Public Accounts Committee report published today that finds an “astonishing” failure on the part of the Government to prepare for the economic impact of a pandemic, Acting Leader of the Liberal Democrats Ed Davey said:

Everyone agrees that COVID-19 is an unprecedented challenge, but the Government’s failure to ensure there was a contingency plan at the ready has left thousands of families with no help whatsoever, and thousands of businesses making redundancies or closing down.

Considering that pandemics are one of the key risks any Government plans for, if

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28 November 2019 – today’s press releases (part 1)

It’s been a very busy day today, so these are split into two parts…

  • Leaked documents reveal Trump trade deal threat to UK farming
  • Lib Dems: NHS staff shortages worsen under Tories
  • Lib Dems: neither the Tories or Labour have a credible plan for the economy
  • Lib Dems would halt ‘Brexodus’

Leaked documents reveal Trump trade deal threat to UK farming

Leaked documents from US-UK trade deal talks reveal the threat posed to British farmers from a trade deal with Donald Trump, the Liberal Democrats have warned.

The detailed documents reveal years of talks between UK and US trade negotiators, with American officials pushing to allow …

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A Fairer Share for All Working Group: The road to a liberal Britain

I joined the Liberal Democrats in November to help to create a more liberal United Kingdom. At a time when protectionism and populism are on the rise, not just in the UK but around the globe, it is crucial that we have liberal answers to the difficult questions.

Despite being 10 years on, we are still hungover from the financial crisis. There has been a major squeeze on incomes, structural changes that have damaged towns and the generational divide has grown.

Because of this, I decided to apply to join the A Fairer Share for All working group. Even though populism is …

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged | 38 Comments

Vince’s IPPR speech

Lib Dem leader Vince Cable MP was invited by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) Commission on Economic Justice to speak this morning. You can watch the speech here, with Vince’s bit from 10:38 in.

The entire speech is a long-read for lunchtime, from the end of this blog, but here is an overview of what Vince is calling for when it comes to outsourcing public services, which has come under fire in recent months following the collapse of Carillion and the financial woes of Capita.

Vince’s five-point plan calls …

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Liberals and Neo-Liberals

Professor David Howarth, formerly LibDem MP for Cambridge, contributes to the new Social Liberal Forum book with a powerful, closely argued essay on Liberal economics. This an extract:

Here is a puzzle: if JS Mill, JM Keynes and James Meade were all Liberals and economists, what is a ‘neo-liberal’ economist? One might have thought that it would be someone who updated their thought to consider new facts and new problems.

In a highly successful example of propaganda and disinformation, ‘neoliberal’ has come to mean the doctrines of Friedrich Hayek or Milton Friedman. But those doctrines are anything but ‘neo’. They hark back to the era before Mill. We need to rectify names. Instead of ‘neo-liberals’ the followers of Hayek and Friedman might be called ‘paleo-partial liberals’.

The next step is to reclaim the Liberal tradition. That was the avowed aim of the editors of the Orange Book, but what some of them seemed to mean was not updating Mill, Keynes and Meade but abandoning them in favour of paleo-partial liberalism. Admittedly the diagnosis was not entirely wrong. The Liberal Democrats, as a political party, had wandered a long way from the Liberal tradition and had succumbed to various forms of conventional wisdom.

But the most distinctive feature of Liberal policy was its stance on corporate governance. From Mill onwards, through the Yellow Book to support for codetermination, Liberals argued for a different way of organising firms, not as hierarchical structures dominated by the owners of capital but as partnerships between labour and capital, incorporating democratic representation. James Meade provided a continuation and deepening of this tradition that should have formed the basis of the merged party’s position.

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I disagree with Jeremy

Jeremy Corbyn photo by lewishamdreamer1Jeremy Corbyn strikes me as someone who is still fighting all the battles of the 1980s and has not thought much about anything since.

Re-open the coal mines! Of course – they were closed by the Tories, so they must reopen. But ban fracking – because that is getting carbon-based fuel out of the ground, which is wrong. Now I respect people who want a total ban on fracking out of concern for the local environment, or to keep the carbon in the ground. I happen to accept the evidence that it can be done safely, and that the gas has an important role in replacing dirtier coal, running standby plant for wind turbines and weakening Putin’s influence in the world.

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Opinion: Half an hour that changed the future

Yesterday, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) announced it would reduce or ‘taper’ its level of QE acquisitions from $85 billion a month to $75 billion. In the physical world it was not a touch on the break so much as a slight easing of pressure on the accelerator.

Back in September the FOMC had announced it thought the time for ‘tapering’ was at hand. Long term interest rates (a window on future expectation for growth and inflation) veered up and down as markets tried to gauge the warring claims of the liquidity, income and expectation effects. No clarity: US stock …

Posted in Op-eds | 23 Comments

Opinion: Political deference to today’s orthodoxy is the UK’s economic problem

All three main political parties in the UK today broadly accept the Bank of England’s (BoE’s) programme of buying the paper ‘assets’ of banks with printed money – worthless and valuable alike (quantitative easing – QE). There are few dissenters, but I am one of them.

My dissenting post-2008 remedy was a managed partial default/bankruptcy of the UK’s insolvent banks with a quick operational reboot, on the grounds that it would be cheaper than a printed-money ‘bankers subsidy’. The quantity of intricately interwoven bad assets was unknown, and thus the UK government was subsidising a pig-in-a-poke, I believed.

But hey ho we …

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The Autumn Statement and the unreal economic debate in which everyone pretends the Coalition stuck to ‘Plan A’

It’s autumn statement day. George Osborne will stand at the despatch box of the House of Commons this afternoon and present his pre-budget report. The Guardian’s Martin Kettle sums up what it’s all about:

For the Conservatives, today is about redefining themselves – in the face of a run of seriously disappointing polls – as the party that feels the voters’ pain over energy prices, house price inflation, wind farms or payday loans – while still, boosted by yesterday’s strong economic surveys and the possible return of the UK’s AAA rating, managing a recovering economy more soundly than Labour. For

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What Japan did while we were sleeping

"2 x inflation in 2 years, 2 x monetary base, 2 x amount bonds purchased" “2 x inflation in 2 years, 2 x monetary base, 2 x amount bonds purchased”The overnight news yesterday from the Bank of Japan spelt out its serious intent to double the monetary base – the type of monetary easing, a l’outrance, that I have been arguing for at LDV, and elsewhere, for a number of years now.

The announcement followed the declaration back in November by the then leader of Japan’s opposition that when elected he …

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No braking at Gambon – a monetary policy guide for petrolheads

If you had to choose a person from the following list, and only this list, to be Chancellor of the Exchequer, would you choose James May, Jeremy Clarkson or Richard Hammond? Tough choice, but go on: indulge me!

The last time I wrote here, I predicted that the Quad had reached a turning point on monetary policy. I did this not on the evidence of Vince Cable’s New Statesman article, but on a report in the Financial Times that Osborne was set to change the regime imposed on the Bank of England.

Well, …

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Opinion: the UK has many economic lessons to learn from Ireland

When various commentators and critics of the coalition’s economic policy cast around for alternative solutions, not many look to Ireland for a model to follow, but perhaps they should.

My native country’s economy is in the sort of doldrums which make the current UK growth and employment rate look utopian, but the economy formerly known as the ‘Celtic Tiger’ is healing itself and there are many lessons for UK policy makers to learn. This year growth is forecast to be 1.8%, double what the UK can expect to achieve, while the country was recently able to return to the bond markets …

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Opinion: Are we valuing the right kind of growth?

Our economic system is built around the indicator of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). It measures how much we have produced as a country over a period of time. It does this by adding together the market value of what we have produced. As a result, an increase in the market value of what we have produced signifies that our economy is growing. But should it?

In the grand scheme of human history, GDP is relatively new. It was created to allow the US to better understand how to develop

Posted in Op-eds | 15 Comments

Opinion: The Conflicts of Economic Policy

Nick Clegg’s conference speech committed Lib Dems to manage debt out of the economy and implement a fair tax regime. But the objectives of economic policy often conflict with each other.

Let’s take it that there are three objectives for current economic policy:

  1. to reduce deficit and the debt it accumulates
  2. to inject demand into the economy
  3. to have a fair tax system

In the following table, I’ve had a try at evaluating recent and proposed economic policies against these objectives.

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged and | 53 Comments
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