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Tag Archives: george osborne

Even George Osborne’s Brexit black hole warning wasn’t high enough

By Paul Walter | Thu 24th November 2016 - 7:15 pm

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George Osborne got a lot of stick back in June, when he warned that a Brexit vote would leave a “£30 billion black hole in (the) public finances”. Indeed, his warning resulted in his entire career being shunted into a siding. Crestfallen, he went off to Vietnam to let off steam with an M60 machine gun.

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Posted in News | Also tagged brexit | 54 Comments

Laws on Osborne v Duncan Smith

By Joe Otten | Tue 5th April 2016 - 10:15 am

I wrote here recently on the claim by Iain Duncan Smith that he had been unhappy with the extent of cuts that George Osborne was demanding from the welfare budget.

Some light has been thrown on this by David Laws’ book Coalition, written before IDS’s resignation but published since.

Largely it seems to confirm Duncan Smith’s position. Not that he is a welfare dove by any means – for example when a complete welfare freeze for 2012 was proposed, while inflation was running at 5 per cent (p102)

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged iain duncan smith, welfare and welfare cuts | 24 Comments

Avoiding the Tory disaster in Education

By Jamie Dalzell | Mon 21st March 2016 - 3:47 pm

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Last week, as a governor, I spent my morning at my local primary school completing an annual return and reviewing our budget for the next financial year (as an accountant, I get all the fun jobs). The atmosphere was a strange one. As a school that has successfully fought off an attempt at academy conversion, the staff were deeply upset about the grand announcement from George Osborne, that all schools will become academies by 2020. Meanwhile, our excellent Local Education Authority advisor was clearly and understandably out of sorts having just been made effectively redundant.

The policy being pushed forward by the government is going to be a disaster for primary schools, and everyone working in the sector knows this. Quite simply, the size of primary schools prevents them from having the necessary infrastructure to make an academy structure feasible. The destruction of the Local Education Authority support network will do irreparable damage to our capacity to support primary leaders in their incredibly varied roles.

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged academies | 20 Comments

David Laws on Marr: I want to expose how NHS chief was leant on to encourage debate on NHS funding

By Caron Lindsay | Sun 20th March 2016 - 10:59 am

It’s the second week of David Laws’ coalition revelations serialised in the Mail on Sunday. This week we have him telling us that:

To take them in turn:

You have to wonder why we bought and publicised the £8bn figure, too. It’s all very well for David Laws to tell Andrew Marr today that Norman Lamb was always sceptical about it, but I seem to recalls making a massive thing about how we were the only party who was going to meet the £8bn request in full. If we knew that the figure was nonsense then, why on earth did we not say loudly and lay out the choices that the nation faced in a much more realistic way?

On Marr, David Laws emphasised how the Lib Dems helped IDS veto Treasury requests for further welfare cuts, confirming that Osborne saw it as a cash cow.There are problems with this analysis, though. Danny Alexander seemed to be hand in glove with Osborne on a lot of this stuff, at one point calling people affected by the Bedroom Tax “bedroom blockers.” Also, a lot of the really awful ideas, from the rape clause to the capping at two children were IDS’s idea.

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged coalition, david cameron, david laws, eric pickles, ids and theresa may | 20 Comments

George Osborne’s decisions are coming back to haunt him

By Paul Walter | Sat 27th February 2016 - 11:23 am

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Commenting on George Osborne’s planned spending cuts, Liberal Democrat Treasury Spokesperson Susan Kramer has said:

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Posted in News | Also tagged austerity | 16 Comments

Are we targeting the wrong deficit?

By Peter Martin | Mon 1st February 2016 - 1:56 pm

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Keynes and his contemporaries did not share our present day casual attitude to the imbalances we see in international trade. The monthly, or quarterly, trade figures were a regular and prominent feature of our business news, at one time, but we have to look much harder to find those same figures now.

Keynes’s proposal that international trade be separated from domestic trade by the use of a separate international currency, the Bancor, formed part of the official British proposals at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference which set the international financial and monetary arrangements for the post war period. Unfortunately this was a step too far for the Americans at the time. The proposal, had it been adopted, would have penalised the surplus nations, making it less attractive for countries to run large export surpluses and would have encouraged the deficit nations to re-align their currencies to reduce their deficits.

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged deficit and john maynard keynes | 25 Comments

Vince Cable on “decaying” relationship with “bloody-minded” Osborne in government

By News Meerkat | Tue 8th December 2015 - 7:15 pm

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Posted in News | Also tagged coalition government and vince cable | 4 Comments

Your thoughts on Osborne’s Autumn Statement

By Mary Reid | Wed 25th November 2015 - 12:32 pm

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Before George Osborne steps up to the dispatch box today we already know which Government departments will be protected from the cuts and which will have to take the brunt. The Tories have pledged to protect the NHS, education, defence, pensions and foreign aid, so that leaves vulnerable the police, local government (and just think of the huge number of services they provide), social care, further education (apparently not considered ‘real’ education), renewable energy and, of course, welfare.

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Posted in News | Also tagged autumn statement 2015, spending review 2015 and tim farron | 33 Comments

Liblink: Tim Farron on the five things Lib Dems want to see in the Spending Review

By The Voice | Wed 25th November 2015 - 12:10 pm

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Tim Farron has been writing today in the Huffington Post.

The simple fact is that nearly half of the cuts George Osborne will make aren’t necessary to get spending under control. Instead that are motivated by an ideological drive to shrink the state. That’s a big departure from the decisions Liberal Democrats took in Coalition.

He outlines the five things that he would like to see in the review:

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Posted in LibLink | Also tagged autumn statement 2015, featured, spending review 2015 and tim farron | 1 Comment

LibLink: Shirley Williams tells George Osborne that he has 10 days to save the NHS

By Mary Reid | Mon 16th November 2015 - 12:17 pm

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Writing in the Guardian, Shirley Williams picks up the baton passed on by Nigel Crisp, the former chief executive of the NHS, who four years ago wrote about his experiences in his book 24 Hours to Save the NHS.

Shirley explains that many of the financial woes in the NHS have been inherited from past schemes:

For example, the number of funded places for young men and women training in this country as nurses was cut by 12% – 2,500 places – in 2012. The consequent shortage of newly qualified nurses has been filled by people recruited by employment agencies. The cost of agency staff is one of the main reasons for overspending by NHS trusts. In 2014/15, agency staff cost the NHS £1,770m, a year-on-year increase of 29%.

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Posted in LibLink | Also tagged NHS and shirley williams | 16 Comments

Opinion: The impact of the Budget on students

By G K Teh | Mon 13th July 2015 - 11:42 am

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George Gideon Osborne. Feared and distrusted by the left, the sensible and reasonable portions of his own party. And now he has given university students yet another reason to distrust him. In the Conservative majority budget issued on July 8 2015, the Chancellor introduced a barrage of attention-grabbing measures, many of which present disappointing news to youths – particularly university undergraduates.

The speculation that the first Tory budget since 1996 will be unforgiving for the young and the unemployed have, sadly, been realised. The National Living Wage (set to £7.20 by next April and £9 by 2020) is all very well for workers over 25, but will not apply to those under 25, who will still have to contend with a £6.50 minimum wage. This means that young people who have just left university will have to make their earnings stretch further to cover the rising cost of living that will result from a more robust economy, which will result from reduction in bank levies and cuts in corporation tax.

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged students and summer budget 2015 | 120 Comments

Budget Live Blog as Osborne helps rich – but casts young and poor adrift.

By The Voice | Wed 8th July 2015 - 12:35 pm

Caron Lindsay 12:30 pm

“A budget for working people” says George Osborne. We’ll see. I guess if you are a rich working person, maybe.

I’ve had an official hiding behind pillow for all budgets in the last five years. I need it more than ever today.

So, let the budget live blog kick-off.

The measures we do know about seem very much about giving to the rich and taking to the poor.

People struggling to get by, stuck in private rented accommodation, will find it hard to see Inheritance Tax thresholds being lifted to more than £1 million while their entitlements to tax credits are being limited.

It’s worth pointing out that those are exactly the sorts of measure that the Liberal Democrats spent the last five years stopping or at least limiting. Everything announced today would have been done by now if it hadn’t been for us.

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged budget 2015 | 90 Comments

Danny turns the tables on Balls on TV economy debates

By The Voice | Thu 19th March 2015 - 11:00 am

On Sunday’s Andrew Marr show, Ed Balls caught the chancellor off guard when he all but forced him (in one of recent television history’s most awkward moments) to shake on an agreement to hold a television debate.

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Posted in News | Also tagged budget 2015, Danny Alexander and ed balls | 9 Comments

Vince Cable writes… Osborne’s deep cuts are damaging and ideological

By Vince Cable | Thu 8th January 2015 - 6:31 pm

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It is encouraging to be part of a Lib Dem chorus from across the party denouncing Osborne’s damaging, ideologically inspired, proposals for further deep cuts in spending on public services throughout the next Parliament.

Being in coalition means that we have to go out of our way to differentiate ourselves clearly from the Tories on the central issue of economic policy. The Tories want to create an election narrative of Tory competence versus Labour incompetence (with the LibDems portrayed either as marginal to the story or cheering the Tories on). Next week’s parliamentary debate on a fiscal charter makes the issue of differentiation particularly topical.

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged vince cable | 35 Comments

The polls in 2014: what they show with 133 days left til 7 May 2015

By Stephen Tall | Wed 24th December 2014 - 1:00 pm

The final polls of the year have been published — getting on for 500 have been commissioned in 2014 — and their story is told in the graph below.

It shows Labour’s declining (down from c.38% to c.33%), the Tories static (at c.32%), Ukip on the rise (up from c.12% to c.16%), and the Lib Dems dipping (down from c.10% to c.8%). I’ve added trendlines to cut through the noise and give us a signal:

The last month has done little to alter this overall picture.

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Posted in Polls | Also tagged anthony wells, electoral calculus, icm and uk polling report | 36 Comments

LibLink: Danny Alexander – Liberal Democrats have no part in Tory plans for harsh cuts and empty tax promises

By NewsHound | Mon 8th December 2014 - 11:20 am

The two Coalition parties continue the process of “conscious uncoupling” today. Yesterday, George Osborne said the Lib Dems threatened the economic recovery. Today, it’s a case of straight back atcha from Danny Alexander, as he lays bare the difference between the Lib Dem and Tory economic approach ahead of the May 2015 election in an article in today’s Telegraph:

Last Wednesday, the Coalition delivered another Autumn Statement that stuck to the strategy we’ve had since 2010: clearing up Labour’s mess in the public finances and doing so fairly; reforms to reward work and improve the UK’s long-term growth prospects. This

…

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Posted in LibLink | Also tagged daily telegraph and Danny Alexander | 46 Comments

What is going on with the Liberal Democrat media strategy?

By Caron Lindsay | Sun 30th November 2014 - 10:20 am

This morning we have George Osborne all over the media talking about how wonderful it is that he’s able to give £2 billion to the NHS. Let’s bear in mind that Norman Lamb has been pushing for a cash injection for some time. All he gets is billing on the Liberal Democrat website for the months of tenacious evidence building and making the case for further investment.

I was quite pained to see Simon Hughes put out round the news channels on Wednesday to promote the Counter Terrorism Bill. While he was in the BBC News Channel studio, David Anderson was criticising the very plans that Hughes was defending. It seemed like a bit of a stitch-up. Nick Clegg has always set great store by David Anderson’s judgement. Anderson’s opinion of the Government’s plans to exclude people they think have been fighting in Syria for up to two years was pretty scathing.

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Posted in News | Also tagged featured, media strategy, norman lamb and simon hughes | 26 Comments

LibLink: Tim Farron: Does George Osborne really want to derail the future of our planet?

By NewsHound | Thu 3rd July 2014 - 3:19 pm

Tim Farron was on punchy form when taking on George Osborne’s lack of ambition on climate change in an article in the Independent this week. He did not mince his words:

Osborne’s destructive rationale for overspending on our planned carbon budget is this: without a new strategy agreed, the UK would be ahead of its planned share of emissions cuts within the EU. It can therefore weaken its ambitions and still meet the old targets – there is nothing holding us to the necessary action to tackle

…

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Posted in LibLink | Also tagged carbon budget, climate change, independent and tim farron | 9 Comments

Some first thoughts on the Budget

By Caron Lindsay | Wed 19th March 2014 - 2:23 pm

So the Chancellor has just sat down. Here are my first thoughts on the Budget.

Nick gets his Workers’ Bonus

The personal tax threshold rises to £10,500. I doubt it was anything to do with the petition being pushed on social media in the last few days. This was down to the hard work of our ministers staying on message, in volume, over time, in budget negotiations. Nick Clegg has stuck with this through the entire Parliament and given us a very tangible promise kept – and more. “I am proud of what we have achieved”, said Osborne. Aye right.

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Posted in News | Also tagged budget 2014, featured, nick clegg and vince cable | 54 Comments

Who’s afraid of Scottish independence?

By Stephen Tall | Sun 23rd February 2014 - 2:00 pm

The last month has seen the ‘Yes Scotland’ independence campaign take a battering.

First, Mark Carney raised doubts about Alex Salmond’s plans for a post-independence currency union between Scotland and the remainder of the UK.

This warning was echoed when, with more naked partisanship, George Osborne, Danny Alexander and Ed Balls teamed up to state they would each refuse to form such a currency union.

And then last Sunday, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso hammered in …

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Posted in Op-eds and Scotland | Also tagged alex salmond, Danny Alexander, ed balls, featured, josé manuel barroso, ludovic kennedy and scottish independence | 33 Comments

Ruling out currency union: Locking the horse inside the stable?

By Caron Lindsay | Wed 12th February 2014 - 6:48 pm

The currency in an independent Scotland has been the subject of much frenetic debate in recent months. The Scottish Government’s White Paper on independence is clear that their preferred option is to continue to use sterling within a monetary union with what would remain of the UK:

The Commission’s analysis shows that it will not only be in Scotland’s interests to retain Sterling but that – post independence – this will also benefit the rest of the UK.

Under such an arrangement, monetary policy will be set according to economic conditions across

…

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged currency, Scotland and Scottish independence referendum | 33 Comments

Marriage tax breaks: Lib Dem members oppose Conservative plans by 62% to 22%

By Stephen Tall | Sun 26th January 2014 - 3:44 pm

Lib Dem Voice has polled our members-only forum to discover what Lib Dem members think of various political issues, the Coalition, and the performance of key party figures. Some 750 party members responded – thank you – and we’ve been publishing the full results.

(There were a couple of results I ran out of time to publish during the Christmas holiday period – I’ll be publishing them this week.)

Lib Dems oppose married couple tax-breaks by 62% to 22%

The tax break for married couples and civil partners was a Conservative election pledge that has lain dormant during Coalition. Not because of Lib …

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Posted in LDV Members poll | Also tagged david cameron, free school meals, marriage tax break and nick clegg | 2 Comments

Coalition minister calls for minimum wage increase (that’s Vince, 4 months ago, in case you were wondering)

By The Voice | Fri 17th January 2014 - 3:39 pm

Here’s the Lib Dems’ Vince Cable on 14 September 2013:

And here’s the Tories’ George Osborne – four months later – on 10 January 2014:

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Posted in News | Also tagged minimum wage and vince cable | 3 Comments

Opinion: Is Europe “falling behind” – or is it leading the way?

By Mike Biden | Thu 16th January 2014 - 9:43 am

Where did George Osborne get his figures from? Who writes his speeches?

A quick look at Wikipedia offers four sources of data for GDP per capita in 2012. The first and simplest comes from the IMF (as it omits odd places such as Monaco and Liechtenstein).

Of the top 30 no less than 14 are members of the EU, 7 are major oil producers, 3 are the great trading hubs of Hong Kong, Singapore and Switzerland and the remaining 6 are Australia, Canada, United States, Japan, Iceland, and Israel.

At 23^rd in the list the UK is …

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged europe | 13 Comments

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

By Stephen Tall | Thu 5th December 2013 - 10:15 am

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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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged Danny Alexander, economic policy, ed balls and jonathan portes | 13 Comments

Might some of the welfare changes be a little more helpful to people than Osborne made out?

By Caron Lindsay | Mon 30th September 2013 - 9:43 pm

Conservative Conference week is never an easy time to be a Liberal Democrat. The Conservative in its natural habitat is not a pretty sight to those of us who cherish the principles at the heart of the preamble to our constitution, of liberty, equality and community, of freeing people from poverty, ignorance or conformity. The words Tory leaders use to rally their troops give us that joyless feeling that is known in Scotland as the dry boak.

But, you know, the Tory conference is what the Cabinet table would be like if it weren’t for the Liberal Democrats in Government. …

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged steve webb, welfare and workfare | 70 Comments

Nice try, George. But the Pupil Premium is happening only because the Lib Dems are in government

By Stephen Tall | Mon 30th September 2013 - 8:15 pm

Who has made sure the Pupil Premium is being delivered in Government? Pretty straightforward question, you might think: the Liberal Democrats. Not if you’re George Osborne, though…

“I sit at that Cabinet table and I know who has really put forward the policies that are delivering a fairer society. The pupil premium to support the most disadvantaged children: that was Michael Gove’s idea, front and centre of the last Conservative manifesto.” (30 Sept 2013)

Erm… okay, George. Let’s take those two claims in order.

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Posted in News | Also tagged michael gove, nick clegg, pupil premium and schools | 10 Comments

Lessons of Coalition (13): what do the Lib Dems need to learn from the first 3 years?

By The Voice | Sun 11th August 2013 - 4:45 pm

LibDemVoice is running a daily feature, ‘Lessons of Coalition’, to assess the major do’s and don’ts learned from our experience of the first 3 years in government. Reader contributions are welcome, either as comments or posts. The word limit is no more than 450 words, and please focus on just one lesson you think the party needs to learn. Simply email your submission to [email protected] Today David Allen shares his thoughts.

If It Won’t Work, Walk

In 1974, Ted Heath called on Jeremy Thorpe to join the Conservatives in a historic …

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged david allen, edward heath, jeremy thorpe and lessons of coalition | 12 Comments

The Tories’ 35% strategy shows they know they cannot win outright in 2015

By Stephen Tall | Fri 12th July 2013 - 9:45 am

“The 35% Strategy”. The phrase was initially coined by Dan Hodges to decry the Labour leader’s soft-left leadership:

Forget the One Nation strategy, Ed Miliband is pursuing what is known within his inner circle as the 35 Per Cent Strategy. Come 2015, he thinks he can stagger over the line with 35 per cent of the vote.

Less commented on is that the Tories have also been adopting their own 35% strategy under the tutelage of strategist Lynton Crosby. Today’s news that George Osborne has ruled …

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged child benefit, dan hodges, featured, housing benefit, Lynton Crosby and welfare cuts | 14 Comments

Opinion: Liberal Democrats must stay firm on deficit reduction

By William Hobhouse | Tue 25th June 2013 - 8:59 am

George Osborne will stand up in the House of Commons on Thursday to announce the government’s intentions for public spending for the 2015-16 financial year in circumstances he neither anticipated nor wished for.

As a result of weaker economic growth and a revision to the estimates of the capacity of the British economy, the structural deficit that the coalition had hoped to eliminate by the time of the next election will exist well beyond it, meaning further spending cuts and tax rises.

Liberal Democrats must spell …

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged comprehensive spending review 2013, economy and liberal reform | 58 Comments