Quote of the Day: Sir George Young

From last night’s Newsnight:

Emily Maitlis: “Does he [Lord Ashcroft] pay full UK tax?”

Sir George: “He pays tax.”

Cameron’s New Video for Schoolchildren

David Cameron has recorded a really nice new YouTube video for schoolchildren. I think it’s really aimed at the 4-5 age range, though I don’t think children of this age are that interested in how Select Committee Chairmen are chosen. I might be wrong though. Anyway I think it’s fantastic that he’s doing these videos for children, as politicians often neglect this key part of the electorate. Dave’s just so good at breaking things down to a really simplistic level; that’s why this video works so well. I mean, to an adult it does sound a little patronising (OK, more than a little), but we shouldn’t judge him. Afterall, if you went into your young child’s classroom I’m sure you’d find the teaching a little patronising, given that you can probably do your 2 times table, and have probably mastered writing your name.

I just think it’s really good that Dave is producing such high quality stuff for this much undervalued political audience.

Quote of the Day: David Plouffe on Obama

“His efforts will be graded daily by the pundits, and polls will be thrown around as evidence of progress or setbacks, but he will keep the ship steady, focused on achieving an end result that will improve the lives of Americans. Without this discipline and long-range focus, change would be impossible to bring about in Washington, a city where every bump, real or imagined, is treated as a permanent setback. The president does not view his work and progress on these imperatives through the lens of daily political scorekeeping. He stays focused on whether his day-to-day work, most of which will never appear in the news, is leading toward the desired result.”

Taken from David Plouffe’s excellent book, The Audacity to Win

Liam Byrne: Master of the Euphemism

“There’s about £57 billion worth of hard decisions that will have to be taken” Liam Byrne on PM earlier.

Translated into English: “We will have to cut £57 billion from public spending”

George Orwell must be turning in his grave.

What Chance of an Early Election?

Mark Thompson and Political Betting have been considering what the impact of today’s figures for economic output will be on the election. They both highlight the fact that the next set of figures will come out on April 23rd, which would be just 13 days before a 6th May election. If they showed stronger growth, they would be great for Labour, but if they show the economy shrinking again, they would be disastrous. But what chance is there of that? Here’s a graph that I kept from the FT a couple of weeks ago which compares previous recession with this one. It clearly shows that this recession has been the deepest since that of the 1930s. But if you also look at the periods after each recession bottomed out, you can see that growth was rarely uninterrupted. In fact, in all of the previous 4 recessions, the economy picked up before shrinking again.

There is a gamble here for the prime minister. Either he gambles on another figure in April confirming growth in the economy for the period we are in now, or he goes to the electorate beforehand and fights an election on the 0.1% growth figure announced this morning. There are also other advantages of going to the polls sooner rather than later, as Mark points out: Brown wouldn’t have to go before the Iraq Inquiry before the election, and Alistair Darling wouldn’t have to stand up in the Commons and read out what is going to be a painful budget.

However the prime minister has demonstrated before that he has little courage when it comes to calling elections, and to do so now would require  significant display of courageousness. Perhaps he could have a look at his book and get some inspiration.

Just Think What Could Have Been

Any sensible person thinks that radical fiscal and monetary action to counter the effects of the recession was right. A Keynesian response to downturns makes recessions shorter and prevents unemployment rocketing.

While we had dramatic monetary action taken by the Bank of England, who took measures that have never been taken before, the response fiscally was significantly weaker in Britain. The most costly component of the fiscal stimulus here was the temporary VAT cut, making up £12.5 billion of a £15 billion stimulus package. In comparison, the stimulus package in the US pumped $787 billion into the economy.

Why was our stimulus so small, then? The main reason was that the Government budget deficit BEFORE the recession was already extremely high. In fact, Britain has had a budget deficit since 2002/3.

This is a fact which is, surprisingly, rarely discussed. But it should be. If the British Government had not been spending more than it took in for the 5 years before the recession, the stimulus package when the inevitable downturn came could have been much larger.

If the money used for the VAT cut was spent directly on ’shovel-ready’ investment projects, along with the extra billions that could have spent had it not been for the deficit, just think how much better the recession would have been. Far fewer people would have been made unemployed, and the likelihood is that we would already be out of recession. And we would have a far lower structural deficit to tackle once the recession was over.

Gordon Brown can take credit for some of his actions during the recession, but be in no doubt that recession would have been much less painful for many people had the Government spent money responsibly before the downturn.

Vince and Obama on the Same Page: Break Up the Banks

Vince Cable, Lib Dem conference, 21st September 2009:

We have a seriously distorted economy, over dependent for growth and revenue on financial services.  Gordon Brown’s unwillingness to take on the vested financial interests is pathetic. The principles should be clear. Full compulsory disclosure of all pay, bonuses and perks for those earning more than the Prime Minister. The break up of the big banks which are currently too big to fail so that the taxpayer is no longer underwriting casinos. Casinos belong in Las Vegas not in banking. We want straightforward, simple banks which do the basics well; not laboratories for financial rocket scientists.

President Barack Obama, 21st January 2010:

The fact is, these kinds of trading operations can create enormous and costly risks, endangering the entire bank if things go wrong.  We simply cannot accept a system in which hedge funds or private equity firms inside banks can place huge, risky bets that are subsidized by taxpayers and that could pose a conflict of interest.  And we cannot accept a system in which shareholders make money on these operations if the bank wins but taxpayers foot the bill if the bank loses.

BREAKING: I’m Watching Blair at the Iraq Inquiry (Possibly)

I’ve just received a ticket to attend the afternoon session of the Iraq Inquiry next Friday, when former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, is due to give evidence. Unfortunately it is for the additional viewing facility so I am not sure if I will attend.

Government Sides With Big Business and Abondons Animal Welfare Again

WARNING – THE IMAGES BELOW MAY BE DISTURBING, BUT I CAN’T EXPRESS IN WORDS WHAT THE PICTURE SHOWS

Because of the intensity and stressfulness of the conditions many commercial laying hens are kept in, there is a practice in the industry to remove most of the hens’ beaks to stop them pecking each other (which hens do when they are kept in a stressful, painful, and unnatural environment). In the past, this debeaking of day-old chicks has been done with a red-hot blade (pictured below). This has caused massive problems in hens for years, as you can imagine: they can’t eat properly, they can’t peck things properly (a key natural trait), and it causes acute pain, both at the time the hen is debeaked and for a period afterwards. That this would happen would be obvious, frankly, to anybody.

It is for these reasons that the practice has already been outlawed in many other European Countries, and why it was set to be banned here from 2011. However the Government has now quietly backtracked on the ban – something we only know thanks to a Parliamentary question. The Minister responsible, Jim Fitzpatrick, says:

The Government have accepted advice from the Farm Animal Welfare Council, an independent advisory body, that a complete ban on beak trimming of laying hens should not be introduced from 1 January 2011 (as is currently in legislation), but should be deferred until it can be demonstrated reliably under commercial conditions that laying hens can be managed without beak trimming, without a greater risk to their welfare than that caused by beak trimming itself.

The Government will shortly issue a consultation on proposed amendments to the Mutilations (Permitted Procedures) (England) Regulations 2007 (as amended) to remove the total ban on beak trimming, to allow for routine beak trimming of day old chicks intended for laying to be done using the infra-red technique only.

What he is essentially saying is that the big businesses that make millions from eggs layed by hens kept in frankly barbaric conditions are not willing to change their practices, and the Government is rolling over. The industry has come up with a new way to cut off the beaks of hens, which it claims is less painful, using an infra-red method. However research has shown this to be complete rubbish: it is just as painful, if not worse, than the method used before. You can see from the picture to the left just how disgraceful a practice this is.

An Early Day Motion calling on the Government to keep the ban now has an impressive 122 signatories, so if you care about this I’d urge you to contact your MP and ask them to sign it. Big Business must not be able to force the Government to abandon moral principles so easily, and it’s time DEFRA stopped just rolling over at the first sign of opposition.

The Obama Nobel Prize

When US President Barack Obama was surprisingly nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize last October, the remarks he gave to the press really hit the right note. In fact I blogged that day that Obama’s Clearly Got His Own Toby Ziegler. Him receiving the prize could have gone horribly wrong for the Administration if the President’s remarks didn’t fit the mood – which they inevitably don’t always do.

Anyway I was looking through this fantastic photo gallery of the President’s first year in office, taken by White House photographer, Pete  Souza, and spotted a photo of the President sitting in the Outer Oval Office looking over the remarks that had been written. And, although we could have probably guessed this anyway, we now know the two key people responsible for this communications coup: The President’s Speechwriter, Jon Favreau (‘Favs’) and Special Adviser to the President, David Axelrod (‘Ax’), who are standing next to the President in the picture below, 3rd and 5th from right, respectively.

Obama may be having some slight issues at the moment, but he’s certainly got a great team around him who, I’m sure, will take back the agenda so the President can do all the things the people of the US gave him an overwhelming mandate to in 2008.