Month: July 2008

On Tuesday I was sounded out by a senior representative of a continental government over the position the UK will adopt towards EU issues, in the event of a Conservative majority in Parliament after the next election. Given the large number of misunderstandings or wishful thinking on the part of several continental governments, I thought it a good idea to set out in a more public forum the position, to try to clear up some of the misunderstandings.I list beneath nine misunderstandings put to me during the course of the meeting.

1. “Presumably David Cameron will not fulfil his promise to withdraw Conservative MEPs from the European People’s party grouping, as that would entail loss of influence etc”

On the contrary, David is determined that all official Conservative candidates in the next European election will stand on a ticket which precludes membership of any federalist grouping including the EPP. The only reason existing MEPs have not withdrawn is they promised to belong to the EPP before the last election. He will keep his word to the party, and our candidates will keep their word to the electorate if elected.

2. “We assume the Conservatives will go along with the European project and with the Lisbon settlement – the UK has always in the past joined in, albeit reluctantly and late.”

It would be unwise to make such an assumption this time. When Margaret Thatcher came to power she did want to complete the Single market, and when Tony Blair came to power he did want to give the EU more powers over social and employment policy. The modern Conservatives have no wish to grant any more power to the EU. Moreover, we have voted against Nice, Amsterdam and Lisbon because we disagree fundamentally with them, and expect powers back. As William Hague has said, we cannot leave matters as they are if Lisbon has been ratified by all countries.

3. “What can the UK do if Lisbon has not been ratified by all countries?”

An incoming government can keep its pledge to give the people a referendum. If they vote No to Lisbon the government will repeal the legislation and the Treaty is dead.

4. “ Isn’t the UK business community strongly pro the EU, so doesn’t that mean any new government will in practise have to go along with EU plans?”

That is a typical continental misunderstanding of elite versus popular opinion and the relative importance of the two. It is probably the case that senior corporate managers of EU multinationals like Unilever are well disposed to EU integration. If you poll UK managers and executives as a whole they are likely to be as Eurosceptic as the rest of the population. Entrepreneurs are likely to be against higher taxes and more bureaucracy, whether it comes from London or from Brussels.

5. “Surely the UK government will just accept what has gone before as it will want to have influence over the EU”

We will be happy to reach common agreement with other countries on matters of common concern if that is possible, but we have no wish to use the system to force other countries to do things they do not want to do, any more than we want to be told what to do by a majority vote we have lost. We are seeking to run the government of the UK better – we do not harbour ambitions to try to run Germany or France by proxy through the EU.

6. “Isn’t the UK worried that it might lose jobs and investment if it does not go along with the majority”

No. We believe companies in neighbouring countries will continue to invest and trade in the UK all the time it makes business sense to do so. The WTO trade rules also prevent retaliatory action, were any member state thinking of such a course. We do not believe our neighbours would wish to behave like that, especially as they sell us so much more than we sell them.

7. “Won’t the UK join the Euro in due course, once a few more years have passed showing it is a success?”

No, we have won the battle to save the pound. If Blair could not persuade the British people to vote for it during his period of popularity, it is not going to happen. An incoming Conservative government will be against joining the Euro in principle, so it would be foolish of the EU to raise it during any Conservative government’s period in office.

8. “ The UK should understand that Lisbon marks the end of changing the institutional arrangements”

We don’t believe that. Every enlargement to date has been accompanied by the transfer of further powers to the EU. The EU is already working on ways of strengthening the Common foreign and security policy and common defence. David Cameron has ruled out contributing to a common European army.

9. “The UK has to show some flexibility to be a good European. After all France has to show flexibility on defence in return for the Common Agricultural policy. Germany allowed a wider range of countries into the Euro than might have been sensible to show willing over European political union”

The continent has to understand that the UK electorate does not want to be part of a political union. We want CAP reform, as it means dear food whilst penalising developing countries.

10 When I asked “Now the EU has extra powers, what is it going to do with them?” Will it do anything that we might like – cutting regulation and lowering taxes for example – there was no real reply

It seemed to come as a surprise to people who do see the whole thing in terms of constantly changing the architecture to give the EU more power, without communicating the purpose or vision behind taking those powers. It seems to be a case of “We need these powers because we need them because we need them”.

I always knew the former Chancellor was no good at economics. Whilst most people were busily repeating Labour spin about his genius at running the economy, I was critical of the way he trashed the Bank of England and taxed the pension funds to death at the beginning, disagreed with the huge surge of public spending, borrowing and credit in the middle, and disliked the stealth taxes, the nationalisation of Northern Rock and endless changes to the figures that followed. He is now reaping what he sowed. Far from having the best placed economy to handle the downturn we have one of the weakest.

I did always think, however, he was a very shrewd politician. He after all was a colossus in a party of minnows – so much so that none of the pygmies around him dared to offer their party a choice when he finally saw off Blair. Gordon Brown was in many ways the arch spinner of the Blair era, and the Brown era was ushered in with a welter of new spin. So confident was the new regime that they even spun that they did not spin, knowing that spin had been discredited. The endless rows and disputes of the Blair/Brown years ended with the departure of Blair. It looked as if the new era would be one of iron discipline and message control.

The last few days show a complete breakdown in political discipline. Miliband’s recipe for a better government was bound to be seen as a leadership bid by a media hungry to take the leadership story on. Journalists are clearly being fed many stories by Labour MPs and briefers about leadership uncertainty. Harriet Harman’s people must have briefed she would be the first woman in Number 10 since Margaret Thatcher, in charge for a week of Gordon’s holidays. That too was bound to lead to unhelpful speculation, and looked bizarre when someone counter briefed that the PM himself was still in charge from the beach. Friends of Jack Straw have been busy denying he is putting himself about at this sensitive time. We read that maybe 10 junior Minsiters are ready to resign to destabilise things further, and that Alan Johnson is wanted to help put the “message” across. You would need to be some snakeoil salesman to sell to the public the current toxic mix of higher taxes,more public waste, higher borrowing, and a sharp squeeze on everyone’s income to pay for some of the public excess.

Last year an eager Prime Minister used the first excuse to return to mind the shop, cancelling the holiday. He could easily have spared more time away. This year he has been persuaded to take three weeks off. That is a very long time in the hothouse atmosphere his colleagues are creating. There is the danger that the political “narrative” as Labour like to call it will have been wrenched so far away from the one the PM wants by the time he does get back that it will be difficult for him to turn it around. Last year he took too short a holiday. This year he may end up taking too long a holiday.

As there are phones in Southwold he would be well advised to use them to get a grip. He needs to assert his authority over Miliband, Harman, Johnson and the rest as quickly as possible. He needs to supply some sense of direction to the country as awell as to his party.

Over the Brown years the Chancellor/PM has applied an iron law to the Opposition – they must speak no tax cuts and no spending increases. If they venture either Labour reserves the right to list the worst kind of spending cuts to “pay” for them, as no “unfunded” spending increases and tax cuts are allowed.

Gordon Brown has ignored this rule himself, increasing spending massively (often on the wrong things) by increasing borrowing. He has from time to time tried to pay for the increased spending through tax increases, but these are usually unpopular and recently have derailed him This has led to a series of spectacular partial reversals of budget policy (10 p compensation package, cancellation of prospective fuel duty increase, review of VED increase, partial climbdown on CGT etc).

Today we learn of the final irony – he is considering, according to the briefing, a package of unfunded tax reductions!

As if we needed more government debt. Government debt is simply taxation deferred, where we the taxpayers not only have to repay the debt with taxes, but have to pay interest on it as well.
It can make sense for governments to borrow during a downswing or period of slow growth, but isn’t this government already doing that to excess thanks to their mismanagement of the economy and the cycle?

If Gordon at the eleventh hour is looking for some tax cuts they should at least be funded out of reductions in much hated spending, like all the spending on regional government in England, the ID cards computer and the apparatus of his surveillance society.

Meanwhile, the Conservatives will wisely stick to Prudence, and prepare themselves for the shock of just how bad the budget deficit is going to be by this time next year. Does no-one in government care at all about the surge in government borrowing? Do they think the markets will just let them get on with it, without extracting a price?

Can the government rescue the mortgage market? This question is being asked today by the government’s own adviser, as if the mortgage market can be sorted out in some kind of a vacuum, detached from the rest of the banking sector.

I can understand that the government wants to stabilise house prices, and fancies that making more mortgage finance available might do that. It is proof that not even the government believes its theory that the rate of new housebuilding determines house prices, for if it did believe that it would be delighted that not many houses will be built this year, and would be urging the cancellation of even more new build projects to stop the price fall.

Meanwhile over at the Bank of England they are less concerned that house prices are going down than that the prices of energy, food and other essentials are going up. They could take action to make more mortgage money available, by cutting interest rates to stimulate mortgage demand, but they fear that might lead to more money being borrowed to push up the prices of other things. The FSA could help stimulate the supply of mortgages by relaxing their requirements for the amount of capital a bank needs to sustain any given level of lending, but that too is unfashionable just after a period when banks lent too much without the capital backing the Regulator now thinks they need.

There is no evidence of any “joined up” thinking between government, Bank. FSA and the banking sector about what to do. The Bank and Treasury have lurched away from their view of last summer that banks had to sort themselves out, and it served them right if they had to rein back. They have not arrived at a new consensus on how loose or tight they now want monetary policy to be. There are some home truths the government needs to grasp before it makes more foolish statements about the mortgage market:

1. The mortgage market cannot be detached from other types of lending to people and companies. Many mortgages are advanced by banks who also lend for other purposes. Their ability to lend overall is constrained by the amount of capital they have and by the Regulators’ rules on how much capital they need to have for any level of lending. If the government wishes to solve the mortgage famine it needs to solve the banking problem generally.
2. House prices are still high relative to incomes , following a period of massive credit expansion which the Treasury and Bank together encouraged by their low interest rate easy money policies of 2001-6. This was also fuelled by the Regulators effectively encouraging off balance sheet ways of financing mortgages. On the government’s analysis and view that houses are not “affordable” it might prove necessary for there to be a sharp fall in house prices before the market starts to function as the government wishes, as people are being squeezed generally so they cannot afford to trade up or to buy a first home at current prices.
3. Keeping interest rates up also prevents housing recovery. Banks look at how easy it is for someone to afford a mortgage on their income. A mortgage at 8% is twice as dear as one at 4%, and so is ruled out for many people on modest incomes.
4. The nationalised Northern Rock is damaging the mortgage market, as a major lender is unable to increase its mortgage book – indeed it is having to run it down to repay government borrowings, and cannot compete strongly owing to Competition rules over state aids. Selling that bank on would help the market.
5. The government needs to accept that it cannot keep house prices up, stimulate more mortgage lending, cut inflation and place a windfall tax on the banks all at the same time. These different aims pull in different directions. Its first moves have to be to encourage the recapitalisation of the banks so they have the balance sheet strength to lend more – the government itself needs to concentrate on finding a solution to Northern Rock, so that bank can lend more. Windfall taxes are incompatible with this aim. In the meantime it has to accept that houses prices on most forecasts will fall more this year and next. The sooner they do so, the sooner homes will appear more affordable. The authorities could cut interest rates to lessen the extent of the fall needed to price people back into mortgages and homes.

Current policy is incoherent. Interest rate policy is encouraging house price falls. Banking regulation is restraining new advances after a long period of allowing lending growth. Housebuilding and planning policy is trying to encourage further price falls. Attacking banks for being too careless in their lending as the Chancellor did last year encourages a more restrictive attitude towards lending.

What do the government want? Perhaps they should decide that first, then they have to bend every policy instrument to that aim. They never did answer my question about how far they think house prices need to fall to be “affordable”, yet they have gone on about how they are not affordable. Muddle over that is at the heart of their problem.

Many Labour MPs have found the answer – windfall taxes. They are proposing a veritable blizzard of these windfall taxes – one for the oil companies, one for the electricity utilities, and yet another for the banks! It leaves the sane asking “What then was the question?”

Would windfall taxes bring down inflationary price pressures? No, not by one penny. Indeed, if the companies they want to tax have real market power as they suppose, they would put their prices up to help pay the tax!

Would windfall taxes make the government popular? Unlikely, as people are fed up with not having enough money in their own pockets – lining the governments pockets some more is not going to make them feel better off.

Would windfall profits improve the efficiency of the sectors paying the taxes? Of course not. It would be more likely to lead to delay or cancellation of some capital investment that could make them more efficient or raise capacity.

Could windfall taxes be routed directly to those who have been losing out under this government? Yes, they could , but that doesn’t look likely. If they used them to pay for the restoration of the 10p tax band that could help a little, but it would still leave us with more damage to business. The government seems resolute in not wanting the cancel its Income Tax hike from the last budget.The banks need more capital, not less. Taxing them more delays the day when they have enough capital to lend on a sensible scale to lift the economy.

Would windfall taxes cheer the left of the Labour party because it would be bashing shareholders, pension funds and savers? Would it be another good hit at the managing and saving classes? Yes, undoubtedly.

Windfall taxes would be great news for the Conservatives, as it would confirm Labour had lost the plot, but bad news for the country.

The government has stuck to its idiot view of house prices – it believes they reflect whether enough new houses are being built or not. All the time house prices were rising they told us it was because we were not building enough. They used the rise in prices as an excuse to demand the concreting over of the South-East, against the wishes of many electors whom they attacked as Nimbys.

Now house prices are plunging, on the same logic, the government should be saying it shows too many houses are being built. They should be welcoming the savage cuts they have forced onto the housebuilding industry by their boom/bust credit policies, as that should be the right response to too many houses, visible in the falling prices. They should be scaling back their demands for more construction, which look more and more ludicrous by the day as we watch the housebuilding industry in free fall close down site after site.

Instead, on the BBC this morning prominence was given to a forecast from the National Housing Federation that house prices will rise by 25% over the next five years, and by more in the South-East. This forecast is out of line with the typical forecast of further falls in 2008 and 2009 leading to a substantial drop in house prices, followed by a slow and moderate recovery. The BBC presumably gave it airtime, and on most mentions did not juxtapose it with the gloomier consensus forecasts, because they want to help the government talk the market up. If only it were that easy.

House prices are likely to fall further because the mortgage market has dried up, and because the Treasury and Bank are keeping conditions tight by running off the Northern Rock book and by their approach to interest rates.

I am going to ask some questions of how that forecast was arrived at, and ask Ministers to explain the inconsistencies of their appraoch to housing forecasts and price changes. The government comes across as ignorant of what really makes house prices go up and down, out of control of the money markets and therefore the mortgage markets, but still as determined as ever to force more houses onto the South East than voters want. They should instead reckon on many months of little new building activity and falling prices.

Most politicians naturally assume public spending is good and more public spending is better. They implicitly assume that you can buy votes with other people’s money. This belief has underpinned the long upwards movement in public spending of the last hundred years, punctuated only by the odd financial crisis forcing retrenchment (e.g. 1976) or by the occasional political period of calculated “austerity” ( e.g. 1981-3, 1997-2001) when spending has grown less fast than the economy.

It is strange politicians believe this, as there is plenty of evidence that big areas of public spending achieve the opposite effect to that desired by the politicians. The last few weeks have shown how spending or promising to spend huge sums to repair the damage of the 10p tax cut, to create jobs in Scottish ship yards, and to win votes in the Commons have not brought any joy or new support for the unpopular government writing the cheques.

There are fundamental reasons why a lot of public spending is unpopular. Public spending takes five main forms:

1. Granting money back to you.
2. Granting money to others.
3. Spending on the delivery of public services you might use.
4. Spending money on the delivery of public services you dont use.
5. Spending money on government itself.

Spending money on giving you money back is the most popular of these. It does ,however, lead some of us to ask why take the money off us in the first place? It means we are worse off than if the government did not take the money and then give it back, as two expensive lots of officials are involved in taxing us and giving us benefits. It also means our freedom is limited to some extent, as you usually have to live in a particular way to qualify for the money back.

Granting money to others can be very unpopular with those who have to pay the bills. Whilst most of us are happy to pay tax so that badly disabled people can receive an income and receive some comforts for their condition, many are not happy to subsidise the neighbour they think could as well get a job and pay tax as they are doing. MPs receive many emails and letters from people complaining that the benefit system is too generous to some. This phenomenon is even more common in the company sector. I remember as a Minister at BERR (DTI as it then was) how many letters we used to receive from companies complaining that we were subsidising their competitors with grant aid that seemed to them unfair. Only a minority of companies receive grants, leaving the majority cross that they have to pay more tax to pay for the grants to the others.

Spending on the delivery of services you use is usually popular. Most people want to know there are enough nurses and doctors in the local A and E in case they have an accident. Parents always want their local school to get plenty of money. It is not the same for services people never use. Some single people or people beyond the age of parenthood do complain about education spending, healthy people sometimes complain about health costs, and many people complain about the costs of quangos supplying services we could well live without. Who wants regional government in England, or more planning consultation documents where the replies will be ignored?

The most unpopular form of spending is spending on government itself. The fascination with the expenses regimes and salaries of Ministers, MPs, quango chiefs and local authority chief executives in recent months is a symptom of a growing frustration. People think the costs of government are out of control, and need to be cut.

This government has allowed people to become very sceptical of how much if any of the additional spending will get through to services they want to use, or will end up back in their pockets. People feel they are getting a rotten deal on public spending because they feel too much is going on government itself, or on transfer payments to people and companies that should not receive it, or on waste within public services that are needed.

People feel overtaxed because they are overtaxed. A government that still thinks all public spending is popular and that we need more of it understands neither the public nor the nature of public spending. Just as some people are jealous of high pay in the free enterprise sector, so many are now jealous of the winners from the government spending lottery, which favours those at the top of the bureaucracy and quangocracy.

When a party is as down and out as Labour is today it is conventional for them to debate whether they should now concentrate on salvaging something by pandering to the core vote, or drive decisively to middle Britain and ignore the many party cries for a more traditional approach. It is only fitting that Labour should now agonise over this, as they have spun for years that the Tories can only do well if they ignore their core and position in the centre ground.

I do not believe in the conventional descriptions of UK politics based on a left-right analysis. Some of the defining issues no longer fit in such a geometric pattern. Euroscepticism is not a monopoly of the right, and is held passionately as well by the Benn wing of the Labour movement. Pulling out of the EU was after all Labour policy in the 1980s. Wishing to restore our civil liberties is a passion of many of us Conservatives today, but there are other Conservatives who hold more authoritarian views, whilst many in Labour hate their government’s attack on our liberties. The left tries to make out that only they would pay large sums into our schools and hospitals, yet both main parties believe in free treatment and free school places and accept that requires substantial and increasing sums of public spending on them. The new divisions are Eurosceptic versus Euroenthusiast, and freedom loving versus turning to the state to seek a greater sense of security and direction in private lives.

Mr Brown will be unable to learn any lesson from recent electoral reversals that requires getting powers back from Brussels, or requires allowing us greater freedom. He is too hooked onto the Euroenthusiast agenda of more power to the centre, and too persuaded that he needs to take more control over our lives to fight his own miserable version of the “war” on terror. He will need to look elsewhere for policies that might chime with an increasingly sceptical electorate.

In the economic sphere there is a clearer distinction between Conservative and Labour, and between Blairism and old Labour. It is here the battle will be fought for the sole of Brown’s Labour. Is he truly a Blairite moderniser, as he sometimes spins, or is he an unreconstructed tax and spend socialist, as his actions since 2001 indicate? Will becoming even more of a tax and spend socialist help win back the core vote, or does he need to become less of a tax and spend socialist to win back some “centre” votes?

Blairites believe that public services should be opened up to more competition and choice. They believe that whilst delivering free medical care and free school places remains important, this can be done more effectively through a range of providers, some of them in the private or charitable sectors. They see the inefficiencies, poor quality and high cost of some monopoly state provision. Socialists believe that these services must be supplied in a uniform way by state employees through a monopoly service, and persuade themselves that any problems of quantity or quality simply reflect a lack of “funding”.

Gordon Brown has elements of both in his thinking. In his statements he tells us the Blairite reforms carry on. He claims to favour a wider range of different types of school, and wants private treatment centres hired by the NHS to provide specialist facilities. However, as Chancellor he was often the roadblock to reform, and as Prime Minister for all the fine words there is not a lot of evidence of major reform on the ground. He increased spending massively to test out the old Labour proposition that there was nothing wrong with monopoly state services that large injections of cash could not put right. Now in power at Number 10 he faces the conundrum of what do you do when the public services are still not good enough and you have run out of money?

The irony of the PM’s position is clear. He will continue to speak as a moderniser but will operate as a traditional high spend socialist. The one thing he is likely to conclude from the bruising rows of the last few months is he should drop all moves to higher taxes, and just borrow and borrow and borrow. The left has largely given up on the idea that taxes on people should be raised – after all the left somewhat belatedly joined Conservatives in complaining about the last income tax hike. Trade Unionists will have another go at taxing energy companies, just as oil prices start to subside. The demand will be popular, but the Chancellor if he goes there will probably end up making another mess and become impaled on an increasingly international and vociferous business lobby capable of shifting profits and domiciles quite quickly if he goes too far.

All this leaves Gordon Brown to do as he will see it is to spend more and more on Labour areas and Labour causes. This will make the economic position worse. Years of high spending on the inner cities, and years of skewing spending to the north and west away from the more prosperous south and east has failed to narrow the gap. Over the last eleven years the more they have spent in the public sector the bigger the regional gap has grown. This will not deter them.

Heaping more public spending on will delay the interest rate cuts the UK economy needs to revive its housing sector. Spending more in the public sector will intensify the squeeze on the private sector and lead to more job losses there. It will reveal to all who still do not get it that Gordon Brown is very much a high spend socialist. It will also bring his government down. It’s the economy stupid. More public spending is not the way to fix it.

If he wants to revive his political fortunes he does need to get a grip on the public sector, and reduce the squeeze on the private by cutting taxes and interest rates.

In the last three months on this site you have responded most to the following topics:

David Davis
English Votes for English issues
English Democrats
The Irish referendum on the EU
Inflation
The battle of the Somme
European army
Modernising Conservatism and Anglicanism
Motoring taxes
MPs pay

(Top ten in order of number of responses per item)

Labour’s loss of Glasgow East has come after the start of the long Parliamentary recess. It means John Mason will have to wait eleven weeks before he can take his seat, eleven weeks before he can say anything in Parliament about why he won and why the electors of Glasgow are so fed up with Labour. It also means Gordon Brown is spared analysis and hysteria about the result around the tea room tables in the Commons. His MPs are already well dispersed and some no doubt busy with other things.

As one who had thought the polls and pundits would be right in predicting a very narrow Labour victory, it does make a difference that they could not even cling on to their 3rd safest seat in Scotland. The turn out was respectable for a by election – some Labour voters were angry enough to go to the polls and vote for a different party.
Labour in the form of Mr Alexander tells us they “will learn the lessons”. We heard that after Crewe and after Henley as well, in the measured tones of an undertaker addressing the bereaved family.

I doubt that very much. To those who say the problem is Gordon Brown – his appearance, his tone of voice, his approach to people – I say he has changed himself a lot. He can now tie his tie tidily, he sports a much better hair cut, he has bought some new suits, and has adopted a much softer and less aggressive tone of voice. I was pleasantly surprised by the way he responded to my last question to him in the House on Tuesday. Instead of asking him a question as I often do to seek to move the debate on, I asked him a highly political question. I asked if he was intending to persuade Obama he was wrong to both want early withdrawal from Iraq and to want more troops and more commitment to Afghanistan, in contradiction to present US/UK policy. He responded in a measured and thoughtful tone, and answered half the issue I put to him. He has changed a lot and become more Prime Ministerial, accepting people’s right to put difficult issues before him. He understood that it would not be good to allow a rift to open up between himself and Obama, but he also has to stay loyal to the current UK/US line.

The problem is not Gordon Brown today. The problem is the mess Blair/Brown made of the economy in the period 2001-2006. The problem is the inflation they have unleashed, and the sharp slowdown they have now generated. That is why I do not think Labour have begun to learn the lessons, because they still cling to the view that the problem is of foreign origin, and that the UK is well placed to deal with it. As readers of this site will know, I concur with neither of those premises.

If they really wish to show they have learned the lessons of Crewe, of Henley and of Glasgow, or for that matter of the last local and mayoral elections, they would take action to alleviate our pain. Just reciting the mantra they “understand how difficult things are” whilst blaming foreigners at every turn will not do. Jetting off to lecture the Saudis about the price of oil, whilst ignoring the EU over the price of food will not do.

They should take action including the following:

1. Impose a staff freeze on the public sector staff (other than teachers, nurses, doctors, police and troops and other important front line personnel). Stop the flood of spending on computers, consultancies, new logos, spin doctors, and all the other paraphernalia of the quango state. Get public spending under control.
2. Cut fuel duty so oil taxation is back on budget, helping cut inflation.
3. Cut interest rates to 2.5%
4. Reduce taxation on new exploration and development of oil and gas in the UK
5. Cut the Corporation Tax rate to attract more business to the UK
6. Announce decisions on privately financed infrastructure projects in energy, transport and water to offer work to the hard pressed construction industry.
7. Speed CAP reform to allow more agricultural activity in the UK and to give us full access to world markets for food.

If they did this theywould tackle the twin evils of inflation and slow down. They might offer people some hope that their family bills will come under some control, and offer those who fear job losses that the government wants to limit the fall in the economy. I see no signs of them doing much of this anytime soon. I have to conclude they still do not get it, as they mouth their soundbites about a foreign crisis and tell us they share our pain on their six figure Ministerial salaries.