And Another Thing…

THIS is what the Conservative Party manifesto 2010 said about the economy:

After a decade of mismanagement, the UK entered the recession in poor shape, with the second biggest budget deficit in the developed world. We have been honest about the scale of the problem, and the actions we will need to take to deal with it.

So, that’s clear, then: for ten years – since 2000 – Labour mismanaged the economy.

And now over to George Osborne, speaking in September 2007, 70 per cent of the way through that “decade of mismanagement”:

George Osborne vowed last night to stick to Gordon Brown’s plan of increasing public spending by 2 per cent in real terms over the next three years.

“Today, I can confirm for the first time that a Conservative government will adopt these spending totals,” the Shadow Chancellor said.

“Total government spending will rise by 2 per cent a year in real terms, from £616 billion next year to £674 billion in the year 2010/11.”

So, while believing Labour “mismanaged” the economy, Osborne and Cameron nevertheless signed up to our spending plans. And then claimed that Labour were 100 per cent responsible for the deficit.

Well, as I’ve said before, consistency in politics is overrated. Osborne obviously believes the same about honesty.

I APPEARED on the MPs’ panel of The Westminster Hour last night, discussing, among other things, Shadow Cabinet elections, welfare reform and tuition fees.

Listen here. Scroll in 28:50 for the start of the MPs’ discussion.

MUCH of the media are getting very excited at the prospect of “middle class benefit cuts” to pay for Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare reforms package.

But we can all relax in respect of at least one area where speculation about cuts is dead wrong: the Winter Fuel Allowance will not be curtailed for younger pensioners, as some of the papers have been reporting. How do I know this? Because the Prime Minister said so during the election campaign. He was asked by the BBC’s James Lansdale about Labour claims that the Tories would cut some key benefits. Cameron got quite touchy:

Let me take this opportunity to say very clearly to any pensioner who is watching this or or reading any of these reports: I know you are getting letters from the Labour Party that says (sic) the Conservative Party would cut the Winter Fuel Allowance, would cut the free bus travel, would cut free television licenses.

Those statements by Labour are quite simply lies. I don’t use the word “lie” very often but I use it today because they are lies. A Conservative government would keep the winter fuel allowance, would keep the free television licence, would keep the extra money for pensioners.

If things had been left at that, Cameron would still have had some wiggle room as far as the Winter Fuel Allowance was concerned; after all, keeping a benefit doesn’t necessarily exclude restricting or rationing it at some point. But Lansdale persevered:

Just to be clear, you would keep the benefits but you would not change them in any way? You will not means test, you will not change the criteria?

And the soon-to-be PM was refreshingly unequivocal:

We will keep what we will inherit in all these important areas.

So, there you have it: David Cameron has promised explicitly to keep the Winter Fuel Allowance exactly as he inherited it. So any journalist who claims that the qualification criteria is about to change is not only dead wrong, they are calling the PM a liar.

And that’s not a word I use very often.

Reporter: So, Chancellor George Osborne, you’ve got some pretty strong views on the last government’s defence budget, haven’t you?

George Osborne (for it is he): Yes, because of all the defence budgets I’ve seen, the one left to us by Labour is definitely the worst. It’s complete rubbish, honestly! It nearly made Dr Fox cry when he saw it, and he’s Scottish and everything!

Reporter: But isn’t it the only defence budget you’ve ever seen? I mean, you’ve never been in government before.

GO: Ah, yes, but… well, I used to pay attention to events and stuff. I even read The Spectator, so…

Reporter: But didn’t you say before the election that you would only know the real state of the economy after you became Chancellor and “saw the books”, as you put it?

GO: Yes, but-…

Reporter: So if you can make a fair assessment of all these other defence budgets without being in government, why couldn’t you make an assessment of other budgets without “seeing the books”?

GO: Ah, well, you see that’s-…

Reporter: Or to put it the other way round, if you can’t make a real assessment of the economy until you’ve “seen the books”, then you can’t make a proper assessment of previous defence budgets either, can you? So you can’t really say this is the worst one you’ve seen. can you?

GO: Look, I didn’t come here to-…

Reporter: How many defence budgets have you actually seen, Chancellor?

GO: Well, lots… er…

Reporter: A rough figure?

GO: One.

Reporter: One?

GO: Yes.

Reporter: So as well as being the worst one you’ve ever seen, it is also the best one you’ve seen, isn’t it?

GO: Look, can we talk about something else? I thought this interview was going to be about Strictly Come Dancing…

TODAY marks the cut-off point for MPs to claim reimbursement for any cost they’ve incurred which might be older than 90 days.

Some will – quite rightly – object to the amount of time MPs and their staff now have to spend navigating Ipsa’s online expenses system. We share that objection. MPs don’t want to spent more than a few minutes a month claiming back money we’ve paid out of our own pockets. We certainly don’t think that our time is well spent waiting for someone at Ipsa to get round to answering our calls after an average wait of 15 minutes. But I can’t remember the last time I was using the utterly opaque and illogical system when I didn’t have to make a call in order to clarify something or other. “Intuitive” is not a word that was familiar to the designers of this particular system.

Here are a few new entries to the Ipsa Hall of Infamy since my last whinge:

• Learning the lesson of expenses claimed under false pretences in the past, Ipsa now insist that MPs lie on behalf of their staff members who claim travel costs. There is no option on the claim form for a staff member to travel from his or her home to Westminster, so the MP must – dishonestly – choose the option that says the cost is for a journey “from constituency office to Westminster”, irrespective of where the office, or the member of staff’s home actually are and regardless of whether the constituency office actually was the departure point (which it normally wouldn’t be). Genius.
• One Labour MP who normally stays overnight in hotels while in London, had to commute to his home 250 miles away instead because Ipsa have placed an inflexible and entirely arbitrary £139-a-night ceiling on overnight stays, and all the local hotels were fully booked.
• A colleague discovered that no-one at Ipsa was available to take his call… at 3.15 pm on a Thursday.
• A Tory MP claimed for the cost of a surgery advertisement. Separately, he had submitted a connected £3.00 claim for the VAT on the advert. Ipsa rejected the claim for the advert – but paid out the £3.00 for the VAT.
• While Ipsa have decided arbitrarily – and politically questionably – that MPs’ staff can no longer have their trade union membership dues deducted at source, Ipsa staff… can.
• A Labour colleague was told that Ipsa had refused to pay the cost of the internet connection to his constituency office. “They don’t think my constituents need to contact me by email, apparently,” he said.

And my favourite one so far:

• You might remember that in the first payroll run, Ipsa couldn’t quite get its head round the idea that MPs should be paid their full salary. So they paid some MPs only a portion of their salary and sent them cheques for the balance. Very efficient indeed, that… Anyhoo, one MP received his cheque and duly deposited it in his bank. Foolish boy – it bounced!

Come on, Eric – make yourself the most popular person in Westminster by making a small addition to your little list.

BARONESS Warsi, David Cameron’s attack muppet (© Alastair Campbell 2010) has been spending the whole of Labour conference standing in front of a TV camera telling the world about how awful the Labour Party is and how left wing Ed Miliband is and no doubt everyone watching her has taken her really really seriously and everything…

Clearly, as someone who doesn’t have to worry about getting re-elected to anything, Warsi feels she can test out new Tory attack lines for her bosses, knowing that even if she looks like an idiot, there’s nothing anyone can do about it, however barmy those attack lines may sound (to their creators, if not to Warsi who, to give her her due, seems to believe them with all with the conviction of a fanatic).

But if I were one of those bright young things at Conservative HQ placing bets on whether Warsi will actually use their latest creative insult (“Go on! Ask her – I bet she uses it!” “No way, surely even she… Oh, all right, I’ll give it a go…”), I would pay just a bit more attention to what Warsi has said when others weren’t writing her lines for her.

Because during the general election, speaking at a dinner in Rotherham in response to a previous speaker who had called on more Muslims to enter politics, Warsi said:

[He] says that we need more Muslims MPs, that we need more Muslims in the House of Lords. I would actually disagree with that because I think one of the lessons we have learnt in the last five years in politics is that not all Muslims that go to into politics have asool.

“Asool” is Urdu for “principles”.

Now, clearly what she said is partly true – it would be absurd to suggest that every Muslim who goes into politics does so for the right reasons, just as it would be absurd to suggest the same of every Christian, Jew, atheist, Sikh, man or woman. But Warsi doesn’t oppose those other groups coming into parliament; she opposes more Muslims in Parliament.

Interestingly, although this article appeared in the online version of The Independent and caused a bit of debate in parts of the blogosphere, the mainstream media never picked it up. I’m sure they were being entirely objective and fair and that if a white, male, non-Muslim politician had expressed opposition to more Muslims going into politics he would have been similarly ignored…

Actually, now that I think about it, maybe she should stick to reciting soundbites that have been pre-prepared for her.

I think the robe is to hide the ladder she's just pulled up after her...

NO WONDER the media are so interested in the soap opera that is David and Ed Miliband. And the truth is that if David had chosen to stand for the Shadow Cabinet, the fascination would have continued, to the detriment of Ed and his leadership.

So I wish him well. His decision helps draw a line under the leadership contest, allowing us to focus on Ed and the future.

In other news, Rosie Winterton is the surprise sole nominee as Opposition Chief Whip, Nick Brown having unexpectedly bowed out. I didn’t see that one coming.

And there are 49 candidates for the 19 vacancies on the Shadow Cabinet. I had predicted between 50 and 60, so I wasn’t too far off.

The question is: what will be the winning threshold for Shadow Cabinet candidates? I recently came across a reference in Kenneth Morgan’s biography of Michael Foot to the 1980 Shadow Cabinet elections, which saw Roy Hattersley top the poll with 143 votes and Neil Kinnock get elected with 90 votes, the lowest of the successful candidates.

This doesn’t give us much of a guide for this time round, though, since I don’t know how many candidates there were in 1980 (although the “electorates’ were very similar in size: 269 in 1980, 258 today). Presumably, the larger the field of candidates, the wider the spread of votes and the lower the winning threshold. But that doesn’t make it any easier to reach the threshold, whatever it is. And as far as I’m aware, there was no women’s quota in 1980, or if there was, it was much smaller than today.

UPDATE: I’ve just come across this rather fascinating (if you’re a political anorak) analysis of the 1994 Shadow Cabinet elections – 52 candidates and a “winning” threshold of 97 votes.

GIVEN that two years ago I entered the Telegraph‘s 100 Most Influential Left Wingers list at number 99, and that I have since then been sacked as a minister, I’m as chuffed as a Chilean miner with a secret stash of Mars Bars to have reached the number 29 position in this year’s poll:

Too kind. No, really.

WHEN I saw this Tweet from PoliticsHome this morning, I thought it looked rather familiar:

And then I remembered this intervention by Yours Truly on May 27 this year:

Given that Ministers of this Conservative Government, particularly those sporting a yellow tie, are positively salivating at the prospect of imposing swingeing cuts which less than a month ago they were campaigning against, when can we have a debate on the economic nonsense of the Government’s saying that they will fully fund the Crossrail project-a good decision-and yet, at the same time, significantly undermining Crossrail’s value for money by cancelling the third runway at Heathrow?

Happy to help, Andy.

WE’RE being asked to believe that Defence Secretary Liam Fox is “shocked and angry” at the leak of his letter to David Cameron, warning the PM off defence cuts.

Why does Liam’s reaction remind me of Captain Renault’s in Casablanca?