Of course their bloody sums don’t add up

The parties are arguing, with desperate earnestness and pitiful fury, about whether each other’s ‘sums add up’. And they’re conducting this argument while all standing on a huge cloud made out of guesswork, evasiveness, ignorance, wishful thinking, secrecy and fiction.

There are two reasons for this miserable predicament.

First of all, Labour’s published plans (such as they are) contain a colossal amount of vagueness. However, because they’re in government, and can publish their numbers on Treasury headed notepaper, these count as ‘official’ and get treated as the baseline against which everyone else gets measured.

Look at this chart from the IFS, showing the government’s proposals for fiscal consolidation:


The green sections in the final two years represent ‘unknown’ changes to tax or spending to reduce the deficit. But there’s more doubt than that: Labour have not done much to explain in detail how the rest of the reduction will be done, other than to say what will be tax rises and what will be spending cuts (although they’ve been clearer on the former).

Then there are the Tories and Lib Dems. If they want to reduce the deficit faster than Labour, they thereby inherit all the uncertainty in Labour’s plans plus any extra uncertainty about the further work to be done. So they’d have even more to explain. They have given some details here and there, and indeed the recent bickering about Tory efficiency savings and National Insurance is to do with the moderate extra vagueness that’s been piled on top of the big underlying vagueness.

So we don’t really know how any of them would do this. Do they?

And none of them can attack the others for ignoring the scale of what’s needed, because of the Fart Principle: whoever raises this problem will be saddled with the burden of explaining their – painful – solutions first (or, in playground parlance, whoever smelt it dealt it).

The second reason that the ‘sums add up’ debate is a mutually convenient charade is that, as Helmuth von Moltke didn’t quite say, no fiscal plan survives contact with the economy.

Economic predictions rank somewhere between meteorology and astrology for their accuracy. As Chris tells us, even in economic good times, Treasury deficit forecasts for the year ahead are out by over £6 billion half the time (and by over £12bn a quarter of the time). For comparison, this week’s spat is about the Tories wanting to use £6bn of extra efficiency savings this year to cut the deficit.

For the year after, forecasts are out by over £15bn half the time and over £21bn a quarter of the time. And three years away? Four? Don’t ask.

So even if all the parties had reams of precise tax and spending plans, audited by the IFS and Stephen Hawking, they’d still be largely hypothetical. And, of course, no party wants to be the one to say they only have the dimmest idea of how their proposals would really work out. They need to project an image of certainty, and the media enjoy judging them harshly for failure – while mostly ignoring the impossibility of the whole enterprise.

Introducing our election coverage

We at Freemania are proud to unveil our programme of 60/60/24/7 rolling coverage of what promises to be the most important, closely fought and thrilling 2010 general election the UK has ever seen.

Our campaign pledge to you is that we will cover the election with a thousand types of shiny sheen, each more ephemeral than the last, and then liquidise it and use the latest in hosepipe metaphor technology to cover you with the election. You won’t know what’s hit you!

• Dayjob Tumbleweed, our top political correspondent, will bring you the very latest developments as they’re reported to have happened. Whether it’s a press conference with Bob Ainsworth, a photo-op in a Luton supermarket car park by Chris Huhne, or the executive summary of a policy document that has a digital scan of Theresa May’s signature at the bottom, you can be sure that Dayjob will hear about it somewhere and pass it on.


• Our panel of pundits – Harpy Bloodshot, Bumptious Hasbeen and Drone Otherhand – stand ready to provide pre-instant analysis of each other’s commentary. They will explain why their own parties’ margin-of-error ups and downs in the polls are due to adhering to/departing from what they’ve been saying all along.


• Speaking of polls, we’ll have regular updates from expert psephologist Professor Blip Hornrimmed, renowned for his eight-dimensional hyperswingometer and his lucid explanations of not only what’s going to happen next week but also why what he said last week didn’t really count.


• Creative guru Pony Onetrick – founder of edgy brand consultancy cutPaste-newFont – will be producing witty and insightful spoofs of all the latest campaign tweets, and roving reporter Shortstraw Cliché will spend the campaign on the trail of the elusive swing voter, who is believed to be holed up in a basement somewhere in the West Midlands with five weeks’ worth of tinned food and bottled water.


• Finally, our resident blogger, Glint O’Selfawareness, will be trying to fill space and urging those fools in all the rest of the media to focus more on issues than personalities, without actually having to know very much himself.

Stick with us and we’ll make sure that, come election day, your yearning for death is matched only by your inability to remember which end of the kitchen knife is the stabby bit!

Frank Blunt
Star columnist and Acting Editor-in-Chief, Freemania

Tory recovery plan poster

(I can’t stop myself any more...)


I don’t like it nearly as much as my last one, but it’s the best spoof of this real Tory ad that I could think of.

Cameron and Osborne’s spin cycle

Congratulations to Jacob Quagliozzi for winning Labour’s ‘design a poster’ contest.

Here’s my own effort:

(Click for larger image.)

Too wordy to work on a billboard, methinks (and technically not that great), but the quote is rather the whole point of it. And I do love that quote. And yes, he really did say that.

Real proverbs

• He who laughs last is slowest to get the joke.
• Absence makes the heart unable to pump blood around the rest of the body.
• Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, unless the beholder has an oozing stye.
• Easier said than done, especially for vows of silence.
• Familiarity breeds web-footed children.
• Many hands make giant horse.
• Honey catches more flies than vinegar, though fewer than a big net.
• In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is going to have real trouble finding someone who takes care of their appearance.
• The Isle of Man is an island.
• Rome wasn’t built under a Private Finance Initiative.
• You can lead a horse to water, so build your glue factory next to a lake.
• A bad workman gets more commissions because he’s cheap, and that’s why so many things are crap.
• If wishes were horses, then horses would be Christmas every day, when the kids start singing and the band begins to plaa-aayy.
• A journey of a thousand miles? Fuck that.

Any more, anyone?

Most of my life

By xkcd:

The Provisional Neighbourhood Army

I agree with Norm that the Tory slogan “the Big Society” doesn’t really come across the way they want it to. They’re also proposing a “Big Society Bank”, which involves the ingenious use of the words “Big” and “Bank” to name an institution that people are supposed to trust.

Another dud, to my ears at least, is “neighbourhood army”. It’s meant to describe a group of professional community organisers, but it sounds just a bit too IRA for my liking.

Condoms: 0.0000003% more mass murder

It’s the turn of Vincent Nichols, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, to try to say something about condoms that’s consistent with dogma but not obviously atrocious. Never an easy task, and another reminder that organised religion has more in common with party politics than it likes to admit.

Just to be helpful, I thought I’d make a chart showing how very much damage condoms cause to potential human lives:


And now, those of you familiar with my sense of humour may be able to guess which song is on the other end of this link.

Apostrophe’s: method to their wrongness

We’ve been discussing apostrophes at work. Rock ’n’ roll.

Clearly, there are some people who put apostrophes everywhere and others who drop them in pretty much randomly; these are cases of straightforward mindlessness and decent, sensible folk can all agree that these people need to be rounded up and fed to rabid otters who have been specially trained to build dams out of human bone.

But I have a theory (my colleagues are unconvinced) that there’s another group of people who get apostrophes wrong selectively because they are, in effect, following a (wrong) rule. I think that their approach is like this:

Usually you don’t put an apostrophe before the s when you’re giving a plural. But there are exceptions. If the word ends with a vowel and just adding an s would change the vowel sound to make it wrong, you should also add an apostrophe:

• taxi’s not taxis (otherwise it would sound like taxiss)
• zebra’s not zebras (zebrass)
• logo’s not logos (logoss).

So, do a fair number of people specifically believe in this exception? Certainly, these sad cases seem to be up for it (assuming that the cuprits were thinking at all).

If so, then they are at least trying to make sense out of the crazy world of punctuation, and they probably don’t deserve death by otter. A corrective programme of electric shock treatment should do it.

I have to admit, this is funny

By Beau Bo d’Or:


But of course it’s wildly inaccurate. Charlie Croker’s coach in The Italian Job was in danger because of all the gold in the back, weighing it down. But, as everyone knows, Jock Bottler McBroon and his ZaNuLieBore minions sold off all our gold years ago when the world gold price was so low it fetched less money than it cost to make the ‘GOLD 4 SALE’ placard that he put up outside the Treasury. So his coach would have been fine.

Crowdsourcing posters

Labour is inviting The People Who Live On The Internet to design its next poster campaign. This is very ‘now’, and also reflects the fact that the party has bugger all money for throwing at ad agencies.

Encouraged by the fact that my spoof Saatchi poster got me more hits on Sunday than I’ve ever had before in an entire week (not bad for a 23-hour day; and thanks to MyDavidCameron, John Prescott and others for the tweets and links), I’m going to have a stab at doing something.

Details of the ad brief are here.

Update: the deadline has passed and the above link is now dead. The winning poster will be unveiled at the weekend, but you can see a selection of some of the better ones here - not including mine, although I’m sure that must be some sort of administrative error.

Osborne may have mistimed his tax spectacle

It must have seemed like a great idea. The last time George Osborne announced a tax cut, it sparked a Tory revival that deeply destabilised Gordon Brown. So what better wheeze than to pull the same trick again, presenting himself as the man with the bold ideas, setting the agenda for the day’s debate with Alistair Darling and Vince Cable?

Maybe. We’ll have to wait and see.

But the differences between autumn 2007 and now are telling: then, he announced his plan to rapturous applause from the Tory conference, in a week when coverage of the other parties was bound to be limited, so his momentum could grow and grow. Now, he has announced his new plan to a press conference and gone on to a debate in front of a sceptical public audience, leading to news coverage that showed Darling and Cable both damning his proposals, outweighing his own limelight by two to one.

That said, he could hardly have announced it earlier, having needed to chew over the implications of the Budget first; and if he’d saved it until later, he’d have had less of interest to say in the debate. But I suspect the debate will be forgotten in a few days.

Effing efficiency: the end is NI

Oh, super. The flagship Tory policy on National Insurance is to be paid for by efficiency savings. As is the Ferrari I’m going to buy next week.

Hopi plays a wearied yet effective game of Spot the Hypocrite, and Stephanie Flanders mulls the economic implications. I’ll say just this:

If you’re going to use the money you can make in efficiency savings for tax cuts, then the only way you’ll have left to get the deficit down will be to hit real public services where it hurts.

Spoofing Cameron

Another poster:


Yes, it’s puerile. Sorry. But I blame the Times’s picture editor for publishing that horrible photo in the first place.

Do MPs really get to edit Hansard?

I hope this is one of John Rentoul’s ‘questions to which the answer is no’, but he suggests it isn’t.

In his column yesterday, Rentoul gave a curious aside on Cameron’s Budget response in Parliament:

He also mocked Liam Byrne, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, whose memo setting out the precise duties of his civil servants was leaked a while ago: "Get him an espresso or there'll be trouble." Oddly, Cameron's staff edited that line from the Commons official record, possibly because it was a personal attack, but left in his description of Byrne as "Baldemort", which is more personal.

True. Hansard records the Baldemort crack but not the espresso one, which appears in this fuller transcript at PoliticsHome.

So, it looks as though MPs do have some editorial influence over what goes in the official Hansard record of what they say in Parliament. Never mind why Cameron wanted one thing cut but not the other; why is this allowed at all?

New agency, new posters... new spoof

Via Jon Bernstein, I see that now the Tories have called Saatchi’s in to revive their flagging campaign, they’re doing what they know best: going negative, hitting hard, saying nothing about themselves:


As MyDavidCameron have said they won’t be spoofing any more posters, it falls to lesser lights such as me to take up the cause:


(Gimme a break, OK? I had to do this in Word... And it probably doesn’t help that I have all the design skills of a drowsy baboon with a bag over his head.)

Update 29/3: I've done another (slightly ruder) spoof.

Update 4/4: And another, more original poster

Infallibility means never having to do the right thing

And so, as the Vatican’s treatment its own paedophile priests makes David Cameron’s and William Hague’s incuriosity about Lord Ashcroft’s tax status look like waterboarding, my mind is drawn to a recent study in Psychological Science, on the concept of ‘moral balancing’.

Sonya Sachdeva and colleagues “tested the idea that a sense of moral superiority might limit additional future moral behavior”. The results of their experiments “suggest that affirming a moral identity leads people to feel licensed to act immorally”.

That is, if people feel “too moral,” they might not have sufficient incentive to engage in moral action because prosocial behavior is inherently costly to the individual. For example, people might not feel the need to donate blood or volunteer if they have already established their reputation as a moral person. This type of response can be thought of as moral licensing. People may be licensed to refrain from good behavior when they have accrued a surplus of moral currency.

I wonder.

The Green Budget: economy’s carbon efficiency doubles

While the Budget, such as it was, has grabbed the attention of most of us who find our thrills in politics and in numbers, there was another important set of national accounts published this week.

The latest figures on UK greenhouse emissions show an 8.5% drop in 2009 – the biggest on record, by far. But, of course, there was a bloody great recession going on last year, and less economic activity is bound to mean fewer emissions.

So I’ve charted the growth (or shrinkage) of the economy alongside changes in greenhouse emissions (the red and green bars, measured on the left-hand axis), as well as the economy’s carbon efficiency – the amount of GDP produced for a given level of greenhouse emissions (the blue line, using 1990 as a baseline of 100, on the right-hand axis):


Last year, emissions fell by a good deal more than GDP, and this follows a period of economic growth during which emissions fell almost every year.

In 18 years, the UK economy’s carbon efficiency has doubled.

However, the government’s target is to reduce emissions by 80% from the 1990 level by 2050. At the average rate of reduction over the decade to 2008, it would take 100 years to achieve this.

Redistribution and retrenchment

Two graphs from today’s IFS Budget briefing stood out for me.

First, the effects across the income distribution of all tax and benefit changes since 1997:


This is something I’m pretty pleased with. The Telegraph, hilariously, reports this as showing that “Ten million middle-income households have lost out because of Gordon Brown’s repeated tax rises”. This is the sort of comment that Chris Dillow might describe as “the Middle England error” and that I might describe as a steaming great lie.

Second, the scale of the tax rises and spending cuts to come:


This one, I’m not not so pleased with.

Given the looming fiscal tightening, it’s hard to see how as much direct redistribution as we’ve seen can be repeated any time soon. Clearly, anti-poverty measures over the next decade are going to have to be more focused on getting people into work and making that work pay.

2010 to be ‘Morse Code election’

The coming political contest is set to be fought as a Morse Code election, experts claimed yesterday.

A report commissioned by the British Society for the Promotion of Morse Code found that the number of Morse Code users is growing exponentially, after they took on a couple of work experience kids who couldn’t find proper jobs.

The claim follows earlier suggestions, mainly made on blogs, Twitter feeds and Facebook status updates, that 2010 would in fact be an ‘online election’.

However, a spokesman for the BSPMC said that Morse Code offered a unique opportunity for politicians to communicate with young voters in ways that were relevant, instant and “cool”.

But Tory attempts to capitalise on the medium came unstuck when their ‘-.-. .- ... .... / --. --- .-. -.. --- -.’ campaign was hacked to transmit ‘....- ----- ....- / . .-. .-. --- .-. / -.. --- - ... / .- -. -.. / -.. .- ... .... . ... / -. --- - / ..-. --- ..- -. -..’ instead.

And Labour’s so-called ‘M-launch’ was derailed when it emerged that former slightly relevant person Stephen Byers had been recorded claiming to have invented Morse Code for a fee of £5000. Gordon Brown’s earlier Downing Street MorCasts had to be abandoned after he somehow managed, even through the medium of dots and dashes, to appear randomly grinning like a serial killer’s dyspeptic uncle.

The subtle art of persuasion

I remember the exact moment when I realised the Tories had given up on the 1997 election and were just throwing campaign money around for the hell of it. It was when I saw one of their ads in the New Statesman – yes, the New Statesman. It said: ‘Trade unionists: if New Labour won’t have you, the Conservatives will’, followed by some sort of waffle vaguely attempting to justify this unlikely call to arms, and then it signed off with the line ‘The Conservative and Unionist Party’.

Wrong in more ways than I could count. Desperate, cavalier and pointless all at once.

Anyway, dear reader, I draw your attention to exhibit A:


This is a stunt involving eight self-respecting young men wearing specially designed masks to make them look slightly like a man that fairly few people have heard of and far fewer could recognise, who has close links to Gordon Brown and a trade union that supports Labour. Paid for by the Conservative and Unionist Party.

Obviously they haven’t given up on this election, but they do still seem to have more money than sense – and after the torrent of spoof posters, they’re not really sure how to spend it effectively.

Moody’s blues: social cohesion vs credit ratings

This week there was a commendably frank statement on the biggest political issue of the decade. It came from a credit-rating agency, and concerned public spending cuts.

There’s disagreement (recall those economists’ letters) about which is the bigger economic threat: cutting public spending and the deficit so fast that a still-feeble private sector can’t take up the slack and we fall back into recession; or letting borrowing stay so high for so long that the markets take fright, the government’s credit rating is damaged and public-debt servicing becomes much more expensive.

Both sides of the debate claim that their approach can achieve the aims of the other side: the cutters say that a lower deficit will improve business confidence and boost growth; the borrowers say that public spending will support a stronger recovery, which will lower the deficit.

FWIW my own view, at least at this stage, leans towards the borrowers:

• Private-sector weakness is likely to persist due to tight credit availability – the crunch hasn’t gone away, you know.
• Recessions caused by financial crises tend to have weaker recoveries, as do global recessions.
• The flipside of our relatively resilient labour market is the risk of a jobless recovery, at least for a while.
• Gilt yields are up, but despite the end of quantitative easing, they haven’t surged, so the cost of borrowing still isn’t anything like as much as in previous decades – and we’re pretty much getting to the peak of gilt issuance now.
• UK public debt is pretty long-dated, so we’re not needing to raise as much cash on the markets to replace expiring bonds as other countries with smaller deficits.
• And by international standards, our total public debt isn’t that large.

But timing matters. Last year, as the recession was raging, only crazy people were advocating immediate deficit cuts. Assuming continued growth, the economic case for cuts will become far stronger in the next year or two.

This year, as we’re just inching into recovery, the debate is more balanced. Neither a double-dip via over-hasty cuts nor a borrowing spiral is an outrageous fear, and any sensible approach will have to take both risks into account.

But there’s a third aspect to this, beyond any of the economics: spending cuts have social consequences. Let’s not imagine that deficit reduction on the scale that the IFS describes can be done via efficiency savings. Services that people – particularly but not exclusively poorer people – rely on will suffer.

And here’s where the credit-rating agency Moody’s comes in, this week grimly warning the UK and other countries:

Preserving debt affordability at levels consistent with AAA ratings will invariably require fiscal adjustments of a magnitude that, in some cases, will test social cohesion… the severity of the crisis will force governments to make painful choices that expose weaknesses in society.

Moody’s, as you’d expect, treats massive deficit reduction as the sine qua non and everything else as an unavoidable shame that we’ll just have to get through somehow.

But is that right? It’s a political belief, not a mathematical fact, that the government’s AAA rating needs to be protected whatever the social cost, whatever the sacrifice, by fighting to the dying breath of every last teacher, nurse and constable. A credit-rating downgrade is neither necessary nor sufficient for raising the cost of borrowing.

The quality of public services should be treated as a factor – a really important factor – to be weighed alongside others (the cost of borrowing, the enfeebled private sector), not a sad but inevitable piece of collateral damage in the War on Debt. Intelligence reports suggesting that the ratings agencies possess weapons of mass destruction are deeply dodgy. And so is the argument that we have to inflict the mass destruction on ourselves to appease them.

What brain scans can’t teach us

(Cross-posted, with minor edits, at Liberal Conspiracy – they get rather more traffic than me, so feel free to post comments there instead.)

This month’s Prospect magazine has a section on neuroscience, and in particular its political implications. As well as being a political junkie, I find psychology and the brain really interesting, so this should have been manna from heaven for me. And there’s some decent stuff there, although most of the contributors don’t get the chance to make any extended arguments. There are also plenty of banal, incoherent and irrelevant points made.

But one thing came up in their roundtable discussion that always gets my goat: the idea that neuroscience is going to be a good way of telling what effects on people different policies will have. Barbara Sahakian, a clinical neuropsychologist at Cambridge, says:

For years we changed our education system again and again, but these changes weren’t based on evidence about how we learned. Instead, wouldn’t it be useful if we thought about how the brain really works, and how children learn best, and in turn formulated educational policy based on that?

And the RSA’s Matthew Taylor adds, in a similar but more nakedly political vein:

I am confident that, as we find out more about our brains, it will strengthen the progressive case, in the sense that children learn best when they are actively involved, not being passive.

No, no, no.

Think about it: how could you use neuroscience to tell which teaching methods promote the best learning?

Well, what you’d do is get a load of kids, try out different teaching methods on them and then test how much they’ve learned, and give them brain scans to see what neurological changes have taken place. This should let you identify the neural correlates of learning. So then, in the future, you can get another load of kids, try out another bunch of teaching methods on them, and use brain scans to see what the results are.

The only weakness here is that the brain scans are completely redundant. You’ve already got ways of testing how much children have learned – and however fallible these might be, bear in mind that the neurological method you develop is of necessity based on these already existing methods for its validity.

So, unless brain scans become quicker, easier and cheaper to administer than pencil-and-paper exams, there’s nothing being added here. Yet very many intelligent people are still drawn to neuroscientific evidence as something so much more impressively real then mere psychological or behavioural phenomena (i.e. what we say and do and think).

As Zoe Drayson, a doctoral researcher at Bristol, explains:

Getting back to the issue of why we think neuroscience is so compelling, there have been studies done that show if you give people explanations of behaviour on a purely psychological level, and then you add a bogus additional neurological explanation which is logically irrelevant, people still think that explanation is better. That’s not to say that there are no good neuroscientific explanations, but it does mean we must be careful.

As I say, I find neuroscience compelling. But I think its main practical benefits are going to be in medicine, not policy design.

And the reason there’s so little progress in the popular educational policy debate is that teaching is something we’re very ideological about while also thinking that our own experience and common sense have already given us the right answers. It’s not because the academic evidence that already exists isn’t of the right kind.

And there was me thinking he only had the one

Political Wife Swap

Justin McKeating argues:

If you are the sort of person who approves of, or allows their voting preference to be swayed even a little by, the interventions in our electoral process by the wives of the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition, you are a moron who should be interned until after the general election.

I completely agreed with this until I thought of an even better idea.

The position of Prime Minister’s Spouse should be directly, and separately, elected. So we could pair Gordon with Samantha, Dave with Sarah, or maybe even Nick (Clegg) with Nick (Griffin). The possibilities are as endless as the attention span of an ITV early evening news viewer.

The morons would vote for the spouse, and the rest of us would vote for the actual government. Everyone gets to engage with the election on terms that they can understand.

(Via Chris.)

Words, words, words

Three nice political quotes from the last week.

First, Cabinet Secretary Gus O’Donnell responding to Tory criticisms that the government is setting long-term ‘pet projects’ into motion not long before the election:

Ministers are entitled to take decisions about the administration of the country's affairs.

Second, former Tory party treasurer Stanley Kalms on the Ashcroft affair:

Just because you can find a way of doing something that is not illegal does not mean you should do it.

Third, Paddy Ashdown on Lib Dem rules, introduced under his leadership, about whether the leader is allowed to take the party into a coalition without the consent of members:

“It was a long time ago”, he said, adding that some of those who were supposed to know what it meant were now dead. “One of them may have been me, but I can’t remember.”

Slogans that don’t work for you

The new Lib Dem slogan is, I think, even worse than Labour’s ‘A future fair for all’ and the Tory ‘Vote for change’. It is:

Change that works for you

Is that ‘works for you’ as in ‘sure, we can meet half an hour later, whatever works for you’ or as in ‘a dedicated local councillor who works for you’?

The former is too formal for a political party to get away with, and the latter is a category mistake: the change itself is the work that will be done, rather than the doer of the work. Unless we’re talking about some sort of high-interest bank account for people with very little money, so your 47p in change will work really hard for you.

Please let it all be over soon.

Latest sensational event probably poor guide to underlying long-term trend

(For Hopi…)

A NEWLY RELEASED statistic shows that the thing it measures has sharply and unexpectedly changed. The move takes the number index past the psychologically important level at which overexcitable fools gibber a bit.

The sheer oddness of the number, which has been met with gaping and shrieks aplenty, almost certainly means that it means very little. The index usually only changes gradually, and this latest statistic represents the biggest ever change since records began not all that long ago. The nearest comparison was the sudden shift a couple of years back, after which nothing much happened except that it later turned out to have been wrong.

Today’s statistic is the first provisional estimate for the number covering a period of time that did actually pass some while ago without anyone noticing anything unusual. It is still liable to be revised a few times as new data comes in, then encased in concrete and dumped in the sea, before being revised again in a very quiet voice in the dead of night.

A spokesman from the Institute For Stuff (IFS) said: “You got me out of bed for this?”

Normalisation vs business as usual

The Tory electoral alliance with the Ulster Unionists was part of an ambition to “normalise” politics in Northern Ireland, so that it isn’t dominated by issues of sectarian identity.

It’s a very noble ambition: it’d be great to see Catholics switching to the DUP because of their transport policies, or Protestants voting for Sinn Fein because of their plans for education.

But the Tories don’t want to risk the electoral chances of their historic allies in the UUP by standing against them – hence the joint ticket. And here’s where the risk comes in.

If the Tories become participants in NI politics as well as playing the more neutral brokering role of a UK government, such a pact could make things difficult.

Of course, if NI politics has indeed become ‘normalised’, then the government needn’t worry about neutrality, as there’ll be no political crises for it to negotiate through. So Cameron’s approach will only really work if the sectarianism it aims to bury is already much enfeebled.

And here’s where we get to this week’s devolution of policing to the NI authorities. The UUP’s insistence on voting against the move is a very clear statement that politics there is still too sectarian – something that holds true, in one way or another, whether their opposition is justified or not.

So the Tories’ electoral partners by their actions refute the very premise on which the pact was formed. A sticky wicket.

Couldn't resist it

Do you see what I did there?

New bullying allegations? His porn alias?

No, it was how the BBC chose to present his comments about Saddam Hussein and UN resolutions. When it came up on the TV in the gym I almost fell off the treadmill.

The really important thing about Iraq: us

Today Gordon Brown gives evidence to the Chilcot inquiry. This weekend, amid violent attacks on polling stations, Iraq holds an election. I wonder which will get the most coverage?

The rest of the world exists primarily as a mirror for us.

Orders of magnitude: Usshering Ussher

The age of the universe, I have discovered, is 23 hours 4 minutes and 6 seconds.

Well, obviously not. That’s a bizarrely small and bizarrely precise number. Even if you’re a young-Earth creationist, you should be looking at this and thinking that I’d have to be out of my mind to seriously believe that.

Now you know how the rest of us feel about you.

Archbishop James Ussher notoriously calculated the date of creation to be 4004 BC, just 6014 years ago. The best current science, using observations of cosmic microwave background radiation, puts the age of the universe at 13.73 billion years (plus or minus 120m). So Ussher was out by a magnitude of around 2.3 million times.

So here’s where my 23 hours 4 minutes and 6 seconds comes in. If you take how wrong Ussher was, and then apply the scale of his mistake to his own number, this is what you get. From a young-Earther point of view, this age would look as ridiculous as the young-Earth notion looks to anyone who respects science rather than guesstimates based on mythical genealogy.

(You think I’m kicking a straw man? In the UK, about a third of people think young-Earth creationism – less than 10,000 years ago – is either definitely or probably true. In the US, over 40% believe in it. That’s a lot of straw.)

Ashcroft: missing the point

Yes, there’s a cloud of hypocrisy and secrecy floating around Lord Ashcroft – as well as William Hague and David Cameron. But this is a side issue.

For years, the strategy that Ashcroft has been masterminding (and partly funding) has meant large sums being spent in key target seats. This has been possible because while there are legal limits on how much a party can spend on campaigning in the run-up to an election, these do not cover spending during the rest of a parliament.

The same principle – that there should be a check on the ability of parties and candidates to ‘buy’ an election by vastly outspending their rivals – should obviously apply equally to both the pre-election period and any other time. But the government, which accepted this principle in legislating as it has (and which has had a clear political motive to stop the Ashcroft money flowing into marginals all these years) has failed to follow through.

The point is that there should be a check on the money – whether it comes from little old ladies selling jam in the Home Counties or is channelled via the Caymans from Kim Jong-il’s finance ministry – that is spent on party campaigns and that it should apply year in, year out.

One other small thing on Ashcroft’s statement. He said:

David Cameron has said that anyone sitting in the legislature - Lords or Commons - must be treated as resident and domiciled in the UK for tax purposes. I agree with this change and expect to be sitting in the House of Lords for many years to come.

This is a tad cryptic: “for many years” seems at odds with the concepts of permanent residence and a life peerage. My reading of it is that he’ll be willing to forsake millions of pounds to the taxman so that he can stay in the Lords for as long as he likes it there; perhaps if he finds he has less influence than he’d like, or doesn’t get the government job he fancies, then he’ll dump his ermine and take his money back to Belize.

British Pie Week

It's British Pie Week! Admittedly, this is according to a manufacturer and purveyor of, ahem, pies, but that's no reason to ruin a perfectly good excuse.

Let's get on with it.

Dying to cut the deficit

With all due respect to the Independent’s economics editor, Sean O’Grady, his remarks here about inheritance tax betray a woeful ignorance of basic supply-side economics:

In the proposals by the shadow chancellor George Osborne… the threshold would be raised from the present £325,000 to £1m. That means the yield would drop below £1bn – compared to £3.9bn taken in inheritance tax in 2007 – raising questions about where the Conservatives might make up the shortfall as they seek to tame the budget deficit

Oh dear. Allow me to set him straight.

If you make dying cheaper by cutting the taxes wealthy people have to pay to do it, then more of them will be incentivised to pop their diamond-encrusted clogs. This increased death rate will then actually lead to an rise in the overall inheritance tax take, even as the amount payable on any individual estate falls.

Simples.

‘If elected, I will jet off with rich businessmen to do their PR for them’

I have to agree with Red Rag: David Cameron’s attempt to turn a negative into a positive was painfully inept. In full:

And you know what, Gordon Brown sometimes says that I'm a bit of a salesman. And do you know what? I plead guilty. And I'll tell you why, because in this country, with all our difficulties, we are going to need some salesmanship. I want to get out round the world, not filling up the aeroplane with journalists, but filling it up with businessmen. I want to get out there and sell our country to the world, say these are the companies you should be doing business with, this is the place you should be investing, Britain's the best place in the world to come and set up and invest.

That’ll definitely stop the polls narrowing.

But if he does still get elected, then we’ll have to keep a close eye on who gets to go on these elite sales trips (taxpayer-funded, unless they’ll be flying Air Ashcroft) and whether they’d made large donations to the Tory election campaign. It would make sense: for the government to ‘pick winners’ is such an old leftist idea; if, however, these private-sector winners got to self-nominate in advance by picking the political winners, that would be much more… post-bureaucratic.

How to make a negative campaign sound positive

‘Vote for change’ – it sounds wonderful. Change, you say? And little old me gets to vote for it? Sign me up!

But think about it. It’s in fact the very emptiest slogan that an opposition party could use. It says nothing at all about what that change might be. The Lib Dems could use this slogan, the Greens and the BNP could use it, the Natural Law Party and Mebyon Kernow (the Cornish separatists) could use it.

All the slogan communicates is that the way things are is bad – and it doesn’t even say why. It implicitly invites you to picture Gordon Brown and whether you want to gaze at him on TV and listen to his dulcet tones for another four or five years.

‘Vote for change’ sounds like a generous offer. But it’s just a subtle attack, and it’s an unsurprising tactic from a party that finds its poll lead shrinking the more scrutiny it faces. Consider the rallying call at the end of David Cameron’s speech yesterday:

And as you go out there and campaign, I want you to do it fortified with two things in your mind. The first is that every day Gordon Brown is running this country is a grey day for Britain. Every day he is in charge is another day we're not gripping our problems, another day we are wasting our opportunities, another day when this country is not being all that it could be. But I also want you to think of this, to think of the great changes we can make in this country.
We're an amazing people in this country, when we get knocked down, we don't roll over and die, we get up and fight. So as you go out and campaign, I want you to think of the small businessman who's got a great dream to make his business take on the world and win it for him. I want you to think of the mother with the young child desperate for a great school, so that her child can fulfil all her dreams and ambitions, and win it for her. I want you to think of the nurse, of the doctor, of the teacher, of the probation officer, all of whom went into public service with a great vocation, but feel crushed by the weight of bureaucracy and government targets, who we're going to set free, and I want you to win it for them.
And while you do it, I want you to think of the incredible dark depression of another five years of Gordon Brown and say no, no, we're not going to do that, so come on then, let's get out there and win it for Britain!

So: first of all, Brown is awful. Second, there are nice people who would like things to be nicer. Oh, and did I mention Brown is awful? Huzzah for Britain!

(Of course, as the election gets nearer, we can expect much more overtly negative campaigning from all sides. It's enough to make you want to hide under a rock until it's over...)

Breaking news: Gordon Brown about to call election in next couple of months

Or something like that.

Word of the day: thitherto

Yes, it’s a real word. And it means exactly what logic would suggest it does.

I was just editing an article that mentioned a book someone published in the 1970s, and it said that the author “had hitherto been regarded as an expert”. Clearly wrong, given the tense, but I didn’t know what was right. It struck me that “thitherto” would be ideal, but surely that couldn’t be a real word! I was about to rephrase the whole thing when I decided I might as well look it up, just on the offchance.

Moral of the story: follow your instincts.

(Next week: the tragic tale of the incompetent seductress who went around sporting a go-thither look.)

Brown’s gold standard

Here is a wonderful graph created by Giles Wilkes:


It shows that Gordon Brown’s decision to sell a lot of the UK gold reserves in 1999 (when the price was low) has left the Treasury about $10 billion worse off. Oh, and that Geoffrey Howe’s decision not to sell gold in 1979 (when the price was high) has left us about $35bn worse off.

Giles explains it all here.

‘I have never hit anybody. And I’m not a crook.’

Krishnan Guru-Murthy’s interview with Gordon Brown was hit and miss. Literally.

I was astonished when I watched this part of it:

KGM: Have you ever hit anyone?
GB: I have never hit anybody in my life.
KGM: You know this is all what's being said…
GB: Let me just say absolutely clearly, so that there is no misunderstanding about that, I have never, never hit anybody in my life.
KGM: Or shoved them?
GB: No, I don't do these sorts of things.

It’s extraordinary for a Prime Minister to be in the position of making such a denial. But not completely without precedent. Watching it, my mind was cast back to 17 November 1973:

In all of my years of public life, I have never obstructed justice. And I think, too, that I can say that in my years of public life that I welcome this kind of examination, because people have got to know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I'm not a crook. I've earned everything I've got.

I don’t know how Nixon’s denial was seen at the time, but in retrospect it has become one of the defining moments in his disgrace.

Is Brown’s “never hit anybody in my life” in the same ball park?

Probably not. Guru-Murthy may have inadvertently done Brown a huge favour in asking too strong a question. Andrew Rawnsley’s book doesn’t contain any allegations that Brown “hit” anybody. The nearest is that Brown “roughly shoved” someone aside. While hitting is unambiguous – either you wholly deliberately strike someone with your hand or no such thing happens – what a “rough shove” amounts to is unclear both physically and in terms of intention.

But by airing the notion of Brown’s having hit sometime, Guru-Murthy has drawn attention away from the actual allegations and also made them seem less serious by contrast (Brown also denied any shoving, but that’s barely been noticed).

NB I generally respect Rawnsley’s work, and while his explanation of how he decided whether things he was told were “utterly reliable accounts… from impeccable sources” or not is basically empty, I can quite believe that Brown has a nasty temper on him and that he can be terrible to work for.

"A future fair for all"

...being Labour's new election slogan - not quite as turgid as it could have been. The trouble is that it sounds like the sort of thing Gordon Brown might say.

Actually, reading it again, it makes me imagine some sort of sci-fi space carnival... "Daddy! Can we go to the future fair?" "Sure we can, Timmy - it's a future fair for all!"

Economical letters to the editor

Sir,

We are not economists by profession, but we didn’t see the credit crunch coming and so that surely puts us in the same boat as most people who are.

Following the letter from 20 economists to the Sunday Times and the letters from 58 economists and another nine economists to the Financial Times, we felt compelled to write.

These three letters variously advocate reducing the deficit at a rate of mumble mumble mumble, by means of cutting spending on mumble mumble mumble and raising taxes on mumble mumble mumble. We fear that each of these positions is dangerously misguided and negligently vague.

We wish to put on record that if we are to bring the deficit down in a way that maintains market confidence in the public finances while safeguarding the recovery, and neither raising taxes too punitively nor harming essential public services, the government must take steps to mumble mumble mumble. Encouragingly, all three main parties seem to be moving towards this view.

It is sometimes said that economics is not an exact science, but we are so confident of our recommendations that we are even using a first-class stamp to post this letter.

Yours faithfully,

Tom Freeman
And all my mates

I saw the picture and couldn't resist it

Oh, and while I'm here:

New Labour, new slogan

Prime Minister Gordon Brown will unveil the slogan of Labour's general election campaign in a speech at the weekend.

Announcing the fact that you’re going to be announcing your new slogan is dumb. It draws attention to the fact that you’re engaging in PR without giving you any of the benefit of that PR actually happening yet. Although it’s debatable how much use slogans really are – especially if they come attached to posters.

I’ve been poking deeply idle fun at the Tories lately, so maybe I should give my own side a few prods.

What, given Labour’s unhappy position in the polls, will this mystery slogan be?

• Better the devil you know. Oh, and we’re introducing a new brimstone tax


• We definitely won’t dash your high expectations


• Nobody likes us, we don’t care


• Going through the motions


• Won’t the look on Cameron’s face be priceless if he loses?


• I hadn’t abolished boom and bust, but I promise I will scrap Horne and Corden


• Governing over the next few years will be horrible – vent your anger by making me do it


• If you vote me out, I’ll write my memoirs. And then I’ll come round each of your houses and read you lengthy extracts

More?

I’ve never shot fish in a barrel before, but…

Now that there’s an automatic generator online, I can let rip a bit more freely:







Update 17/2: A couple more. I've had to do these myself from scratch, using Word, Paint and some sneaky screengrabbing (no Photoshop skillz), so they're a bit amateurish - but I'm all about the concept...

Like shooting fish in a barrel. With a Gatling gun. And fish-seeking bullets.

More sterling spoofery from Clifford Singer:




My own crude effort:

Correction: credit misallocation

Boris Johnson, a Daily Telegraph columnist, writes:

Thank heavens we stayed out of the euro.

That should of course read:

Thank Gordon Brown we stayed out of the euro.

Mature debate on the ‘debt crisis’

The UK government is less dependent on the bond market, and less affected by a rise in borrowing costs, than other states with smaller deficits.

Governments borrow by selling bonds. These bonds pay out yields each year (the interest rate) and they have an expiry date, at which time the original capital is returned to the buyer.

So the amount of bonds a government needs to sell in any year depends on: (a) the amount of new borrowing plus (b) the amount of maturing bonds that need replacing. Longer debt maturity means that (b) will be smaller.

Stephanie Flanders notes that “the average maturity of UK sovereign debt is 14 years. In the US, it's about four years. In France and Germany it's six or seven. In Greece, it's even lower… That makes an enormous difference to the amount of gilts we need to ask the debt markets to buy in a given year.”

In 2010, the budget deficits of Germany, France and Italy will be lower than the UK’s. But in terms of the bonds to be issued this year, Germany will be needing about 386bn euros, France 454bn, Italy 393bn and the UK 279bn.

It’s still a lot, but it’s also a lot less than these other countries.

The longer maturity of UK public debt also means, as Flanders explains, that an increase in the yields payable on new bonds will have a smaller effect on the total cost of servicing national debt.

We in the UK are right to be worried about our deficit. But the idea that we face a ‘debt crisis’ notably worse than other countries looks harder to sustain.

Update 18/3: I saw this nice chart from the Economist, illustrating how much longer-dated UK gilts are than other countries’.

Seeing through walls

Rich at Arbitrary Constant has posted a puzzle:

Name an ancient invention, which is still used in some parts of the world today, that allows people to see through walls.

I think I know what the answer is, although it requires quite a liberal interpretation of “some”.

More Tory posters

It's easy, it's cheap, it's right up my street...




Make your own here and see others here.

Cameron blames Brown for wisteria claims

By our correspondent Frank Blunt

Conservative leader David Cameron has laid the blame for the parliamentary expenses scandal squarely with Gordon Brown. “It is a measure of Labour’s Debt Crisis that even I could be bamboozled into claiming a load of money for the mortgage on my second home. Or possibly my third. Whatever.

“And the fact that I kept claiming for this even after I had started demanding the system be reformed just shows how badly Labour’s Age of Irresponsibility has broken our society.”

Meanwhile, Cabinet papers leaked to the Chilcot Inquiry revealed that Brown himself may have been involved in planting the unruly wisteria that so expensively besmirched Cameron’s beautiful home. Cameron said that there would be “no limit to the amount I would claim on expenses to clear him out. Gordon Brown cannot reform the institution because he is the institution. Whereas under the Conservatives, l’état, ca sera moi.”

“How Gordon Brown can claim to be a reformer with a straight face I just don’t know,” he added, hardly smirking at all.

Scientists admit: global warming ‘a big hoax’

By our correspondent Frank Blunt

The world scientific community yesterday confessed that so-called ‘climate change’ was a cruel trick that they had dreamed up to make us suffer. “It was at a party – or rather, it was during a party that we hadn’t been invited to. Again,” said a spokesprofessor. “We decided to invent reams of ‘evidence’ for a phenomenon that didn’t exist, just to confuse, frighten and annoy people.”

Further frauds have also emerged. An editorial in the Journal of Scientificality today confesses: “We also made evolution up for a laugh, just to see the looks on religious people’s faces. We didn’t expect anyone would actually believe it!” Other newly admitted hoaxes include the germ theory of disease, plate tectonics and gravity.

An ode to quantitative easing

Giles Wilkes, the multitalented git, has composed a really rather excellent poem about quantitative easing, ‘The ballad of Mervyn’s shovel’. Paul Cotterill, the sly dog, has responded with a limerick of his own on the subject and an invitation to submit similarly themed poems.

I cannot resist. Bear in mind that Giles has an unfair advantage in that he actually understands QE, whereas I’ve had to pick up the gist based largely on blog posts by him and others…

Sing a song of £200 billion

Mervyn King was in his counting house, counting out our money;
It didn’t take him very long, a fact he deemed most funny.
“To return our stagnant nation to a land of milk and honey,
I must make things more liquid – or at least, a bit more runny.”

And so he set off to create two hundred billion nicker,
Enough to buy the whole wide world a bathtub full of liquor
Though rather than buy fripperies he thought that he would pick a
Duller option: public debt. But now here’s the real kicker:

“The printing press – a minting mess – will debauch our fair pound,”
Said monetarist sceptics who were swarming all around.
“The value of dear sterling will collapse beneath the ground
And an explosion of inflation will astonish and astound.”

But King replied: “You dolts, it’s not a literal printing press;
I do it electronically, by clicking here on ‘Yes’.
And as for sterling, well it is now really more or less
Where it was back when we started – so no big deal, I guess.”

Now other critics did retort: “It’s no big deal, indeed,
For far too little’s changed vis-à-vis circulation speed
Of money; banks are hoarding what they fear that they might need,
So there’s precious little here on which recovery could feed.”

Yet assets boomed: the FTSE grew from suckling at King’s teat,
The once-tortured housing market had all expectations beat,
Estate agents were dancing in the (up-and-coming) street,
And the Treasury found buyers for all the gilts it could secrete.

Then QE stopped – not with a bang nor whimper, just a grumble
About its consequences, an impenetrable jumble;
Some feared that its reversal could provoke another stumble,
And King concluded: “I predict that (mumble mumble mumble).”


Also, just for good measure, a limerick:

The Old Lady was most displeased
That credit was painfully squeezed
She made billions from nought
And yet I must report
My own bank balance is uneased

BAE, ‘bribes’ and ‘settlements’

BAE, which had bunged a load of money to a couple of governments so that it could make a load more money without any questions being asked, has now bunged a load of money to a couple of governments so that it can go on making a load more money without any questions being asked.

Huzzah for justice.

Wanted: non-political blogs

Yes, I know, the concept is hard to grasp. Think of them as being like blogs, but with a subject matter other than politics, and you may start to get the idea. Anyway, I want to read stuff outside my usual field of obsession. I want to read interesting people who have funny, insightful, articulate, sad, angry, delightful, unexpected, thought-provoking things to say about, well, life. And, if you please, I’d like your help in finding them.

Suggestions?

Image management fail

My new stapler does not have the most fortunate of brand names:


Now, I’m sure it’s meant to be pronounced ‘Rah-pess-co’ and not, you know, the other way, the alarming way, the forehead-slappingly stupid way. And I’m sure they’re a perfectly reputable company run and staffed by perfectly decent people.

But, taking into account that the name can seem a tad iffy to an English-speaking audience, the images and headings on their website makes me mildly concerned about how much common sense their branding people have:


Yes, I know, branding people are contractually required to have the common sense sucked out of them with a special machine when they start work. But even so… ‘punching’?

And what the hell message is the ‘stapling’ woman supposed to be conveying – ‘Well, now I’ve attached one piece of paper to another, I’ll just roll around on this bed that I happen to have in the office. Mmm, they’re attached so firmly…’

Still, their stapler is bloody good. I’ll give them that.

Tories caught out on dodgy crime stats

A very good piece on Radio 4’s Today programme: BBC Home Editor Mark Easton looks into how the Tories are using official statistics on violent crime to apparently show that there’s been a big rise recently.

The snag is that the official sources make crystal clear that the way the figures are compiled changed significantly in 2002, resulting in an artificial increase in the numbers. This “has rendered direct numerical comparisons with pre 2002/03 levels inaccurate” – according to BBC pinko former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith.

The police are also objecting to the scaremongering way the Tories are using these stats:

In Milton Keynes, local [Tory] MP Mark Lancaster's office put out a statement last week claiming that there were 6,015 "violent attacks" in the town last year, reflecting a 236% increase over the past decade.
…
Milton Keynes sounds like Dodge City. That's a "violent attack" every 90 minutes.
However, according to the Milton Keynes Citizen newspaper, the town's police says that the statistics are "extremely misleading".
Local commander Nikki Ross told the local paper that the figure includes "everything from public order offences, to harassment, to allowing a dog to be out of control in a public place".
"The actual number of people who were victims of serious violence was 81," she said.
The point here is that the phrase "violent attacks" does not equate directly with the crime category "violence against the person". For instance, if someone swears at you in the street and you complain to the police about it, that incident goes down as an act of "violence against the person".

Evan Davis interviewed Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling about all this. Grayling’s defence was: these are the official figures produced by the Home Office, and even though they come with a warning not to use them for comparisons with before 2002, we can still use them for comparisons with before 2002. Except that he didn’t say the middle bit.

Easton’s report and the interview should be available here at some point today (at about 7.32, so 1 hour 32 mins into the programme), but Easton has explained it all in writing here, with another background piece from last week here.

A good result but a measly outcome

Good:

The medical journal which originally published the discredited research linking autism and MMR has now issued a full retraction of the paper. The Lancet said it now accepted claims made by the researchers were "false".
It comes after Dr Andrew Wakefield, the lead researcher in the 1998 paper, was ruled last week to have broken research rules by the General Medical Council.
...
Last week, the GMC ruled that Dr Wakefield had shown a "callous disregard" for children and acted "dishonestly" while he carried out his research. It will decide later whether to strike him off the medical register.
The regulator only looked at how he acted during the research, not whether the findings were right or wrong - although they have been widely discredited by medical experts across the world in the years since publication.

And a sad reminder, to the media who love a scare story as well as to slapdash scientists, that actions have consequences:

When can you make a citizen’s arrest?

George Monbiot is inviting us to attempt citizen’s arrests on Tony Blair, “for a crime against peace, namely your decision to launch an unprovoked war against Iraq”. He’s offering money, so I expect Cherie will have a go.

The response to this has not been universally positive (although someone’s already had a go). But Monbiot is undeterred: “you can mock our feeble attempts to hold Tony Blair to account, but only if you propose an alternative”.

OK, here are a few alternatives: have a nice cup of tea; take up knitting; put pretend arrest warrants out on the other 411 MPs who voted for the war; go online and find out what your old school friends are up to; put a pretend arrest warrant out on Blair for his illegal war against Yugoslavia; keep writing the same Guardian column over and over again until you hit retirement; send thank-you notes to Vladimir Putin, Hu Jintao and Jacques Chirac for declining to make the Iraq war was legal by giving it the nod; or eating some ice cream. These would be all be equally successful ways of holding Blair to account.

One other thing you could do would be to read section 24A of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, which covers the rules on citizen’s arrests [annotated with my own expert legal interpretation]:

Arrest without warrant: other persons

(1) A person other than a constable may arrest without a warrant—
(a) anyone who is in the act of committing an indictable offence;
(b) anyone whom he has reasonable grounds for suspecting to be committing an indictable offence.
[(a) is obviously out, as the war was in the past, and for the same reason so is (b)]

(2) Where an indictable offence has been committed, a person other than a constable may arrest without a warrant—
(a) anyone who is guilty of the offence;
(b) anyone whom he has reasonable grounds for suspecting to be guilty of it.
[No competent body has ruled that any indictable offence has been committed, so (2) is out. That basically stymies the whole idea, but let’s imagine that citizens are allowed to decide what counts as an offence, and carry on]

(3) But the power of summary arrest conferred by subsection (1) or (2) is exercisable only if—
(a) the person making the arrest has reasonable grounds for believing that for any of the reasons mentioned in subsection (4) it is necessary to arrest the person in question; and
(b) it appears to the person making the arrest that it is not reasonably practicable for a constable to make it instead.
[For (a), we’ll have to see below, and (b) is out as Blair is always accompanied by constables who could perfectly well make any necessary arrests. Actually, we could stop here, because the (3) demands that both conditions (a) and (b) be met. But while we’re so near the end…]

(4) The reasons are to prevent the person in question—
(a) causing physical injury to himself or any other person;
(b) suffering physical injury;
(c) causing loss of or damage to property; or
(d) making off before a constable can assume responsibility for him.
[No, no, no, no. Not even close]

It’s a jolly student jape, but the legal case for performing a citizen’s arrest on Tony Blair is even weaker than the political case. Sorry.

Higher or lower? The Tories, interest rates and the pound

As Chris reports, George Osborne has said: “The overriding objective of fiscal policy must be to provide the credible deficit reduction plan that allows the Bank of England to keep mortgage rates as low as possible for as long as possible.” He’s been pushing this view for a while.

In an intellectually hefty (by his standards) speech in September, Osborne said that “tight fiscal policy will allow the independent MPC to keep interest rates as low as possible for as long as possible while keeping inflation and inflation expectations securely anchored”. He also dealt directly with the argument that significant spending cuts too soon could such demand out of the economy and put the recovery at risk:

Not only does this argument ignore the risks of a loss of confidence and higher interest rates, it is also too simplistic. It ignores the impact of fiscal policy on the exchange rate in an open economy like the UK. Ben Broadbent, Chief UK Economist at Goldman Sachs, wrote recently that fiscal tightening in an open economy "has little appreciable impact on aggregate output" because it tends to rebalance demand away from non-traded goods and services and towards the traded sector. In other words, what you lose in government spending, you gain in exports.

The Goldman paper doesn’t seem to be online, but Stephanie Flanders has summarised its gist:

If the government… announced tighter budget plans starting in 2010, it is possible that the bond markets would reward that government by pushing down long-term interest rates (also known as the interest rate on government debt). That could stimulate the economy in its own right by making it cheaper for companies to borrow. It could also, by reducing the return on sterling investments, push down the pound, giving an extra fillip to exporters.

So, if I understand this right, the tighter fiscal policy that the Tories are planning (as Cameron says, “We're not talking about swingeing cuts”, which I believe to be literally true) will mean that monetary policy can stay looser for longer.

It will also push the value of the pound lower than it would have been, which will help exporters. This will also make imports more expensive, which will drive up inflation. But that will mean higher interest rates, which is exactly what Osborne wants to avoid.

Huh?

Then there’s the effect on the cost of government borrowing. If foreign buyers of UK gilts think that the pound will be lower in the future, then they’ll demand higher yields to make up for this – thus pushing up the cost of public borrowing.

Bill Gross, of fund managers Pimco, has been sounding the most lurid warnings lately about UK public debt and the gilt market. He said last week: “High [UK goverment] debt with the potential to devalue its currency present high risks for bond investors.” He’s in favour of fiscal consolidation, but so that the government doesn’t take on more debt than it can safely service, not in order to get the currency down – quite the opposite, as he seems to imply that a government that cuts its borrowing will be rewarded by a stronger currency.

So do the Tories really want a lower pound? Do they know how to bring it about? Do they want the consequences that flow from it? I confess I struggle to understand the rationale here. Perhaps it’s because I’m a bumbling amateur when it comes to economics and finance. Or perhaps it’s because Osborne is too.