By Peter HoskinFollow Peter on Twitter As revealed by ITV's Lucy Manning, the quietly assertive chairman of the Treasury Select Committee, Andrew Tyrie, will lead Parliament's inquiry into the banks. Joining him will be his select committee colleagues Mark Garnier, Pat McFadden, Andy Love and John Thurso. Four men to take on who-knows-how-many rate fixers. […]
By Peter HoskinFollow Peter on Twitter About year ago — as I mentioned briefly in an article for The Times (£), at the time — people in government regarded these Olympics as a reprieve. Their thinking was that, even if our economic torpor hadn't ended by now, the Games would act like a shot of […]
By Peter HoskinFollow Peter on Twitter With impeccable timing, the House magazine has interviewed David Laws for its latest issue. You’d think that the man who almost came to personify the Coalition in its early days would have a few things to say about the state of things now — and it turns out he […]
By Peter HoskinFollow Peter on Twitter Must admit, I love the Office for Budget Responsibility. Not only are they a decent organisation in spirit, designed to suck much of the dastardly politics from the fiscal process. But also, every so often — once a year, in fact — they let their collective hair down and […]
By Peter HoskinFollow Peter on Twitter Forget the Lords for a second — perhaps the most significant bit of political news to emerge yesterday was David Cameron's reaffirmed support for universal benefits. Speaking in PMQs, he rejected Nick Boles's proposals for curtailing certain pension-age handouts, saying that, “at the last election I made a very […]
Universal benefits never did make much sense to me. Even allowing for Ed Miliband’s argument that hand-outs for the middle classes (and richer) keep everyone on board with the welfare state, they do seem a bit superfluous. Why should the state borrow and tax money only to give some of it back to those who […]