Follow on Andrew Lilico on Twitter here. The point of this 2015-6 spending review was clearly to arrange, in more detail, Osborne’s hoped-for battleground for the 2015 General Election. He capped total welfare spending (excluding pensions) – will Labour match that? He ended automatic pay rises in the public sector – will Labour’s public sector […]
In a very simple tribal society, a number of political orders are feasible. It would be possible for the tribe's leader to make all key decisions herself. Alternatively, every key decision could be decided by a vote of all adults. But in a modern, complex society of vast numbers of individuals and huge numbers of […]
I am a big fan of military intervention. In general, I believe that military solutions to difficult situations are greatly under-rated and somewhat under-used. I was a fan of all Blair's interventions – from Sierra Leone through Kosovo to Afghanistan and Iraq. I would happily have supported interventions in other places as well, such as […]
I've argued over the past year or so that the EU debate in the UK was rather behind the times, in that the real options we are likely to face aren't "renegotiate" vs "status quo" or "in" vs "out", but, rather, "out" vs "more out". It seems to me increasingly plausible that, far from hotting up, the […]
It is common in the press and the political classes to characterize the poor opinion poll ratings for the Conservative (and Lib Dem) Party as "mid-term blues". The idea is that voters very often turn against governments in mid-term, but then return to the fold in the subsequent General Election. Now that was, as we […]
There are always a few "interesting" folk out there who want to propose that when – as has happened recently in Ireland, Greece, Portugal, and Spain – investors cease to want to lend a country money, all it needs to do is to issue more debt and everything will be fine. Because they believe that […]
The debate about "austerity" in the UK and Europe rages on. But let's grasp a few things. Some significant folk (e.g. the IMF) appear to be calling for the UK to "slow down" the pace of its deficit reduction programme. Well, the UK's planning to have a £120bn – £120bn! - deficit for three years in […]
Here's how it should work: if you own something, then setting aside trivial cases such as a toddler stealing her brother's lollipop, the government should protect your property. If you enter into a contract, then the government should assist in enforcing it (again subject to a materiality condition – a teenage boy failing to turnup […]
Follow Andrew on Twitter. Back in the late 1990s, I was interested in the question of how Blair had disrupted the coalition of support for the Conservative Party and how we should respond. The traditional Conservative coalition consisted of four elements: traditional Tories; classical Whigs; Paternalists; and Corporatists. In a successful Conservative coalition two of […]
If those that self-label "modernisers" were interested in my advice on how to be less disliked in Conservative circles, right at the top of my list would be this: Stop claiming the 2010 General Election was a success – "the best performance since 1931". If there is one single thing "modernisers" do that is calculated […]
Follow Andrew on Twitter. Any metaphysical system – that is to say, any account of the fundamental nature of things – must eventually grapple with the following challenge: Although it is perhaps possible to conceive of a universe in which everything is necessary (i.e. everything just is, and could have been no other way) it […]
Up to 2007 the UK formally had only £2,000 of full deposit insurance (and, for reasons we shall see below, that was almost all the relevant insurance we had). Deposit insurance was then extended enormously, at the time of the Northern Rock crisis, to cover all deposits made in any bank up to September 2007, […]
Cyprus and the Troika have agreed a deal that may now keep Cyprus going until the next bailout. The key features are: Resolution of Cypriot banks raises €4.2bn The "total programme money" available to Cyprus will be €10bn Because the money raised from Cypriot banks comes via resolution instead of a tax, the Cypriot Parliament […]
Follow Andrew Lilico. As expected, the main macroeconomic policy action in the Budget wasn't in the fiscal area at all – overall it was "fiscally neutral", i.e. it didn't seek to use new policy measures to increase or decrease the deficit. That means the government has given up on cutting the deficit for years – […]
By Andrew Lilico. Follow Andrew on Twitter. So here's the problem: the economy's picking up. That may not sound like a problem. That may sound like a long-hoped-for political gift. But it is – indeed it has the potential to destroy what remaining chance there is of David Cameron winning a May 2015 General Election. […]