Budget 2014 « Labour Uncut

Posts Tagged ‘Budget 2014’

Class-based jibes are not an effective attack on Osborne’s feel-good budget pitch

24/03/2014, 03:52:00 PM

by Jonathan Todd

“Tories neck and neck with Labour,” reported The Sunday Times. Revisiting the questions that Uncut posed for George Osborne prior to the Autumn Statement allows us to assess how the landscape is evolving.

1.) Has the relationship between economic and Tory recovery broken?

Last October Uncut ran a regression to analyse the relationship between economic sentiment and Labour’s poll lead. This indicated that for every 1% increase in the proportion of the electorate reporting the economy as doing well, the Tories would close on Labour by 0.6% – ‘the Todd thesis’, as Lewis Baston christened it. The table below, which uses figures from YouGov, shows how these variables have evolved since then.

The upward trend in economic sentiment is clear. Labour’s lead over the Tories, though, remains much the same now (5.6%) as last October (5.7%). This is the stuff of the ‘voteless recovery‘ that Tories fear.

Digging deeper into these numbers, however, raises some challenges for Labour. The table shows that Labour’s lead was largest during November and December. This might be explained by the popularity of Labour’s price freeze commitment made at party conference. As this commitment has featured less prominently in political debate, Labour’s lead has withered.

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“Much more of this and we are going to need a Devon Loch scenario to win”

19/03/2014, 05:07:33 PM

News reaches Uncut that Ed Miliband’s budget response has depressed spirits on the already gloomy Labour benches in the Commons.

After weeks of narrowing polls and increasing jitters in the tea room, today’s budget set-piece was widely viewed as an opportunity for Miliband to rally his troops.

The benign economic circumstances enjoyed by George Osborne had already been priced into PLP expectations, as had the difficulties faced by the leader of the opposition in delivering an instant budget response without having had the time to study its small print.

Few expected the Labour leader to fillet the detail of what was announced, but MPs were looking for a fighting performance from their leader. Something to settle the nerves and show some command at the despatch box.

But as the MPs filtered out of the chamber following the main speeches, the mood on the Labour side was sombre. One MP who spoke to Uncut shortly after leaving the debate was scathing, describing the performance as “embarrassing,” and that morale among their colleagues was now “really quite low.”

Looking forward to the election next year, their assessment of Labour’s prospects was bleak, “Much more of this and we are going to need a Devon Loch scenario to win.”

For readers too young to either directly recall the Devon Loch Grand National in 1956, or to have seen countless repeats of the incident on Grand National specials through the years, the clip below should help.

For this MP, and many of their colleagues, unless Ed Miliband improves, Labour will require a slip from David Cameron equivalent to that of Devon Loch’s, to triumph in 2015 .

Posted in Inside | 19 Comments »

Budget 2014 preview: Increasing the personal allowance is the wrong priority for low earners

19/03/2014, 10:00:11 AM

by Simon Bartram

Today we can expect a lot of boasting from Conservatives and Lib Dems about how they have raised the personal allowance, as if that is a faultless defence against any accusation that the poorest are being hit the hardest.

For the 2013/14 tax year, individuals earning less than £100,000 did not pay tax on the first £9,440. This personal allowance is set to rise to £10,000 for 2014/15, saving basic rate tax payers £112 (20% of £560), and Nick Clegg is pushing for the allowance to be raised still further to £10,500 for 2015/16. The extra £500 increase, this is estimated to cost the Treasury £1 billion.

Since personal allowances have rocketed from £6,475 to potentially £10,500, this must surely be one of the most recognisable changes that the coalition has enacted, and it is a one which they ceaselessly flaunt to demonstrate their egalitarian credentials.

Yet this is a very inefficient way of targeting the lowest earners in our society, given that everyone earning up to £100,000 gains from having a personal allowance (above £100,000 your personal allowance decreases gradually to zero), and, of course, households with two earners will prosper more than single occupant households. Some of those households would already be benefiting from the tax breaks for married couples where £1,000 of the personal allowance can be transferred to a spouse.

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Posted in Grassroots | 5 Comments »

Budget 2014 preview: Labour must change the language it uses to talk about business and economics

19/03/2014, 07:00:50 AM

by Rob Marchant

Today Britain’s political focus turns, as it always does sooner or later, to the economy. It is the last Budget which will come in time to make much of a difference for the election, an election for which all parties now start to gradually gather together their support from various quarters and interest groups.

Osborne will set out his pre-election stall and Miliband will respond. We have yet to see just how he will respond, but it seems pretty likely that it will be along the lines of his op-ed in yesterday’s Guardian.

Reading it, thankfully, Miliband seems to have learned his lesson from the awful “predators and producers” speech of the party’s 2012 conference and is now more careful with his wording. But if you want to really understand what a politician is thinking on a particular subject, you should look to their advisers on that subject; those who may unguardedly say what their bosses cannot. More of that later.

Now, one notable absence – or, more unkindly, gaping hole – in the 2010 election campaign was any noticeable support from the business community. A stony silence replaced the modest set of endorsers for the party’s business policies who had previously spoken in support of the party. And that was in the days of Prime Minister Brown, whose administration certainly had a more business-friendly character than the party’s current leadership.

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How does Labour get its economic message across?

17/03/2014, 04:35:39 PM

by Jonathan Todd

“The last Labour government,” The Times front page last Friday reported Ed Balls as saying, “didn’t regulate the financial services in a tough enough way.” They reported this as “the closest to an acknowledgement of personal responsibility” for the 2008 financial crisis. Yet, given that Balls has said similar things in the past and is silent on whether the last government spent too much, it seems a relatively mild contrition.

Apparently, there are a range of views within the party as to how Labour should address a central Tory attack: “Why hand the keys back to the guy who crashed the car?” “Senior figures close to Tony Blair have been urging a more aggressive rebuttal”, The Times report. “Ed Miliband’s allies want to focus voters’ attention on the future.”

If Blair is advocating an aggressive rebuttal, I imagine he means on behalf of the 1997 to 2007 government, rather than the Gordon Brown administration. It’s a stretch to imagine Balls running on a “Tony was right, Gordon was wrong” campaign.

The debate over how Labour wins the economic argument was also considered in the book that Uncut launched at party conference. “We might change the conversation,” I wrote, “in which the Tories present us as addicted to spending by changing what people think of our past (“It was the banks, not us”) or what people think we think about our past (“It was partly us but we’ve learned our lesson”) or what people think about our future (“Here’s why it will be different next time”).”

Thus, Balls seems to want to say “It was partly us but we’ve learned our lesson”, while Miliband appears to want to argue “Here’s why it will be different next time”. In these terms, the approach advocated by Uncut is closest to that of Milband. “Because there is a limit to how much repositioning Labour can credibly make this side of the general election, we focus on the future.”

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