Danny Alexander – the new Roosevelt?
One MP I bumped into this morning on his way to the Commons chamber for Danny Alexander’s announcement slapped his hands together and said: “Time for some pork barrel.” And the Treasury has produced a handy map so you can wait at the window in 2015 to see the diggers go by.
Road extensions, rail projects, housing, a new golden age of infrastructure building… close your eyes and you could think you were back in the 1930s watching President Roosevelt opening dams.
Wander up the road from Westminster to the IFS headquarters and you get a rather cooler assessment of the “most comprehensive, ambitious and long-lasting capital investment plans the country has ever seen” (copyright Danny Alexander, but I’m sure he won’t mind if you re-use it). Paul Johnson said “despite the hype, capital spending (is) flat over the next few years.”
The coalition has failed to agree more than one year of cuts into the next parliament but it was only too happy to unite around £100bn of spending announcements running through to the end of the next parliament that Danny Alexander presented today. How credible they look, when the HS2 project has crashed through the budget buffers by £8.5bn before it’s even out of the shed, is debatable.
I asked Patrick McLoughlin, transport secretary, if his jaw had dropped when civil servants put a note under his nose asking if he’d mind announcing that the over-shoot on HS2 was already about the same size as the entire 2012 London Olympics bill. He said infrastructure projects are often “controversial” and the government had followed good accounting practice.
Lord Deighton, the minister brought in to mastermind infrastructure projects told The World at One on BBC Radio 4: “It’s not surprising that (the budget) moves about a little in these early days.”
I hear some Lib Dems didn’t like the welfare announcements George Osborne unveiled yesterday. One MP said that the seven-day delay before JSA claimants get a penny was “gratuitous”. And Nick Clegg has told colleagues that George Osborne overstepped the agreed form of words when he spelled out the introduction of language test for JSA claimants and penalties for those that fail to take them up.
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