It’s the Mansion House speech tonight, and it comes on a day when unemployment numbers on the claimant count went up by much less than expected. The chancellor himself is the most high profile example of this. Just a fortnight ago, his own team were unsure as to whether he would be delivering tonight’s landmark…
Today the chancellor is going into the lion’s den to defend the bankers. Europe feels that Britain failed to regulate the City ‘casino’ properly, and helped stoke the financial disaster that caused the recession across Europe. The European Commission has come up with proposals that would give two continent-wide institutions the ultimate ability to regulate…
Jon Snow
To answer my own initial question: Purnell has broken from the pack. He has done what David Miliband, conceivably Andy Burnham, and maybe John Hutton (of whom more in a moment), might have done and must have been thinking of doing. Purnell has plunged a knife that has been waiting for such an exercise for…
Gary Gibbon
New rumour is that Gordon Brown didn’t actually decide to keep Alistair Darling in place until this morning and that an early morning conversation with Peter Mandelson swung it. That won’t do much for Mandelson/Balls relations, which had been patched up since Lord Mandelson’s return to government. Ed Balls will be feeling frustrated that his…
Gary Gibbon
Alistair Darling saw the Prime Minister last night for a long conversation and made it plain he didn’t think he should be thrown out of the Chancellorship. The chancellor was offered a number of jobs but turned them all down. I believe Mr Darling left still not entirely clear whether he had won his right…
It’s a supreme irony that on this day of Whitehall whirlwind, there’s actually been the first hard evidence that the economy might be on the turn. After the worst recession for at least four decades, one closely followed indicator is suggesting the economy actually grew, in May, for the first time in 14 months
Jon Snow
A political crisis This is a political spectacle none of us has ever seen before. The government is reshuffling itself. Hazel Blears has just shuffled herself out of the Cabinet. She’d have been fired anyway over her second homery and non-payment of capital gains tax. Two other ministers, one of them another woman, are expected…
Economic diplomacy is back in a big way. That was the message from last month’s G20 summit, and it continues today with high-level UK-China chinwag. The system that failed the world plunging trade and global growth to contractions not seen since World War Two was a system that was international. Gaps in regulation existed between…
The world is in an era of epic economics. So huge are the challenges, they will define domestic politics for years. Forget about the right answers, politicians are only just beginning to come up with the right questions. And in this strange new world there often is no right answer. The international aspects of the…
Jon Snow
So Britain’s 12th largest building society goes bust – and the chairman complains that the chancellor isn’t bailing it out. Stunning! If, as some suggest, the Dunfermline Building Society is a victim of reckless lending, what possible obligation does Mr Darling have to bail it out?
Europe seems to be moving into gear on the “Eastern Question” – how to stop the financial crisis in Latvia and Hungary from coming back to haunt us. EU finance ministers, meeting in Brussels ahead of a G20 summit in Sussex this weekend, say they want to double the size of IMF funds to $500bn (£362bn).…
Jon Snow
Seeing the steel job losses in communities that can least afford to cope with them, I commend File on 4 on Radio 4 this last Sunday (25 January). They investigated the new bankruptcy laws that make it much easier to go into “administration” and pointed out that whilst jobs in the failed company might be…