Gary Gibbon
On track to smallest state since 1930s? Not if Vince can help it
One Treasury source said this was “just where the graph lines happened to end up,” implying no champagne popping pencilled in for the big day five years off.
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Gary Gibbon
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Gary Gibbon
‘A third or a quarter’ of cuts still to come. Really?
Treasury Secretary Danny Alexander reckons a third or a quarter of cuts are still to come after the election. The Institute for Fiscal Studies says 50 per cent. Who is right?
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Gary Gibbon
Lib Dems adopt grim determination… and shirt sleeves
Danny Alexander is not without ambition. Over time he has tried various tactics to convince Lib Dems that they should take him to their hearts and consider him future leadership material.
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Gary Gibbon
Budget 2014 – it’s all politics
“It is completely political,” someone with knowledge of the budget told me. The “surprise” being mooted could be a crowd-pleasing Tory pledge on personal taxation.
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Gary Gibbon
Lib Dems in Glasgow: red lines and blue lines
Senior Lib Dems are doing their best to bat away questions about whether they’d prefer to do business with Labour or the Tories after the next election.
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Gary Gibbon
Cable – Jeremiah sulks in the Cave of Adullam
Nick Clegg will close the economy debate on Monday but Vince Cable will not be chipping in with a helpful speech, indeed he will not be in the conference chamber.
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Gary Gibbon
Going nuclear over Britain’s defences
The Lib Dems want to cut the number of nuclear submarines from four to two. But officials who have carried out a study for the party say two subs would “not be a credible deterrent”.
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Gary Gibbon
Danny Alexander – the new Roosevelt?
You might get the impression in the Commons that the UK is about to enter a golden age of infrastructure building. But wander down the road from Westminster and you get a cooler view.
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Are Lib Dems swinging both ways on Syria?
It was one of those “oh, just one more thing” questions after an unexceptional interview about tax. I asked Danny Alexander, as a Lib Dem, how he felt about arming the Syrian rebels.
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Tough on tax, but is it all talk? FactCheck
The government’s promising it’s cracking down on tax avoiders. Are their claims avoidance or evasion? FactCheck finds out.
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Gary Gibbon
Crunch budget meeting slips to Monday
With the budget looming the coalition’s top politicians are still struggling to nail down what it will include, reports Gary Gibbon.
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Gary Gibbon
LibDems push for £1200 tax threshold hike
Sounds like last night’s quad meeting saw the Lib Dems – Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander – push the case for the tax threshold expected increase in this budget (£630) to be doubled (to £1200 or so).
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Gary Gibbon
Huhne to Cabinet: I should have been consulted
Cabinet had a group therapy session today on Europe. Lib Dems shared their pain. Conservatives explained their difficulties. On the whole, there was a combined effort one Cabinet minister said to “keep down the heat”.
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Gary Gibbon
A whiff of class warfare as MPs debate the strike
Political Editor Gary Gibbon on the regional variations of the public sector pension strike as MPs resort to what seems very much like old-fashioned class warfare in the Commons.
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Faisal Islam
Flattening out the GDP debate
My report yesterday on the GDP figures and Krishnan’s rather robust interview of the Chief Secretary of the Treasury has elicited some viewer feedback, and not just about my hard hat. Some correspondents felt we were talking down the economy by “arbitrarily” looking at the flat economy since the end of September, rather than 0.5 per cent growth in Q1 of this year.