Mark Field MP: The Office for Budget Responsibility – it seemed such a good idea at the time...

Mark Field is the Member of Parliament for the Cities of London and Westminster and currently serves as a member of the Intelligence and Security Committee. Follow Mark on Twitter.

This year’s Budget continued a hapless, unparalleled record of forecasting failure for the Office of Budget Responsibility.

Sadly, what has so undermined City commentators’ confidence is that the OBR’s independent analysis has invariably veered in the direction of robust support for the Treasury’s economic projections. At each succeeding Autumn Statement and Budget since June 2010, the OBR has been forced to downgrade growth outturns, whilst continuing to hold optimistically to the notion that the public finances will be transformed by robust growth starting earnestly in two years’ time. It all seems so reminiscent of the Brown Chancellorship’s discredited financial projections that persuaded global investors to allow Britain to borrow well beyond its means, with such disastrous consequences in the Noughties.

Mark Field MP: The mispricing of risk. The danger to savers. And the spectre of inflation – big themes in my first book.

Mark Field is the Member of Parliament for the Cities of London and Westminster and currently serves as a member of the Intelligence and Security Committee. Follow Mark on Twitter.

‘Is there more to come?’ It was with this question in mind that I gave my first book the provocative title, Between the Crashes.

Launched last month with the support of ConservativeHome, Between the Crashes provides a timeline of the seismic political and economic events that followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008. In doing so, it pulls together some of the overarching themes that are set to define the early part of the twenty-first century – the shift of power eastwards, generational division, disillusionment with capitalism and the political class and, most of all, the consequences of Western debt.

As I came to write the book’s conclusion in December, I was struck by a sense of how a crisis which began half a decade ago may still have much further to unwind. Today’s low interest rates and rounds of quantitative easing have lulled us into a dangerously false sense of security, parking rather than solving some of our biggest problems. Yet they are, in truth, a sign that the British economy remains on life support. It is entirely possible that excessively loose monetary policy, alongside the racking up of ever more debt, will eventually lead to another great jolt.

Mark Field MP: Whatever happened to that export-led growth?

Mark Field is the Member of Parliament for the Cities of London and Westminster and currently serves as a member of the Intelligence and Security Committee. Follow Mark on Twitter

In a fast-changing world, the truth is the global race has been underway for some time. The past half-decade ought to have been the best of times for UK exporters. After all, in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis, sterling dropped in value by over 20% against the currencies of both our biggest export markets. The pound’s fall against the US dollar (nearer 30%) and the Euro in an era before enforced austerity within the Eurozone happened when consumption remained relatively high.

Since the crash, our floating currency has remained remarkably stable against these competitor currencies - the slight gains in 2009-12 only being cancelled out by downward movement in recent months. Worryingly, however, despite the devaluation, UK companies appear to have missed this opportunity to boost export sales, and the UK’s healthy surplus in services exports continues to be undermined by a stubbornly high goods deficit.

Mark Field MP: The Chancellor shouldn't seek quick fixes in tomorrow's Budget

Mark Field is the Member of Parliament for the Cities of London and Westminster and currently serves as a member of the Intelligence and Security Committee. Follow Mark on Twitter

There is no doubt that the Chancellor’s room to manoeuvre is incredibly limited. Much of this, of course, can be attributed to global events - we only need to look at the weekend’s dramatic news from Cyprus to know that the Eurozone crisis is far from over. However, it has also become ever clearer that, in the Coalition’s first Budget in June 2010, the government was complacent about growth.

The short pre-election boom following 2009’s VAT reduction and the large, early rounds of quantitative easing lulled the Coalition on assuming office into believing that the growth baked into the system would somehow do the heavy lifting when it came to deficit reduction. The coalition’s plan to eliminate the structural deficit required the gap between revenue and expenditure to be narrowed by £159 billion in 2014/15. Tax rises were expected to contribute £31 billion and spending cuts £44 billion to this total.

Unfortunately, however, the Coalition ended up with the worst of all worlds. It has received relentless criticism for harsh austerity measures when in reality, too often it has lacked the political will and necessary competence to execute the levels of savings required. The fact is, for all the rhetoric, we are still overspending by some £300 million each and every day and thus needing to borrow to the tune of £120 billion year-on-year. In 2010, we should have looked the electorate in the eye and been quite clear about the magnitude of the task that lay ahead to rectify the public finances. Early u-turns on school sports, forestry and book reading schemes augured ill for the government’s ability to push through some of the more important and wide-ranging savings.

But we are where we are.

Mark Field MP: The deeper discontent beneath the mansion tax debate

Mark Field is the Member of Parliament for the Cities of London and Westminster and currently serves as a member of the Intelligence and Security Committee. Follow Mark on Twitter

‘It’s like the Harrods sale!’ exclaimed Rob Tincknell in January. As Chief Executive of the Battersea Power Station Development Company, it was no surprise that he greeted the stampede to secure new Battersea homes with elation. More than £600 million worth of prime London properties - three quarters of the 800 homes on site – had been snapped up in a frantic four days. The final tranche of 200 properties is now on a homes ‘road show’ in Singapore to attract wealthy Far East buyers.

For property-owning Londoners, the Battersea frenzy was no doubt a welcome sign of the continued robust health of the capital’s housing market. But I suspect the average renter found the news utterly demoralising. For them, the financial crisis brought great promise of lower house prices. But that never came to pass. Instead, already-stratospheric rents have crept steadily upwards. Mortgage deposit requirements have increased. House prices are climbing and yet still properties are being snapped up in double quick time. When even a Battersea studios costs £343 000, the hope of owning the smallest of homes seems more remote than ever.

Contrast that to the ease with which wealthy foreigners, many of whom will not be resident in the capital, are hoovering up London real estate. Such is their spending power that it is becoming increasingly common for agents to market new London property developments first to overseas buyers whose appetite for homes in the capital, alongside their ability to pay for them, seems not to abate.

An increasing number of Londoners are feeling locked out of their own city. Whatever one’s politics, this cannot be desirable– an overcrowded capital in which much of our precious housing stock is being bought by part-time or even absent residents. To many there is no starker example than the London property market of the growing global divide between the super rich and everybody else.

Mark Field MP: Bash the banks and global companies if you must, but we need them more than ever

Mark Field is the Member of Parliament for the Cities of London and Westminster and currently serves as a member of the Intelligence and Security Committee. Follow Mark on Twitter

Berate banks and bankers if you wish.

Slate the tax arrangements of large multinationals, whose contributions in VAT and employers’ national insurance remains substantial even if their corporate tax contributions (thanks to a hopelessly complicated UK tax code) fall short of that demanded by a print media (whose own holding companies are operated by tax-efficient trust).

But for so long as UK governments of any colour remain addicted to spending well beyond our means, then we are in hock to both banks and global corporations. For even as the annual ritual of banker bonus baiting is upon us, it is these institutions that are integral to the market system that feeds the national borrowing and spending addiction.

The harsh truth is that the clamour for ever greater public expenditure is the biggest roadblock to meaningful reform of our banks.

The Government’s attempts to kick start bank activity via the Funding for Lending scheme have delivered some success in the area of subsidised mortgages (albeit largely where borrowers have existing significant equity holdings). But progress at lending into the real economy has been more faltering.

Mark Field MP: The first skirmish of many?

Mark Field is the Member of Parliament for the Cities of London and Westminster and currently serves as a member of the Intelligence and Security Committee. Follow Mark on Twitter

Thankfully few people have to endure the unimaginable terror that beset our nation’s hostages and waiting relatives as the Amenas gas plant siege dragged on last week. In a world of relentlessly demanding 24/7 media coverage, the frustration of senior government ministers was palpable as unreliable, piecemeal information trickled through from Algeria.

Whilst today’s attention rightly focuses upon the bereaved, little time should be lost in developing a diplomatic and intelligence strategy in this region. For we shall hear much more of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and the Nigerian fundamentalist terror group, Boko Haram, in the months ahead.

The sheer vastness of this part of North Africa is best illustrated by the fact that Algeria’s capital, Algiers, is nearer to London than it is to that nation's southern-most districts. Indeed the utter remoteness of the Amenas complex meant that any plans to engage British, French or US special services in the hostage rescue were fanciful. Besides, after a brutal civil war in the 1990s, the Algerian security forces are highly experienced, albeit uncompromising. Moreover, the lesson that the Algerian government will have learned from the West’s treatment of one-time ally, Colonel Gaddafi, in neighbouring Libya, is to act ruthlessly in the face of any perceived insurgency. It understandably fears similar betrayal by France (its old colonial master) and the West. So any suggestion that the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ might have extended to Algeria would have led to Western military assistance to rebel forces, in which AQIM would almost certainly have featured. What message would the Algerian government have been sending to its own people over recent days if it had allowed protracted negotiations over the siege or foreign armed forces to engage on Algerian soil?

Mark Field MP: There is vanishingly little to choose between Osborne's and Balls's approach to the economy

Mark Field is the Member of Parliament for the Cities of London and Westminster and currently serves as a member of the Intelligence and Security Committee. Follow Mark on Twitter

Well, it was never supposed to be like this. The coalition’s expenditure programme for the entire parliament was designed to have been done and dusted in November 2010. Subsequent pre-budget reports were expected to feature only the odd tweak here and there.

Last week’s Autumn Statement may have had the Westminster village agog with anticipation, but it was met with supreme indifference by the large corporates and banks of my constituency - for three reasons.

First, a recognition that any government in these acutely difficult times has virtually no room for manoeuvre.

Secondly, despite all the continued fire and brimstone of the exchanges between George Osborne and Ed Balls, there is in fact vanishingly little to choose between their approaches to economic management. Indeed, all the talk of ‘austerity’ and ‘savage cuts’ provides the coalition with the alibi to the markets that they have a deficit reduction plan that is being vigorously stuck to (not borne out by the economic facts) whilst Labour can take comfort in playing their familiar ‘heartless Tories’ card in drumming up support from swing voters, without having any plausible alternative.

Mark Field MP: Some electoral lessons from Chicago...and Croydon

Mark Field is the Member of Parliament for the Cities of London and Westminster and currently serves as a member of the Intelligence and Security Committee. Follow Mark on Twitter

It’s the demographics, stupid. This is truly the thread that links November’s re-election of an incumbent US President and a series of disappointingly poor Conservative performances in parliamentary contests.

In opposition, David Cameron rightly observed that the presentation of immigration policy needs to be handled with care. It must NEVER be ‘too hot to handle’, but as seats such as Croydon North (notionally Conservative until 1997, but now somewhere we are barely able to secure one-in-six votes) show, demographic change means the coalition needs to look afresh at the wisdom and effectiveness of its much-vaunted immigration policy.

The Republican Party in the US trailed its Democrat rivals by a vertiginous 87 percentage points amongst African Americans, 47% amongst Asian voters and 44% amongst Latinos. Whilst headline voting figures are not so stark for UK Conservatives, the trends are unmistakably similar.

Ministers have taken heart from yesterday’s figures from the Office for National Statistics demonstrating that 59 000 fewer people arrived on our shores last year than in the previous year. But let us not forget that we still had 183 000 more people arriving in the country than departing, with London bucking the national trend with a slight increase in its overall influx of migrants – the capital last year added a further 51 000 people to its population. The coalition’s vow to reduce annual net migration from ‘hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands’ is not only unworkable but, in all likelihood, its rhetoric repels many swing voters. Not only significant numbers from ethnic communities, but also many Middle England electors in key marginal seats, who conclude that the Conservative Party is simply irrelevant to the challenges facing the modern world as they see and live it.

Mark Field MP: Secret courts are a regrettable necessity

Mark Field is the Member of Parliament for the Cities of London and Westminster and currently serves as a member of the Intelligence and Security Committee. Follow Mark on Twitter.

In the battle to keep British citizens safe and our streets secure, we rely on intelligence not just from UK agents but from those of our allies too. That intelligence gathering can be highly risky. Agents often work alone, with only their handlers to trust. In return for making those considerable sacrifices, for taking those risks, they ask only one thing: a guarantee that the intelligence they provide is protected. The absence of such a guarantee not only puts lives at risk but undermines the trust that is the essential lubricant to intelligence sharing. For decades we were able to guarantee that protection.

But then something changed.

Lawyers began to see ‘money’ in civil actions by suing the British government on their clients’ behalf. Claimants were able to make all sorts of wild allegations, safe in the knowledge that the government would never be able to produce secret agents or share allies’ secrets in open court.

In tackling such actions, the government has had only two choices: collapse the case and settle or attempt a defence with any compromising evidence removed. The latter could be done through a Public Interest Immunity Certificate (PII). But the problem with PIIs has been that in many cases, so much evidence is removed as a result of it being allies’ intelligence or placing at risk the identity of an informer, that the case becomes unwinnable. Under the PII route, evidence is discarded or redacted, it is not scrutinised. This has left the government unable to defend itself and forced to settle.

Mark Field MP: The child benefit changes will penalise aspiration — and for little gain

Mark Field is the Member of Parliament for the Cities of London and Westminster. Follow Mark on Twitter.

Although first mooted over two years ago, it is only this week that changes in child benefit will become fully apparent, as letters drop through the letterboxes of over a million households where one earner is bringing home at least £50 000 per annum.

Only last month at Conservative Party Conference, David Cameron made a powerful case for supporting the ‘strivers’ and the aspirational in our society. Yet it is precisely this group that stands to be most adversely affected by the child benefit changes.

Conservatives like me regard deficit reduction as a moral, as well as an economic, matter. Surely we owe it to our children and grandchildren alike not to pass on huge debts in the decades ahead for our consumption today.

As a result I shall always support measures by the coalition to reduce public spending.

But on these child benefit reforms let’s for once be wise before the event.

Mark Field MP: How CEOs should adapt to the collapse of trust in the rules of capitalism

Mark Field is the Member of Parliament for the Cities of London and Westminster. Follow Mark on Twitter.

When historians look back upon the first decade or so of the twenty-first century, I suspect they will analyse just how and why every one of Britain’s institutions (bar the Monarchy) came to be discredited. They will also ponder the demise of leaders in the worlds of politics, finance and business.

The end of the Noughties witnessed a breathtaking financial collapse which swept away trust in banking. Simultaneously, a scandal broke over the misuse of MPs’ expenses that deepened an historical distrust of politicians. As the 2010s began, a dirty tale of phone hacking sucked media, police and politicians, into a fresh quagmire of shame. Faith in the justice system seemed to be at an all time low as successive British judgements were overturned by European courts. And as the nation faced its collective indebtedness, the mantra ‘we’re all in this together’ led to searching questions about whether celebrities, bosses and companies really were paying their fair share.

As a corollary, twenty-first century Britons came to feel impotent, disillusioned…and angry.

Mark Field MP: I suspect the joint plan of the Chancellor and the Governor is simply to keep the show on the road

Mark Field is the Member of Parliament for the Cities of London and Westminster. Follow Mark on Twitter.

As the Greek economic tragedy reaches yet another climax, it remains fashionable from these shores to decry the Eurozone for its schizophrenic lurching between hapless inaction and spurts of frenetic, if misguided, activism.

However, with this critique in mind, it might also be wise to examine carefully what is happening closer to home.

For so long as global financial markets remain flooded with cheap money, courtesy of government underwritten bailouts, then political consideration will continue to outweigh sound economics.

Conservatives are right to dismiss the Opposition claim that the UK economy currently faces a binary choice between growth and austerity. But nor should the coalition fall into the trap of thinking that preserving historically low interest rates is an adequate compensation for sluggish economic growth.

Mark Field MP: Christians are being ethnically-cleansed from the Middle East's hollow new democracies

Mark Field is the Member of Parliament for the Cities of London and Westminster. Follow Mark on Twitter.

The global media circus has moved on from Cairo, Alexandria and the Egyptian seaboard. Soon the current rapt attention to the terrible bloodshed in Damascus, Houla, Aleppo and Homs will similarly pass.

Yet for the nine million Egyptian Coptic Christians and the two million Syrian followers of Christ, whose lineage goes back to St Paul’s proselytising in the first century AD, these are desperate times. Religious minorities often find their most assured protection under dictatorships. Forget all the talk about liberators fighting against the existing regime in Syria, or of democrats and progressives triumphantly taking the reins in Egypt. The unspeakable truth is that the sizeable Christian communities in these trouble-torn states are at greater threat of ethnic cleansing from their ancestral homes than has been the case for generations – often at the hands of the self-styled freedom fighters so feted by the Western press.

Events in Iraq provide us with a timely example. During this year’s Easter celebrations, St Joseph's Chaldean Church in central Baghdad was surrounded by concrete barriers and army checkpoints. Amidst savage bloodletting between Sunnis and Shiites in the aftermath of the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the story of Iraq’s Christian population is one that is rarely told. But since the invasion it is estimated that half their number has desperately been driven to exile outside the country. Some 330,000 Iraqi Christians have fled in the past decade to Syria alone (where Christians have been largely protected by the Assad regime). Others have found safe haven in Jordan and naturally some have come to these shores. Under Saddam Hussein, some Christians had risen to the top of politics, most notably Tariq Aziz, Hussein’s Deputy Prime Minister. Yet since the dictator’s fall, violence against the Christian minority, who were often associated with the ‘crusading invaders’, has included kidnappings, the beheading of a priest, the bombing of ancient churches and forced conversion to Islam. 

Mark Field MP: Politicians still haven't told voters that we aren't nearly as prosperous as we thought we were

Mark Field is Member of Parliament for the Cities of London and Westminster. Follow Mark on Twitter.

Sarkozy is history, the Greeks are in paralysis, the Coalition has for the first time experienced mid-term electoral blues (just wait until May 2013 and 2014). This month has already been one of savage reprimand at the polls in Europe. Yet rather than a definitive judgement on the benefits or otherwise of austerity, I suspect electorates continent-wide are issuing a plague on all our houses.

We are reaping the rewards of decades’ worth of debt accumulation, implicitly supported by a generation that enjoyed an expanded welfare state, cheap goods, cosseting employment regulation, never-ending lines of credit and inflated house prices (in the UK and US, if not on the continent). All this has quietly torn massive rifts - between young and old, debtors and savers, East and West – and papered over the developed world’s declining competitiveness in the face of aggressive and dynamic new rivals. Voters are furious that they were sold, and then readily bought into, a lie of prosperity. Nobody, left or right, seems to hold a solution.

As we have sought to understand the roots of the financial crisis, focus has rested upon the role of bankers - their manipulation of and disregard for risk, their short-termism, their failure to respond to public anger and their apparent hostility to change – as well as the apparent willingness of politicians of all parties to give them free rein.