CentreRight

A contract for motorists?

In 1997 Tony Blair was looking for Mondeo Man’s vote.  At this election motorists could again be pivotal.  Ordinary drivers, Focus Families if that isn’t an alliteration too far, are feeling the pinch with petrol prices going through the roof.  Andrew Hawkins, Chairman of the polling company ComRes, has argued that if “the Conservatives can turn this issue to their advantage it could be the electoral driver they need to seal that deal”, as it can motivate key groups like skilled manual and clerical workers to turn out for them.  With that in mind, I find it a little strange that the Conservatives don't appear to have addressed motorists at all in their new "contract".  Motorists have been let down on a number of fronts and any party that campaigns on plans to change that over the next week could be rewarded with the keys to 10 Downing Street.

The underlying reason why petrol prices are so high is the massive rates of tax on motor fuel.  As of February this year, 65 per cent of the price of unleaded petrol at the pump is tax.  That rate is only higher in two countries in the entire EU27.  For diesel, 64 per cent of the pump price is tax which gives Britain the highest taxed diesel in Europe.  That taxation is far more than is needed to pay for road spending or to account for road transport’s greenhouse gas emissions.  Even after accounting for those costs motorists are still being singled out to the tune of £18.4 billion.  And despite all that we are still getting repeated increases in Fuel Duty rates.  The Government are starting a new version of the Fuel Price Escalator with plans to increase rates by 1 penny per litre above inflation every year.

The prescience of Graham Brady

Articles come and articles go...but some that go are worth bringing back to life.

For example, re-read Graham Brady's article here  - published on this site over a year ago - in the light of the news from Greece and Germany.

Brady argues that the most likely consequence of a Greek-style collapse is a renewed push by the Euro-elite for fiscal union - and further political integration.

Dan Hannan tells me that he'll be blogging soon on the matter here.  And John Redwood has already been doing so here.

At the end Brown would have been better to remain silent

Watching the worm on the BBC website last night, for the closing remarks. Brown's line dropped into negative and stayed there pretty much throughout his final comments, which were as negative as his scoring. He would have been better off saying nothing at all.

Two weeks, 1,500 miles and £6.7 billion - the Debt Clock Tour

 We wrote on CentreRight a couple of weeks ago about the launch of our Debt Clock campaign. 1,500 miles and £6,698,630,137 of new national debt later, we’ve completed our full-scale tour of the UK.

To recap swiftly, the clock is the world’s largest of its type: a seven metre long digital clock that counts up the national debt, mounted on a 14 metre lorry. With the British Government borrowing an alarming amount this year, the clock is ticking up by £5,169 per second.

From the launch in Westminster, via Oxford, Bristol, Cardiff, Ludlow, Birmingham, Manchester, Edinburgh, Alnwick, Newcastle, Hull, Peterborough and Harlow, the clock made a big impression wherever it went.

Almost everyone I spoke to had two stages to their reaction. First, they would ask if it was a real number, amazed that the Government could really be borrowing £446m a day. Once we’d assured them that it was the case, their jaws would drop.

This was what motivated us to do the Debt Clock campaign in the first place. So often we hear politicians talking about millions, billions and trillions – indeed I’m sure we’ll hear more of that in the final Leaders’ Debate tonight – but until you actually see these amounts spelled out it is hard to imagine how large they really are.

As well as a lot of members of the public expressing their support, we were fortunate to be joined at several of our stops by PPCs. As a non-partisan campaign, we invited the candidates from all the main parties to each event, and a good number took some time out of their campaigning to join the Debt Clock tour. They included Conservatives David Davis (above), Chloe Smith, Rob Halfon, Iain McGill, Anne Marie Trevelyan, Nicola Blackwood, Gagan Mohindra and Philip Dunne, as well as Lib Dem and UKIP candidates in several areas. A full photo gallery of each stop on the Debt Clock tour is now available here.

The media response was very good. Presented with a strong visual image, and an opportunity to discuss this massive issue with a local angle, local papers and regional TV and radio picked the clock up, as did several national papers, the BBC, Reuters, Bloomberg and even ITV’s Tonight programme for their National Debt special.

To put the debt into perspective, our researchers have produced a few facts to illustrate just how large it is:

• The Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol cost £9.6m in today’s money. The national debt could build a new version of the Clifton Suspension Bridge 33,490,874 km long.

• The Government currently borrows enough to build a new Welsh Assembly (£67m) every three and a half hours.

•  Old Trafford has more than 68,000 seats. If you were to pack the place to capacity, each spectator could become a millionaire with just five and a half months of new debt. Manchester United’s huge debt, run up by the Glazers, is now £716.6m – an amount which the Government currently borrows every 1 day, 14 hours and 30 minutes.

• You could build an Angel of the North made of silver (£97m) in just 5 hours, 12 minutes of new Government borrowing.

The debt truck itself is now in storage, ready to reappear come the next emergency budget or spending review, but if you’d like a debt clock widget to embed on your own website or blog, you can get one here.

Winning the election is not the same as winning a mandate

The momentum is now with David Cameron and he is set to become Prime Minister. His strongest debate performance came when, at last, he started to explain the elementary conservative proposition that scrapping a tax on jobs isn't taking money out of the economy, but leaving it in the hands of job creators. That the economy and government spending are not the same thing. This is a genuine dividing line that should have been turned against Labour much harder and earlier.

How now to use this week? The danger is that David Cameron will become a Prime Minister without a mandate to do what needs to be done. The deficit, not imigration, was Gillian Duffy's main concern. But all main parties are refusing to acknowledge the scale of the problem. And in public opinion terms they have reaped the thin fruit that their collective failure of leadership deserves.

Yesterday, Today carried a story about a report from the 2020 Public Service Trust. Two poll findings, which should terrify anyone hoping to be in government in a week's time:

• Only 24% of the public believe that spending on public services needs to be cut at all to address the level of national debt (yes, debt, not deficit was what Mark Easton reported and I guess he knows the difference)
• 75% believe that efficiencies alone can deliver the required savings without damaging the services themselves.

We shouldn't be surprised by this; those findings reflect exactly what the main parties have been saying. Public opinion is in the place that politicans have led it to. But it means that an enormous task needs to be done to explain and then build consensus around the cuts that must come.

There are things that can be built on in the next week. David Cameron was the only politician last night who wanted to talk about Greece and he needs to do so again. We have said that we will publish an emergency budget, and we need to explain why. We need to challenge Labour for their failure to publish a Comprehensive Spending Review before the election. We need to explain the power of publishing on-line all government contracts for goods and services over £25,000 (an immediate benefit will be the number of bids and contracts that might otherwise have been worth up to about £30,000 suddenly coming in at £24,950). In power, publishing a Domesday Book of public debt and Labour's liability legacy, including public service pensions and PFI, will be vital.

Conservative strategy has been too risk-averse for too long, and culpably, it saw conservatism as too much of a risk. Momentum has come from getting real and getting conservative about cutting business taxes and trusting wealth creators not waste creators. In the next few days more needs to be done to build a mandate for being in government. CCHQ should understand that doing that will also help us get into government.

Proportional representation would tug Britain to the Right...

Interesting argument from Andrew Gillgan at The Telegraph:

"A more proportional electoral system is far more likely to tug Britain to starboard. All three major parties are run by a broadly liberal elite. But PR would massively empower the populist Right. On immigration, on free-market economics, and to some extent on foreign policy, the main parties agree with each other more than they've done for generations. Enormous numbers of voters, however, disagree with the elite, liberal consensus – and PR would, for the first time, give them representation in Parliament."

Please discuss!

The self-important, po-faced pomposity of health and safety bureaucrats reaches new heights (or depths, as you prefer)

As reported by The Times -

staff at a nursery in Pemberton, near Wigan, have confiscated a cheese sandwich belonging to a two-year-old pupil, Jack Ormisher. Its failing was to contain neither lettuce nor tomato.

Sadly, predictably, this isn't some off-the-reservation jobsworth acting out on an unsanctioned limb. This is exactly what Wigan Council says should happen, because of course they know more about how to bring up children than parents do:

Wigan Council has since confirmed that the straight-up combination of cheese and bread contravenes its healthy eating guidelines — and fully supported the cheese-snatchers. “The centre has a list of recommended healthy food, according to national guidelines, which children are encouraged to eat,” said a spokesman. “A cheese sandwich would not feature on the list.”

Fighting exactly this kind of po-faced, self-righteous, overbearing stupidity is exactly why we started Big Brother Watch. Who do these these people think they are?

An unwelcome intervention from the European Court of Justice

You don't normally have to look far to find a European court willing to weaken British anti-terrorism legislation. The European Court of Human Rights has been doing a pretty handy job for a while now, and the European Court of Justice has today happily stepped in to perform a similar function. 

It has ruled that family members of terrorist suspects should be allowed to claim full social security benefits, including disability, living allowance, income support, and child, housing and council tax. The British government had attempted to ensure that this was not the case, mindful of the fact that there was probably a pretty reasonable chance that the benefits claimed by, for example, the wife of a terrorist suspect may just have found their way to the terrorist suspect himself. 

The European Court of Justice has overturned this, as they have decided that 'it is hard to imagine how those funds could be turned into means that could be used to support terrorist activities'. Perhaps they underestimate how much this government allows the unemployed to claim.

Many of those affected by this ruling will be the foreign national terror suspects that the government has been consistently thwarted in attempting to deport by various courts. We are used to being told that al-Qaeda ideologues and terrorist suspects cannot be removed from the UK if there is the chance they will be mistreated in their country of origin. Yet now we are being told that not only can we not deport them, the taxpayer must also ensure they remain living a life of relative financial comfort.

For years, we have been paying terrorist suspects to live in the UK. When this kind of decadence goes unaddressed, no-one can be surprised that public finances are in the state that they are. 

Mind the spending cuts gap

You can argue about the detail but in general the Institute of Fiscal Studies have got a point that over the next week all political parties should go further in telling voters where the spending cuts would fall. The Labour Party are judged the worst offenders in only identifying 13% of what is required. The IFS have been a bit soft on the Lib Dems letting them get away with vague stuff about "tackling tax avoidance and evasion" - £4.6 billion. What is needed is tackling their policy avoidance and evasion.

But with all parties facing a gap of around £50 billion I think it is reasonable for voters to want more information. Nick Wood may be right that it is too late to add to the shopping list of proposed cuts. But I think we can give voters more of an idea of the type of savings we will be looking for. Dizzy has already noted that the Written Questions put down by Conservative front benchers give a pretty good clue.

Say goodbye to the Sub-Prime Minister

One of the new things about this election campaign has been how advertising agencies have lost their monopoly on the posters. Rather than just complaining about not getting the message across we have seen teenagers, pensioners and housewives fiddle around on the internet to produce their own, often pretty professional looking, alternatives. I supposed it might have happened a bit last time but I don't remember it doing so.

In another context  have written about Bromley businesswoman Lisa Fergusson having a battle with British Gas - who kept sending her threats after she switched to npower.

Now Lisa has got in touch with her poster offering - which I am pleased to reproduce.

Debt, fairness and why we need "smart taxes"

Between the Rochdale incident and Gordon Brown's sheer contempt for the public, the press seems to have finally arrived at the conclusion most ConservativeHome readers reached some time ago - indeed even before the 2008 financial crisis in some cases - namely that we're in a serious financial mess. The fact that you cannot spend more than you earn indefinately is surely obvious; the fact that few seem to understand this simple truth is rather shocking; and the degree to which some will go to deceive themselves one of those great mysteries of political phychology. Thanks to Greece and the IFS however, the past month of election delusion in which politicians, media and the public acted as if nothing had ever happened, that bust was still boom, and that money grew on trees, has at last ended. Having touted their various political menus offering a range of lavish courses to the nation's ever hungry diners the truth that George Osbourne told them years ago has at last started to sink in - the cupboard is bare.

Britain is now in a situation rather like a loss making dot com company during the dot com crash, dependent upon ever more cash injection from investors hoping it eventually will turn red into black and never likely to do so. They called the "burn rate" what we call the deficit, but they at least could work out from that rate how long they had until the cash run out - we are instead ever dependent on gilt markets, and paying in interest rather than equity. Unless we demonstrate that we have a viable plan as a nation then we face our own Greek style tragedy. Why people cannot understand this I do not know - maybe it's nicer to delude oneself? - but in the next 7 days the seriousness of the situation and the sheer inability of a hung parliament to deal with it must be pressed home. After the election the proposals set out will in effect be our business plan, our pitch to the bond market equivalent of Dragons' Den. At this election and in tonight's debate we must ask the public one question: would they invest in a company run by Gordon Brown and Nick Clegg? I know I wouldn't.

* * * * * *

Looking through the Lib Dem and Labour manifestos I'm struck by something. The word "fair". It's everywhere! Everyone likes fair - it's fair, after all, who doesn't want fairness? It's up there with apple pie and Grandmars, and apple pies made by Grandmars; a thing that only the most wicked, evil, nasty person could dislike, surely? (Maybe best claim to be allergic). However the word fair is devoid of anything qualitative. "A future fair for all" doesn't mean a better future for all, or indeed better for anyone, and "Fairness that works for you" is equally vague about quality of outcome. Like equality, "fair" is a word that actually means nothing in physical reality. You cannot feed your family on fairness. A nation can be fair and wealthy or fair and poor, it can be equally rich (in theory) or equally poor (as regimes bent on equality always end up). This is not to say unfairness or inequality are good - they too are devoid of qualitative definition - but rather that these are bad things to base policy on. Quality matters more than equality. Blair was elected on "Things can only get better" - when a party moves from betterment to fairness and equality you know pessimism has taken hold and ambition abolished. It shows once again that only the Conservatives believe in a better and more prosperous future for Britain, the others just believe in a fight over what we have.

* * * * * *

One of the things I dislike about politics and the way we are governed is what you could term bad business practice. I believe the country should be run more like a business, a good business that's run to the maximum of its potential. Efficient, cost effective, forward looking, getting the best deal for the public. Looking through the Labour and Lib Dem manifestos I'm left stunned by the sheer madness of it all. They seem to be averse to all notions of efficiency and cost minimising; Labour indeed having identified £11bln of waste which they wish to keep, instead raising the jobs tax they call National Insurance to pay for it! Meanwhile the Lib Dems want to levy VAT on new homes, increase Capital Gains to 50% and remove higher rate pension tax relief. It's as if they've never even heard of the Laffer Curve and have no thought of their action's dire consequences.

If however the Laffer Curve's concept that lower taxation creates faster growth and ultimately more revenue is too difficult to sell to the public, or indeed unaffordable in the short term, that does not mean that revenue neutral tax shifts wouldn't be a good idea. The Conservatives already plan to cut Corporation Tax for example, funded by ending loopholes and special allowances, but why not go further?

The impact on our GDP of all forms of taxation could be analysed and measured in terms of damage done per billion pounds of tax revenue (after collection costs), and having this new measure we could easily weigh up what to use to raise revenue with the least impact yet what to cut to get the maximum increase in growth for the money. To cut where we get the most bang for our buck, funded by increases where we get the least drag. I don't have the data but it's fairly easy to guess parts of the order. Taxes such as Employers National Insurance make our labour more expensive, making our goods more expensive than foreign imports at home and less competitive as exports abroad - we're in effect helping foreign firms undercut British ones - putting it at the top of my list needing the chop. Indirect taxes by contrast tend to have far less impact, as Brown's daft VAT cut demonstrated. A revenue neutral tax shift cutting or abolishing Employer NIC funded by increased indirect taxation (not neccessarily VAT) could do wonders for manufacturing and employment.

Given our current financial state and dire need for growth the need for "smart taxes" based on minimising harm and "smart tax cuts" based on maximising growth is even more pressing. Will any government be able to though, knowing that such a radical shift of tax from business to indirect taxes would be controversial? For the country's sake I hope so.

How do you feel about privacy now, Gordon?

Through an unprecedented expansion of surveillance and data collection, this Labour government has relentlessly invaded the privacy of the British people over the last thirteen years. Their rationale: if you've nothing to hide,you've nothing to fear.

What a splendid irony that the remarks Gordon Brown thought he was making in private have now sealed his fate.

Mending the Broken Society

I wrote this article, Now it's our turn to believe that we can change the world, in response to David Cameron's superb speech yesterday on Mending the Broken Society.  

Alan Johnson's argument on CCTV is both irresponsible and intellectually dishonest

Alan Johnson has today offered us even more CCTV. Because we just don't have enough of it already.

Putting aside privacy issues, which don't seem to interest Johnson or his colleagues at all, I think it irresponsible of senior politicians to ignore the evidence and research in the field about which they're speaking, in attempts to win support at elections - particularly when so doing as an incumbent in the relevant ministry. In this field, all such evidence suggests that CCTV cameras fail to meet any objective test in producing the desired results. As security expert Bruce Schneier has said,

Pervasive security cameras don't substantially reduce crime. This fact has been demonstrated repeatedly... in study after study in both the U.S. and the U.K. Nor are they instrumental in solving many crimes after the fact.

There are exceptions, of course, and proponents of cameras can always cherry-pick examples to bolster their argument. These success stories are what convince us; our brains are wired to respond more strongly to anecdotes than to data. But the data are clear: CCTV cameras have minimal value in the fight against crime.

Cherry-picking is exactly what Johnson tried to do today. He brought a victim of crime with him to the press conference, who spoke movingly about what happened to her, and then expressed the view that CCTV was important in solving her case and that it might not have been solved without it. Perhaps, in this case, it was. But as I've argued here before, both about CCTV and in another context vis a vis Labour's rampant campaign authoritarianism, those who support CCTV often (and, I increasingly think, deliberately) make the mistake of focusing on the specific case in which CCTV might have assisted and say, "there – it’s all worth it".  That is to take an emotional position rather than a rational one, overlooking the fact that the millions of man-hours and millions of pounds used in that way might better be spent elsewhere in law enforcement. As we have argued at Big Brother Watch, through our research and our writing, any such rational analysis is against more cameras (and against many of those we already have) rather than in their favour.

Johnson had the gall to say of David Cameron's "Broken Britain" mantra,

"He's used a series of tragic incidents to try and paint the worst possible picture of our society."

At his press conference today, Johnson did just the same, in an intellectually fatuous attempt to elide between the visceral unpleasantness of those cases and the apparent necessity for his pseudo-solution.

Stressing the shocking nature of some examples of the problem you've identified* does nothing to advance the link with the mechanism you're shopping around.

Finally, in his "you can choose to have more CCTV" line, Johnson seems blissfully unaware of the irony - that over many years the government in which he serves has presided (along with its predecessor, to be fair) over an unprecedented explosion in surveillance in which we have thus far been offered no choice at all.

*and presided over

Could John Bercow hold Britain's fate in the hollow of his hand?

The following would be among the winners should the next Parliament be hung. Please note: You don't have to triumph at the polls, or even turn up if elected, to be among their number.

Nick Clegg.  Alex Salmond. The Democratic Unionist Party.  Martin Bell.  Gerry Adams.  A scattering of Plaid Cymru MPs with accents unheard since "Zulu".

And John Bercow, until recently Speaker of the House of Commons.

This presumes, of course, that he's re-elected in Buckingham.  This is a strange campaign - not just in that sprawling constituency, but generally - and anything could happen yet.  But sources in the area say, with emotions that vary from resignation to fury, that as matters stand Bercow will be victorious.

In the event of a hung Parliament, he'll most likely be a double winner.  This is because only a Conservative majority stands between Bercow and continuation as Speaker.  It wouldn't guarantee his defeat in a Speakership election, of course: David Cameron has made it clear that he will support Bercow's candidacy.

Nor would he be likely to lose such an election, even were lots of Tory MPs to vote against him. But his position would become impossible in these circumstances were enough of them to do so.  Given a hung Parliament, though, this danger to him will recede.

Which raises a question. In the event of the catastrophe of a such a Parliament - complete with political haggling, economic uncertainty, a falling pound, and pressure on our credit rating - how important would the Speaker's role be?  Could John Bercow hold Britain's destiny in the hollow of his hand?

I'm told that the new Speaker will have no more power in the next Parliament than Bercow had during the last one.  He will retain the power to grant Urgent Questions.  He may have a role in brokering a deal if the new Commons can't reach agreement on electing Select Committee Chairmen or Members.

But he won't sit on any new Business Committee.  (The Party is committed to introducing one.)  And the Government, in any event, would maintain control of much of the timetable.  So it's hard to see the Speaker being a major player.

None the less, the Commons would be a far more important forum in the event of a hung Parliament than one with a substantial majority for a Party.  There would be knife-edge votes.  "Ambushes", as Opposition MPs seek to lull Government Whips into a false sense of security - before voting unexpectedly.

Bad Ministers would be more exposed.  Good speeches would have greater influence.  The Speaker would loom larger in the public eye.  I wonder if Bercow will announce to the world, before May 6, that he stands ready - acknowledging his duty to the nation -  to play his part in stabilising the Commons and the country.

Paul Goodman

"Plundering and blundering" (Disraeli on Gordon Brown and Gladstone)

Interesting to see David Cameron quoting Gladstone yesterday at the Centre for Social Justice. The CSJ's foundations were laid on the work of the Conservative Party's former Renewing One Nation unit, set up under IDS by Tim Montgomerie and others.

In the  interests of adding One Nation ballast to DC's reported Gladstonianism, it's worth pointing out that whilst the best of Gladstone rightly can command some cross-party appeal today, at his worst he definitely had something of the Brown about him: control-freakery and a considerable sense of his own moral compass being amongst his characteristics when in power. More than once he combined in himself the roles of Prime Minister and Chancellor. This was not a great success. As Disraeli pointed out before winning the 1874 general election (thereby giving the Conservative Party its first absolute majority for a generation and enabling it to implement an ambitious programme of social reform):

"For nearly five years the present Ministers have harassed every trade, worried every profession, and assailed or menaced every class, institution, and species of property in the country. Occasionally they have varied this state of civil warfare by perpetrating some job which outraged public opinion, or by stumbling into mistakes which have been always discreditable, and sometimes ruinous. All this they call a policy, and seem quite proud of it; but the country has, I think, made up its mind to close this career of plundering and blundering" 

As with Gladstone, so with Brown.

Coalition government: the continental example

I grew up in Belgium, which, with its system of proportional representation has “enjoyed” coalition governments for most of the 20th century.  For the last decades coalitions of six or more parties have become the rule. On balance it is a negative experience, especially for the taxpayers.

Here is why:

1. It gives disproportionate power to fringe parties whose few seats are needed to form a parliamentary majority; small parties hold the large parties to ransom;
2. A few party leaders often secretly agree to form a coalition in smoky back rooms even before the electorate has voted, making the actual poll – bar the unexpected - quite irrelevant;
3. Election promises mean even less as all is up for grabs when the different parties negotiate a detailed programme between themselves after the election;
4. Instability as any party may pull out of the coalition at any moment over any politically propitious subject;
5. Every coalition party has its pet projects, with grave spending implications;
6. Grave economic consequences as coalition partners usually find it easier to agree on spending than on cuts;
7. Never a clear political direction; government policy will pull in all directions as the parties' policies and beliefs may be quite contradictory, and each party has ministers who will put their beliefs before the coalition agreement reached with the others;
8. Coalitions often enjoy a large majority in parliament, making the minority voters feel ostracised and disenfranchised – exactly the same claim proponents of proportional representation make in the UK;
9. The mere existence of coalition governments entices voters to vote even more for fringe parties, resulting in a further fragmentation of the political landscape.

Not a good idea.

Alongside the nanny state we have a burgeoning 'nanny economy" - fuelled by the compensation culture and increasing costs for the consumer and taxpayer

By Lee Rotherham

This week the political roadshow is motoring forwards on the economy. In this, it will be preceded by both the metaphorical and very real juggernaut of the national debt, though it’s far from certain if any of the candidates will become roadkill as a result.

But there is more at play than the capability of future governments to balance the books or simply to count straight.

Since first becoming involved in excavating the spending realities underlying the Bumper Books of Government Waste, I’ve kept half an eye on how some of the major themes emerging from that research have developed – and not just the strange material such as what happened to Berlusconi’s Downing Street gold. It was therefore a pleasant sight to find the Sunday Telegraph recently covering what forms, along with your standard red tape, a not insignificant cause of economic drag – the country’s steadily emerging compensation culture.

The Sunday Telegraph’s article focused purely on payouts to tourists visiting sites, but provides a very timely reminder of a problem that has expanded beyond reason or common sense. Of course it’s fair enough to indemnify cases where shoddy workmanship or downright negligence have caused injuries. But there comes a point where you cannot legislate for the inattentiveness and yes, stupidity of the individual.

To add to the nanny state we have been developing a nanny economy, driven not even by the civil courts themselves but by the very fear of them, shepherded by no-win no-fee ambulance chasing. This of course means higher prices for the consumer - someone has to pay the insurance companies - and higher costs to the taxpayer when councils, for instance, are concerned.

Coalitions

I've said we can win an outright majority, I've predicted that we will win an outright majority, and I stick by that.  But since I'm not standing anywhere this time, I don't need to exercise the politician's resistance to answering hypothetical questions.  So, let's daydream, entering an improbable parallel world, just for a moment, in which there were no-overall-control in Parliament.  What then?

Pay cheques, canvassers, and newspaper articles

One interesting feature about the timing of the election is that we get paid this weekend, and the higher earners amongst us (essentially, anyone earning above £100,000, and especially those earning above £150,000) are about to receive what may in many cases be a nasty shock.  The Telegraph announced cheerfully/tearfully this morning that those on £175,000 a year will be £18,000 a year worse off.  Given that that £18,000 is off post-tax income - a 16% reduction in take-home pay - that's a mighty steep drop to absorb quickly.

Now few voters will have much direct sympathy, perhaps, with those on such high salaries.  But some of those people have friends, some of them may have time available to go canvassing this weekend, and quite a few of them will be journalists.  I suspect there may be a few notably unsympathetic articles about Brown and Darling in the press this coming Sunday and Monday...

What Whitehall really thinks about Britain

There was - understandably - a lot of consternation over the weekend about the leaked Foreign Office minutes suggesting that the Pope might open an abortion clinic or bless a gay marriage during his visit later this year.

More interesting, though, was the above chart which was leaked at the same time. Titled "Papal Visit: Stakeholders", it is a graphic representation of the various groups, institutions and individuals who might have a view on the Pope's visit. The various "stakeholders" are divided along two axes: Influential - Not Influential and Positive - Negative.

The reason this is particularly interesting is that while it was intended apparently to help the Government prepare their PR effort, it is extremely revealing as to how senior civil servants view Britain. For a start, the Influence axis betrays the bizarre set of priorities held in parts of Whitehall and Westminster.

The Positive - Negative axis gives juicier insights into the civil service's concerns about either the PR impact or even the religious views of various prominent national figures. (I should say at this point that the negative end of this axis appears to be a combination of people who simply don't like the Pope, such as Richard Dawkins, people who oppose the visit, such as many taxpayers, and people who are Catholic but pose a PR problem, such as Wayne Rooney. I leave it to readers to decided which criteria people have been judged by.)

Here are a few of the revelations the chart contains:

• Jim Murphy, the Minister who is personally in charge of the Pope's visit is listed as "Negative". Is this because he personally dislikes the whole idea or do his civil servants simply think he is a PR liability?
  
• Taxpayers are listed as one of the least influential groups in the eyes of Whitehall. The chart shows a clear bias to listing anyone who has a negative view of the trip as automatically "Not Influential", but even taking that into account the contempt in which taxpayers are held is clear - only TfL, Visit Britain and the City of London are rated worse.
  
• Susan Boyle is, in the view of these officials, more influential than the Queen, Government Ministers of the Archbishop of Westminster - head of the Catholic Church in Britain.
  
• The highly educated staff of the Foreign Office cannot spell the word "athletes" correctly.
  
• Despite the huge child abuse scandal, "children", "schools" and the Department of Children, Schools and Families are expected to have a positive view and/or positive PR impact on the Pope's visit.
  
• "Government Ministers", while expected to deliver a positive spin for the visit, are listed as "not influential".
  
• "Diversity Groups" and "LGBT Groups", whom the Government normally likes to boast that it has given a voice to, placed at the top of the agenda and works with closely, are magically "not influential" when it comes to this visit.

This is just one brief glimpse of how Whitehall views Britain - how interesting it would be to see these charts for all the other major events that are held.

I am I, Gordon Brown, the Lord of La Mancha

In his speech this morning, Gordon Brown declared that "we can fight the unbeatable foe. Right the unrightable wrong. Reach the unreachable star."  These noble sentiments are of course lyrics from a song in the show "Man of La Mancha".  This stars Don Quixote, a deluded and absurdly old-fashioned wealthy old man, permitted to tour the country (accompanied by his faithful squire Sancho Panza) seeing dragons where there are none, tilting at windmills, whilst those that should be looking after him squabble over his inheritance.

Don Quixote is convinced that everyone is in continuous danger of attack by the evil Enchanter.  He encounters a young, promiscuous character called Aldonza, whom he attempts to woo, swearing eternal loyalty.  The romantic nature of his delusions, and the sheer ease with which he can be pitied, charm those that do not know him, but his own family task Dr Carrasco with shattering his delusions so that he can be returned home and the matter of his inheritance settled.  I could go on, but suffice it to say, all does not turn out well for our hero.

I presume readers will agree that when Gordon Brown volunteers to identify himself with Don Quixote, there really is nothing left for satirists to do...

Re: The FT publishes the spending cuts that the political parties will not

There are a few things to note about the analysis in the Financial Times - looking at fiscal policy options after the election - that Tim has written about this morning:

• They have left off two Conservative pledges on welfare spending: the faster increase in the state pension age and stopping tax credit payments to relatively well off families.  The former will have been left off because it won't happen during the next Parliament and the saving will be offset by moves to restore the link between the state pension and earnings.  The latter presumably because the specific Conservative proposals - to stop payments to families making more than £50,000 - do not save a lot of money.
• It is difficult to imagine how a new government could cut prisoner numbers by 25 per cent.  It is hard to see why such an extreme measure has been included, but that those working on the analysis at the FT like the idea of the justice system using custodial sentences a lot less.  Of course, any list of cuts will reflect the wider views of its authors to a certain extent, but it is important to remember that the FT's list is not simply a bald statement of fiscal facts.
• To look at the same issue from another direction, they haven't included anything on the rapidly growing international development budget.  Of course, there is a wide range of views in this area and reasonable people have argued for the rapid rises in spending planned and others for abolishing the budget entirely.  The moderate option we have proposed is to freeze the budget for a year in 2010-11, which would save £862 million, should that really be off limits?
• As the authors note, the list of potential cuts does not include lots of smaller - but still very significant - savings.  All of the items in their list are over £1 billion.  The list of cuts we developed with the Institute of Directors and updated for the book How to Cut Public Spending (and Still Win an Election) came to a bigger total - £50 billion instead of £37.4 billion - but many of the measures included saved less than £1 billion.
• Their list of cuts still suffers from the same omission that exists in all of the parties' plans.  They aren't doing enough to outline programmes and organisations that could be abolished.  That is important as getting rid of entire lines in the budget means bigger cuts in running costs.  In one of the research notes released to accompany the book we set out a range of organisations that could be scrapped outright.  The biggest target should be the Regional Development Agencies.  The Conservatives only need to shift their rhetoric on the RDAs slightly for their policy to count as a cut and save nearly £1.8 billion.

In 2009 Britain had the biggest deficit of any country in Europe not making serious cuts already - Ireland - or being bailed out and quite possible heading for default - Greece.  In the longer term, projections from researchers at the Bank for International Settlements suggestion we are in the worst fiscal position of any major developed economy.

Between the £50 billion in potential cuts that we've outlined, the £37.4 billion that the FT have set out and the billions in spending that haven't been covered - often because it is impossible to cost potential cuts with the scant data available - it should be possible to find sufficient cuts in spending.  We just have to hope that, after the election, the new Government isn't paralysed by the threat of new elections and fresh militancy from the unions to such an extent they don't get the job done.

The FT publishes the spending cuts that the political parties will not

1. A 5% cut in public sector pay;
2. Freezing benefits for a year; means-testing child benefit;
3. Abolishing winter fuel payments and free television licences;
4. Reducing prison numbers by a quarter;
5. Axing the two planned aircraft carriers; withdrawing free bus passes for pensioners;
6. Delaying Crossrail for three years;
7. Halving roads maintenance;
8. Stopping school building;
9. Halving the spend on teaching assistants and NHS dentistry; and
10. Cutting funding to Scotland and Wales by 10%.

That list of ten eye-watering economies does not appear in any party manifesto but in today's FT which has completed an analysis of the kind of cuts necessary to bring order to Britain's public finances. Perhaps in Thursday's final debate we'll get more candour from the leaders on this biggest of issues facing Britain.

You can choose your own cuts with the FT's interactive 'deficit buster' tool.

Martin Ackroyd: Demanding that political parties work together is like asking a meat eater and vegetarian to both eat meat and vegetarian food on alternate days

By Martin Ackroyd

Nick Clegg keeps talking about how great it would be if we all worked together... and in principle, this sounds great.

However, the reason why Prime Minister’s Question Time is so fraught, isn’t because we all agree, but because we disagree.  If we agreed, we’d be in the same party!

• The Lib Dems want to scrap the pound and join the euro, Labour aren’t far behind them, but the Conservatives want to keep the pound.
• We want a cap on immigration, Labour and the Lib Dems are happy for immigration to increase... the Lib Dems actually want to let illegal immigrants stay if they can avoid being caught for a few years.
• The Lib Dems and Labour want to impose a jobs tax; we do not, and neither do the bosses of many of Britain’s big companies such as M&S and Sainsbury’s...
• Labour and the Conservatives think nuclear power is a good thing, the Lib Dems want to build no more nuclear power stations.
• We don’t think it’s right that Scottish MPs should vote on matters only affecting England, the Lib Dems and Labour think this is fine.
• Labour and the Conservatives want to keep Trident, the Lib Dems want to scrap it.

Asking us all to work together, is like saying to a vegetarian and a meat eater, be reasonable... eat meat one day, and be a vegetarian the next day.

Or to use a footballing analogy, perhaps a Manchester United and a Liverpool supporter should compromise and support Arsenal?

Nick Clegg may be a nice chap, but he doesn’t have the power to agree anything.  The Lib Dem constitution is set up so that, before any coalition could be formed, there has to be the agreement of the majority of Lib Dem MPs and the thirty or so members of the party’s Federal Executive (and if not with 75% approval of those two constituencies, via a special conference and then a ballot of all members, if the special conference didn’t give two-thirds backing).

Is this the best way to form a Government?  After the British people have voted, should thirty unelected Lib Dem supporters be able to decide whether Labour or the Conservatives hold power?  Should they be able to decide who is Prime Minister?  Is this what Nick calls “the new politics”?!

However, it may be even more bizarre than that.  People assume that if there is a hung parliament, the Lib Dems may hold the balance of power.  This may or may not be the case.

What if the Scottish Nationalists and Plaid Cymru hold the balance?  They say they would demand that more of UK taxpayers’ money is directed to Scotland or Wales. The same may go for MPs from Northern Ireland.

So the idea of everybody trying to agree sounds great.  But the true implication of creating a government that could be brought down at any moment by one of the smaller parties is quite frightening.  This is why a hung parliament is a bad thing.