Peter Smith: The Comprehensive Spending Review - and why government should target the targets

Peter Smith is a lawyer who works in central London. He has previously worked in Parliament for Edward Leigh MP.

Next week, George Osborne will announce the result of the triennial Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR). CSRs are the big brother to Departmental Spending Reviews, where ministries consider their goals over the short- and middle-term and match slices of the funding pie to policies which – they hope – will be instruments to achieve desired outcomes.

In financial terms, DSRs aren’t truly zero-sum. Although interest groups within any particular ministry will lobby for their pet projects, there is always a little give around the whole pie. In the MoD, for instance, the media hype up tensions between the Army, Navy and Air Force, but when the chips are down the whole lot can demand cash off the Treasury.

In contrast, the pie can’t really grow for the CSR. The Treasury has no bigger hand to feed it, as it raises money direct from us, the tax payer, and from the bond market. Neither is particularly forgiving when Mr Osborne asks for more moolah, especially during a recession.

The Chancellor will this year sit in a Star Chamber to hear Secretaries of State make their pitches for cash. To an extent he is balancing apples with pears and bananas, aircraft carriers with housing benefit and bobbies on the beat. The quid pro quo for bearing the risk and getting the blend wrong, is that One Horse Guards can set departmental public sector agreements (PSAs) - targets to you and me.

Peter Smith: Two books, one conclusion. Immigration has been and is too high.

Peter Smith is a lawyer who works in central London. He has previously worked in Parliament for Edward Leigh MP.

The first of April saw two new books launched on the perennial problem of large-scale, permanent migration into Britain. Despite the inauspicious publication date, their authors are no fools. They demonstrate that the gap between intellectual Left and Right has now narrowed substantially on the question of immigration.

Ed West’s The Diversity Illusion sets out, blow-by-blow and in a racy journalistic style, the social and cultural impact of foreign settlement. West, who writes for a bevy of titles including The Spectator and Daily Telegraph, seeks to explain, as the subtitles put it, what we got wrong about immigration and how to set it right.

From the Left, David Goodhart, the former editor of liberal Prospect magazine and now head of Demos, examines in The British Dream “the tension between solidarity and diversity in rich, liberal societies”. His conclusion is much the same as West’s, but delivered with the additional force of an apostate condemning his religion.

“[U]nlike most members of my political tribe of north London liberals I have come to believe that public opinion is broadly right about the immigration story. Britain has had too much of it, too quickly, especially in recent years, and much of it, especially for the least well off, has not produced self-evidence economic benefit.”

The migration both authors consider fits broadly into two historical trends. From the end of the Second World War until the mid-1990s, about four million ethnic minority Britons either moved or were born here to migrant parents. Most came from former colonies and particularly the Caribbean, India, Pakistan or Africa.

Peter Smith: The next step in equality --- Protecting the freedom to differ

Peter Smith is a lawyer who works in central London. He has previously worked in Parliament, for Edward Leigh MP.

The move to bar direct and indirect forms of discrimination over the past 50 years has been, to a great degree, welcome progress. Without doubt it is perniciously unfair to discriminate against people on grounds of their race, and the same is largely true of discrimination because of sex, age or disability (although valid qualifications exist, such as the current ban on women in the infantry, which may yet change).

What has become apparent, however, is that when it comes to sexual orientation, many people consider homosexual acts to be morally wrong. I accept this is a blunt statement for many reasons, but the essence of this view stems from a wider understanding of the magnificence of heterosexual acts in the promises of lifelong marriage, complementarity between the sexes, and the creation and nurturing of new human life. For many people, such views stem from orthodox religious beliefs, and they may be mediated through appeals to historical tradition, reason, nature, and experience.

Yet how is the dynamic of equality represented in same-sex marriage to fare when it clashes with mainstream Christian, Muslim and Jewish views on human sexuality? Where does the equality agenda go now?