I think they are trying not to make the mistake they made before of saying "Go forth and prepare for government", before an election which failed to get the hung parliament they expected. I believe UKIP will be standing, that is not listened in the opinion polls I expect that will make seats harder to win for the conservatives.Originally Posted by Saracen
(\__/) All I wanted in the end was world domination and a whole lot of money to spend. - NMA
(='.*=)
(")_(*)
"Its like the captain of the titanic, been made the captain of the lifeboats."
I laughed.
throw new ArgumentException (String, String, Exception)
I did say "mortal men"...
I did say "mortal men"...
Oh I wish I had the powers to fling thunderbolts. If I did, Brown would need an earthed stainless steel umbrella to poke his nose out of the door. Sadly, mortal (and thunderboltless) is I.
Hey, did I just invent a new word?
announced a crackdown on tax evasion through new agreements with the governments of Dominica, Grenada and Belize
Cameron's speech was a very good bit of electioneering. Very well written and very well presented.
My favourite was "this Prime Minister won't win any medals for bravery, but at least most of his cabinet will be mentioned in Dispatches".
However, regardless of pre-scripted jokes, and there were a couple of good if predictable ones, it was the meat of it that really matters. On that, and despite Cameron's obvious ability for a slick presentation, I had to agree with most of what he said - despite Darling trying to present a gloss, it's a budget for very hard times and as the party in power for 13 years, they simply cannot avoid the blame for the hard times.
It's like this. Some of our current mess is down to the international crisis, but a LOT was there before that. It's the result of years of domestic tax and spending policy, and is firmly down to Brown. So Darling can try to put a gloss on it, but that Titanic quote is actually remarkably apt.
And Nick Robinson drive it home in his comments on BBC2 after the budget. Darling said they're going to be "doing more" on this and that, but the figures in a budget show a cut of £100m in this area and £400m in that area.
So .... how can you be "doing more" and cutting budgets at the same time? There are ,as far as I can see, only two possible answers. One is "you're not". In which case the "doing more" is electioneering hype given the lie by the budget figures. The other is that you will deliver more front-line improvements by efficiency savings and take some of those savings as cuts while ploughing the rest back into increasing services. And if that is the case, then it can only be the case because the way services have been provided in recent years has been disastrously inefficient.
And if these service provisions have been the result of such woefully inefficient spending that they can cut billions off of budgets and still provide worthwhile service increases, then who was the incompetent muppet responsible for that grossly inefficient spending in the first place?
Oh yeah.
Over the years, we;'ve heard Brown boast and boast and boast about how they've spent "billions" on this, billions on that, and billions on the other. If he was running a competition for spending the most, he'd be a runaway winner, But he forgot that the object of the exercise wasn't to spend, but to provide services, and to do so at sensible cost. You do not measure service provision by how much you spend but by how much service improves, and whether you spend wisely, and get value for money.
So now Labour are in the awkward position of having to cut spending to get the deficit down, while pretending that somehow it's about improving service and increasing provision.
Oh, and a lot of emphasis was put on the deficit. It's worth remembering that the deficit is merely how much national debt is increasing by. Even if they cut the deficit to zero, and it's going to be four years before even Labours plans will merely halve it, the actual debt is still going up every year, and that debt has to be paid for.
There are figures that show that if you ranked government departmental spending (such as Health, Education, Defence etc) merely paying the interest on the existing debt would rank about fourth, and is heading for third. A very large part of our national output every year is going on merely paying off the debt that brown has racked up, and that's without including financing his off-balance sheet stuff like PFI. And if interest rates go up, that drain on resources will rocket. As it is, we're already paying about 1% more on rates than other triple-A countries like Germany, and that may well get worse if the markets don't like plans to reduce the deficit.
All told, from what I can make of it so far (and I'm still reading the budget report), this report was exactly the "largely do nothing" budget I was expecting, dressed up in electioneering clothes designed to provide tonight's news soundbites.
Gunbuster (24-03-2010),SeriousSam (24-03-2010)
At this point does it really matter what this budget says? it might as well be Unicorns for everyone. Either because Darling won't be here to enact it or that the electorate just can't stomach what needs to be done to fix the situation.
Some other considerations is that it's for new buyers only so not available for everyone.
Credit is still tight, so I don't think we'll see a huge jump in demand, but hopefully should stimulate the housing market a bit more, like when the stamp duty limit was raised.
For people buying soon I still think this will save people some cash.
...unless you were looking at something over 1M
(Not atypical or ridiculously high end in central London)
Solution: don't live in Central London
I know, easy for me to say, but we could actually save so much money if people would get their heads round the fact that actually, in the modern, digital world, most business doesn't need doing from London, and you can pay your staff significantly less while allowing them a significantly better quality of life, by moving your offices to, say... ooh, how about Manchester
They are moving civil service stuff out of London - that's where a lot of the savings are coming from.
I didn't expect much from this given the election is just round the corner. It was an hour or so long, could have probably done the whole thing in 5 minutes if he hadn't constantly compared to previous years.
Stamp duty won't do anything.
Banks are not lending and businesses are also cautious about borrowing too.
NI going up doesn't help.
@scaryjim: To be fair, I only came to London from all the way up North in the last two years to wrap up my studying (University themselves don't really move much). Plus, some jobs are really centralised in London, so until busineses move I've no choice but to follow
But I am so surprised how expensive even 'student' accommodation can be. I was given a quote of £1100-1300 for all-inc studios in places I would most like to be (and you have to be a student to stay in those places)
Perhaps this is part of the plan, but this is going to make property investment on the upper end less attractive. Rental yield is really low for luxurious apartments, and this is just going to make it worse. Okay, with a base rate of 0.5% just about any thing is better than leaving cash in a bank, but I rather suspect that there are places elsewhere in the world where you'll get better returns, without that much more risk.
Good, they should of done it sooner.
There are a few issues with the notion that this is where savings are coming from, though.
First, you can't do it in a hurry. It's going to take years. You can't just expect thousands of staff to uproot their families and move. Many, maybe most, simply won't do it. Secondly, you may well save money in the future, but if costs a faffing fortune to do it.So in the immediate future, far from reducing costs it increases them. Partly, this is for acquiring new premises and the set-up costs. Partly it's for recruiting new staff in the new location. Partly it's because those new staff have a learning curve to master before they even reach the efficiency of the existing staff. Partly it's because there's going to be an overlap period where you're running both operations. And partly it's because the redundancy payouts for the staff you don't move costs you a fortune.
Any notion that moving operations to far-flung locations is going to help pay down the deficit or contribute to cuts over a short term, like three or four years is, in my view, absolutely fatuous. No, it's a con. It's a move to maker it seem like they are doing something to achieve the "efficiency savings" that we all know is going to come down to job cuts, once the election is safely over and they can do what needs to be done without having to worry about electoral backlash for five more years or so.
Oh, and if it's going to save such a lot of money and is such a good idea, well, Labour have been in power for 13 years, so what's taken them so flaming long to get around to it? Or have they just been content to waste billions of taxpayer's pounds by sitting on their fat, complacent political backsides, contemplating their navels and working out how to raise more of our money to spend than getting value for what they already spend?
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