George Osborne to deliver budget to MPs

As George Osborne prepares for his second budget speech, join Andrew Sparrow for all today’s news and analysis and minute-by-minute coverage of PMQs, the chancellor’s statement, the Commons debate and reaction 12.25pm: There has been speculation about Gordon Brown speaking the budget debate. According to Greg Hands, the Tory MP, Brown is not in the chamber now. If he does want to speak, it almost certainly won’t be today. The budget debate goes on for several days and speeches on the first day (apart from the chancellor’s) never attract much attention. 12.22pm: Cameron has said the will be a “whole series of measures” in the budget to help promote growth. We’ve got to make sure, at a time when frankly any government would have to be making public sector cuts, we’ve got to make sure the private sector grows. 12.14pm: My colleague Matthew Taylor has sent me this about the Downing Street protest. The group of around 20 women arrived at around 11.15am carrying placards in the shape of red briefcases reading ‘Block the bankers’ budget’. The protesters said that minutes later groups of three women lay in front of each of the four vehicle exits of Downing Street, and locked themselves together inside arm tubes, which makes it difficult for police to remove them quickly. The action comes ahead of an anti-cuts demonstration on Saturday which is expected to attract hundreds of thousands of people to London to protest against the government’s cuts to public services. Sara Ayech, one of the women lying outside the main gates of Downing Street said: “We are stopping George Osborne from delivering his bankers’ budget because this budget has been written for the benefit of big business and the banking sector, not for ordinary people. The banks destroyed the economy and in return received the bail out and bonuses. But the government is choosing to make everyone else pay the price through unemployment, the decimation of the Welfare State and the NHS. “The Welfare State was fought for and won by ordinary people only 64 years ago. It’s now under attack by the coalition government and we are here to defend it and show that people will resist the injustice of these cuts.” The group say the cuts will have a devastating impact on the lives of women, citing examples such as the closure of women’s refuges, cuts to child, disability, carers and housing benefits, the roll back of maternity rights and that women are thought to make up 80 per cent of the expected job losses from the public sector. A police source confirmed “five people” were attempting to block the exit to Downing Street, adding no arrests had been made. And here’s a picture. 12.10pm: Ed Miliband asks why Cameron is removing the mobility component from disability living allowance from care home residents. Cameron says: “The short answer is, we’re not.” Miliband says he has to tell Cameron what’s in his own legislation. It’s in clause 83 of the welfare bill. Cameron says the money is wrapped up into the new personal independence payment. Miliband says there is a clause in the bill taking the mobility component away. Some 22 disability organisations are saying the government should scrap this plan. Cameron says Labour said it wanted to support reform of DLA. Miliband should congratulate the government on listening to opinion across the Commons. 12.09pm: The BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg says the Downing Street protest only lasted a few seconds before the protesters were dragged away. 12.07pm: Miliband says it is important to have a formal process involving the Arab countries. And, on Colonel Gaddafi, is he a target? Cameron says all targets must be absolutely in line with UNSCR 1973. But he is not going to give “a running commentary” on targets. That’s Miliband’s first set of questions over. 12.06pm: Miliband asks about the role of Arab states in the operation. Cameron says the Arab League met again yesterday. It backed the UN resolution 1973. Qatar has contribued aircraft. Countries like Kuwait and Jordan will make logistic contributions. Support in the Arab world for saving lives in Libya “is very strong”. 12.04pm: At PMQs Ed Miliband is asking his first question. He pays tribute to the work of the armed forces in Libya. Can Cameron update MPs on the situation. Cameron says Miliband’s speech in the Monday debate was “extremely powerful”. A no-fly zone is in force over Libya. Gaddafi forces have had to retreat from Benghazi. But “clearly this is early stages.” A lot more needs to be done. 12.01pm: A group of protesters have been trying to block Downing Street to stop George Osborne getting to the Commons to deliver his budget. They have been tweeting at budgetblockers. 11.59am: Norman Lamont has taken his seat in the upper gallery in the Commons to watch PMQs and the budget. 11.50am: Prime minister’s questions is starting soon. Total Politics has got a feature on PMQs in its latest issues and it features interviews with David Cameron and Ed Miliband about the experience. Amazingly, Miliband says he does not get nervous in advance. I spend most of the morning preparing each Wednesday. I don’t get nervous, particularly. Going up on Newsnight and Question Time during the Labour leadership election was the hardest thing I’ve done – certainly more difficult and nerve-wracking than doing PMQs. If this is true, it’s remarkable. Maybe he would perform better if he did get nervous. 11.46am: John McFall isn’t the only person to suggest that George Osborne would like to be a combination of Nigel Lawson and Michael Heseltine. (See 10.21am.) Nick Robinson has written a whole blog on this theme. But I can’t tell whether McFall pinched Robinson’s idea, or Robinson pinched McFall’s idea, or whether it was just a happy coincidence. 11.35am: Nick Robinson came out with a pithy piece of media analysis on the BBC just now. Referring to the tax allowance increase (see 9.37am), he said that if they gave that story out yesterday, “that’s because they’ve got a better one today”. He thinks Osborne will want to make a headline-grabbing announcement about fuel duty. That’s what Michael Fallon was hinting at earlier. (See 11.08am.) 11.26am: My colleague Graeme Wearden from the business desk has sent me an update on what is happening in the City in this morning. He says that sterling has already lost ground today, while shares have risen ahead of the Budget speech. The pound has dropped by over 0.3 cents this morning to $1.629, after the latest Bank of England minutes showed that the MPC was split 6-3 on whether to raise interest rates this month. There had been speculation of a 5-4 split, with another hawk voting for a rate hike. The FTSE 100 has just nudged above 5800 points, up 37.7 points, with mining stocks leading the way (driven by China’s strong demand for raw materials). Elsewhere, Irish government bond yields have hit record highs — which Osborne could cite in support for his attack on the deficit. There’s also a good chance that Portugal’s government will fail to pass its austerity measures – triggering another Eurozone bailout? Sainsbury’s, though, have given Labour some ammunition – it has blamed “government spending cuts” for hitting consumer confidence, in a rather disappointing trading update. 11.17am: Here’s a budget reading list. On the budget • The House of Commons Library’s Background to the 2011 Budget briefing (pdf). This is probably the best factual guide to what’s likely to be in the announcement. It’s 41-pages long and it will be on my desk all afternoon. On George Osborne • George Parker’s profile of Osborne in the Financial Times magazine (subscription). • Tim Montgomerie’s condensed version of the FT piece on ConservativeHome. • Paul Goodman’s essay on Osborne from ConservativeHome last year. 11.13am: My colleague Damian Carrington has sent me a note about the environmental measures we’re expecting in the budget. Another blow is looking likely to the scale and ambition of the Green Investment Bank , I am told, which will not be allowed to borrow until the national debt has fallen below a set level. The GIB is the great green hope of those who want to see the UK grow out of the recession by investing huge sums in clean and sustainable infrastructure such as renewable energy. George Osborne has already pledged £1bn for the bank but Ernst and Young, and others, say £ 350bn is needed by 2025 . So the bank needs to borrow, a loathsome idea to the all-controlling Treasury, which also hates the idea of adding notional billions to the deficit. As we reported on Friday, it looks like borrowing powers will be delayed till 2015 , and now the newly revealed condition on the national debt level hampers the bank further. It’s bizarre that a development bank intended to stimulate growth can’t really start work until the economy has recovered. And remember, the GIB was a manifesto pledge by both coalition partners and was in the coalition agreement. Chris Huhne, energy and climate change secretary, reassured the Guardian last month that ” ducks quack, and banks borrow as well as lend.” As it stands, the GIB is looking like a lame duck. 11.08am: Michael Fallon, the Conservative party deputy chairman, has just told BBC News that he hopes George Osborne will deal with the “fuel duty escalator once and for all”. Labour’s March 2010 budget said that fuel duty would increase by 1p a litre in real terms every year between April 2011 and April 2014. That’s the escalator. Fallon seems to be giving a strong hint that it will be scrapped. 10.42am: You can read all today’s Guardian politics stories here. And all the politics stories filed yesterday, including some in today’s paper, are here. As for the rest of the papers, they’ve all got extensive budget coverage. Here are a couple of budget articles worth noting. • Gavyn Davies in the Financial Times (subscription) says George Osborne should stick to plan A. (As Paul Waugh points out on his blog, Davies used to be seen as a key Gordon Brown ally.) Has [plan A] worked? Last year, the budget deficit fell by over 1 per cent of GDP, and the economy expanded by 1.5 per cent, with unemployment basically stable. Not great, but it could have been worse. More recently, real GDP growth seems to have dipped sharply as consumers’ expenditure has weakened. Wednesday’s budget forecasts by the Office of Budget Responsibility will probably see some significant downgrades to growth projections in 2011. But business surveys have been stronger than the official economic data, and the Institute for Fiscal Studies says that the chances of a double-dip recession are no higher than 20 per cent. This is uncomfortably high, but in my judgment not high enough to jettison the government’s main strategy, with the loss of credibility which that would imply. • Pilita Clark in the Financial Times (subscription) says private jet operators are unhappy about reports that there will be a “Learjet levy” in the budget. It would be a great disappointment if, simply to score political points, the chancellor were to pick on a low-margin industry struggling to recover from a ­terrible recession,” said Pat­rick Margetson-Rushmore, chief executive of London Executive Aviation. This move is another stealth tax, but not a very good one,” he said, adding the sums it would raise would be fairly small and the people penalised would be operators and the wider business aviation industry, rather than private jet ­passengers. And here’s one non-budget article that’s particularly interesting. • David Aaronovitch in the Times (paywall) on “Blue Labour”, Aaronovitch’s term for the philosophy promoted by Maurice Glasman, the academic and social activist who has influenced Ed Miliband. On Radio 4 on Monday night Lord Glasman elaborated on the Merrie Englande theme. He wanted to see a redistribution of power between State and locality roughly akin to that which had existed in Elizabeth I’s time — a return to “the Tudor state model where there’s a conception of social order, a balance of interests, where there’s statecraft”. He felt that far from being the 1945 creation of the welfare state, Labour’s best period had been the out-of-power relationship between the party and the Labour movement, its trade unions and co-operatives. One of Lord Glasman’s attractions for the young Labour leader is in suggesting how the long-term decline in membership might be mitigated. If the party becomes a social action force, with grassroots activists (a bit like Hezbollah without the headbands and Jew-hatred), perhaps it can retain or improve its presence on the ground. The other thing that Blue Labour does is to link Labour to populism — to that strand that regrets rapid change. One aspect of this is a rhetorical defence of institutions that are paradoxically politically popular while being less used: libraries, post offices, pubs. Things, you might argue, that we like the idea of more than we are prepared to endure the reality. The tone of Blue Labour is regret at our fallen condition. Lord Glasman calls the crash a “culmination of a catastrophic period in English history”, in which “work has been degraded [and] where the pressure is on every individual to sell themselves to make ends meet”. 10.29am: Every council in England has frozen or cut council tax, Eric Pickles, the communities secretary, has announced. The government gave councils money to fund this and so the news doesn’t come as a great surprise, although councils could have chosen not to accept the money given to authorities that imposed a freeze. Some 378 councils have frozen the tax and 43 have reduced it. Full details of council tax levels, including authority-by-authority figures, are available on the Department for Communities website. 10.21am: According to PoliticsHome, Lord McFall – the former Labour chairman of the Commons Treasury committee – thinks Osborne will seek inspiration from Nigel Lawson and Michael Heseltine in today’s budget. This is what McFall told the BBC. I think he’ll try and model himself on two previous chancellors of the exchequer – one Nigel Lawson in coming forward with a number of tax cuts and two Michael Heseltine when he worked in Liverpool and introduced the enterprise zones. And that will fit in with his growth budget. It’s a good analysis, but rather spoilt by the fact that Heseltine was never chancellor. He was very grand – president of the Board for Trade, deputy prime minister and all that – but he never ran the Treasury. 10.13am: David Chaytor, the former Labour MP, has lost his appeal against the length of his 18-month sentence for fiddling his expenses. This is from the Press Association. The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Judge, and two other judges sitting at the Court of Appeal in London refused to reduce the 61-year-old’s 18-month prison term. Chaytor, who forged tenancy documents and invoices to falsely claim more than £22,000 of taxpayers’ money for rent and IT work from the Commons authorities, was jailed on January 7. It had been urged on his behalf that the appropriate sentence was one of 12 months. 10.04am: Ed Miliband has just told the BBC that today’s budget will be “a test of the government’s economic strategy”. As opposition leader, he has to reply to the chancellor’s budget statement. It is one of the hardest jobs in the parliamentary calendar, because the opposition get virtually no warning of what’s coming. But, on the plus side, it does not matter that much how you perform, because the media are only really interested in the budget and its contents. 9.37am: The Daily Mail splash today says that 25m workers will be offered tax cuts worth up to £320 a year. Sounds good. But the only new or newish fact seems to be the amount to which the income tax threshold will rise next year (newish, because Danny Alexander dropped a very strong hint in the Observer on Sunday) and this does not seem to justify the £320 figure. Never mind. At Next Left Sunder Katwala has written a post explaining how “the Great Osborno” has performed a conjuring trick with the figures. Increasing the threshold by £600 is worth a maximum of 20p in the pound, so clearly could not be worth more than £120 to any taxpayer. (The change is worth least to lower earners who do not use the full threshold. A part-time worker on £6000 a year will gain nothing at all, while today’s change is worth £1.25 a year to somebody earning £7500 a year, but it will be worth 100 times more to higher earners). But that’s “up to £320″ in Osborne money, if you reannounce last year’s announcement too, roll it in, and then strip out inflation on the assume voters would prefer to think about its nominal value than whether or not it makes any real difference to their living standards. Katwala also points out, correctly, that the “tax cut” rhetoric only applies to income tax. Overall, people will be paying more in tax this year because VAT has risen by so much. 9.29am: Unusually, today’s budget will include changes to the way Whitehall operates. As my colleague Polly Curtis reports, the “star chamber” that vets departmental spending plans is going to become permanent and the Treasury is going to impose new controls on ministers who do not control their budgets. 9.11am: For the record, here are the latest YouGov GB polling figures. Labour: 42% (up 12 points since the general election) Conservatives: 35% (down 2) Lib Dems: 9% (down 15) Labour lead: 7 points Government approval: -25 9.05am: Bob Crow, the RMT general secretary, has already sent out his verdict on the budget. All the signs are that this will be a class war budget with it’s roots deep in the playing fields of Eton, designed to shift the balance even further towards big-business and the wealthy elite who finance the Conservative party. We have no doubt that the spivs who created this crisis will be let off the hook and that it will be working people lined up to take a kicking as the old-school Tory Thatcherites twist the knife once again. 8.52am: Lord Lawson, Margaret Thatcher’s chancellor, was on the Today programme this morning. According to PoliticsHome, he said that Osborne should not try to achieve growth by micro-managing the economy. The danger is to think that you can press a button here and do a little special relief here and do a little bit there and so on and you somehow get growth. All you do is you complicate and mess up the tax system. 8.41am: If you’re looking for a list of measures that we’re expecting in today’s budget, my colleague Heather Stewart has a full round-up on our website. Jim Pickard has also got a good version on the FT’s Westminster blog. 8.21am: George Osborne is going to deliver a “steady-as-she-goes” budget, according to sources quoted in the Guardian this morning . That’s a Whitehall euphemism for “rather dull”. By comparison with some of the other budgets we’ve had in recent years – the 2009 budget tasked with digging Britain out of the worst financial crisis for a generation, Alistair Darling’s last budget before the election, the Tory chancellor’s first “emergency” budget – this will be relatively pedestrian. Osborne has taken the big economic decisions for the next four years and his room for manoeuvre is relatively slight. But, in my book, there’s no such thing as a boring budget. With growth stalling, and swingeing cuts threatening to dismantle vast chunks of the public sector, Osborne has to persuade Britain that the economy is safe in his hands. As the YouGov tracker polling figures (pdf) on the economy show, at the moment the picture is mixed. The proportion of people who think the government is managing the economy badly has been rising steadily over recent months, and since January it has been over 50%. But there are still more people blaming Labour for the cuts than blaming the coalition. We’ve got prime minister’s questions at 12pm, and then Osborne will present his budget at 12.30pm. Today’s Guardian has got a flavour of what he’s going to say . George Osborne will seek to appeal to Britain’s “squeezed middle” when he announces help for first-time buyers, motorists and 25 million income tax payers in a budget designed to tighten the Treasury’s grip over public spending. Despite disappointing news for the public finances, the chancellor is expected to say that he has scope to raise the income tax personal allowance by £600 next year, fund a £250m shared equity scheme for new homes and defer the above-inflation increase in petrol duty due next month. But Osborne will balance tax giveaways with fresh tax-raising measures, a crackdown on tax avoidance and “special measures” for overspending Whitehall departments in what sources insisted would be a “steady-as-she-goes” package. The chancellor will outline a range of measures – including a shake-up of planning laws, deregulation of employment laws affecting small businesses, and the long-awaited plans for a green investment bank as the coalition government seeks to shift the focus of the economy from deficit reduction to boosting growth. This morning I’ll be reporting on all the pre-budget speculation in the papers and on the web. I’ll be covering PMQs and the budget statement and then I’ll be blogging furiously through the afternoon, bringing you the best comment and analysis from Guardian colleagues and from elsewhere on the web as journalists, economists and everyone else go through the budget small print working out what it all means. Budget 2011 Budget Tax and spending Economic policy Economics Economic growth (GDP) Public finance Public sector cuts Family finances Petrol prices guardian.co.uk

Posted by on March 23, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.