Spending Review 2010: £83 Billion Sounds a Lot – But These Cuts Are Nowhere Near Enough
THE TELEGRAPH: The Government is making a weak start in its attempt to deal with the deficit, says Simon Heffer.

There will be something new, we must be sure, to be announced today in the Chancellor’s review of public spending, even though so much of it has been leaked already and, of course, the defence review was announced yesterday. We are meant to be awed by the £83 billion reduction in the deficit planned over the next four years, but should doubt this attempt (which will probably be reasonably successful in the short term) to grab the favourable attentions of the markets will be enough.

Before George Osborne took office I had grave reservations about his understanding of economics and, more to the point, his understanding of why exactly we are in this mess. Nothing he has said since May, and nothing leaked in the last few days, has altered this view. Maybe we shall be pleasantly surprised by his genius today, but we should not be banking on it.

Rather, we should have reservations about what we have been told is proposed. The reduction of £83 billion sounds like a lot of money, but it still represents a £92 billion increase in public spending by 2014-15. It will leave a state that is still too large, that is too much of a drain on the productive areas of the economy, and that is undertaking functions that could be done more efficiently and cheaply if transferred to the private sector. It will also leave a level of debt that will impoverish us steadily as interest rates rise, as one day they must. More should have been cut, and there should have been no shame in having an ideological ambition to take the state out of people’s lives as far as possible. After all, it is part of the Liberal Democrat intellectual heritage to do that, isn’t it? Continue reading and comment >>> Simon Heffer | Tuesday, October 19, 2010

The End of the Road for Barack Obama?
THE TELEGRAPH: Barack Obama seems unable to face up to America's problems, writes Simon Heffer in New York.

The once mighty Detroit seems on the verge of being abandoned. Photo: The Telegraph
It is a universal political truth that administrations do not begin to fragment when things are going well: it only happens when they go badly, and those who think they know better begin to attack those who manifestly do not. The descent of Barack Obama's regime, characterised now by factionalism in the Democratic Party and talk of his being set to emulate Jimmy Carter as a one-term president, has been swift and precipitate. It was just 16 months ago that weeping men and women celebrated his victory over John McCain in the American presidential election. If they weep now, a year and six weeks into his rule, it is for different reasons.

Despite the efforts of some sections of opinion to talk the place up, America is mired in unhappiness, all the worse for the height from which Obamania has fallen. The economy remains troublesome. There is growth – a good last quarter suggested an annual rate of as high as six per cent, but that figure is probably not reliable – and the latest unemployment figures, last Friday, showed a levelling off. Yet 15 million Americans, or 9.7 per cent of the workforce, have no job. Many millions more are reduced to working part-time. Whole areas of the country, notably in the north and on the eastern seaboard, are industrial wastelands. The once mighty motor city of Detroit appears slowly to be being abandoned, becoming a Jurassic Park of the mid-20th century; unemployment among black people in Mr Obama's own city of Chicago is estimated at between 20 and 25 per cent. One senior black politician – a Democrat and a supporter of the President – told me of the wrath in his community that a black president appeared to be unable to solve the economic problem among his own people. Cities in the east such as Newark and Baltimore now have drug-dealing as their principal commercial activity: The Wire is only just fictional.

Last Thursday the House of Representatives passed a jobs Bill, costing $15 billion, which would give tax breaks to firms hiring new staff and, through state sponsorship of construction projects, create thousands of jobs too. The Senate is trying to approve a Bill that would provide a further $150 billion of tax incentives to employers. Yet there is a sense of desperation in the Administration, a sense that nothing can be as efficacious at the moment as a sticking plaster. Edward B Montgomery, deputy labour secretary in the Clinton administration, now spends his time on day trips to decaying towns that used to have a car industry, not so much advising them on how to do something else as facilitating those communities' access to federal funds. For a land without a welfare state, America starts to do an effective impersonation of a country with one. This massive state spending gives rise to accusations by Republicans, and people too angry even to be Republicans, that America is now controlled by "Leftists" and being turned into a socialist state. "Obama's big problem," a senior Democrat told me, "is that four times as many people watch Fox News as watch CNN." >>> Simon Heffer | Monday, March 08, 2010

Simon Heffer: President Barack Obama: Perhaps He Can't Fix It...

THE TELEGRAPH: President Obama has been in power for just over 50 days, but already critics believe his plans to save America from disaster are doomed

Photo by Reuters courtesy of The Telegraph
Even in the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, New York knows how to throw a party. For most of yesterday hundreds of thousands of people made a sea of green that paraded up Fifth Avenue to mark St Patrick’s Day. Tens of thousands lined the street to watch them. The all-day party, fuelled by imports of Guinness and whiskey, seemed the more intensely engaged upon as an escape from omnipresent financial gloom.

Away from the party, the mood in America’s cultural and business capital is more firmly anchored in stark reality, and quite different from the euphoria that pervaded it when I was last here, on election day. President Obama still enjoys the popularity that comes with not being George Bush, especially in a city top-heavy with Democrats. But his initial response to the global calamity that he found on entering the Oval Office has not inspired popularity’s more sober elder brother, confidence. Large constituencies, notably business, are voicing their scepticism openly. The President’s much-vaunted $787 billion stimulus package is being widely interpreted, even by some of those (such as Warren Buffett, America’s second-richest man) who openly supported Mr Obama for the presidency, as a serious failure. And we are only just past the first 50 days.

Mr Obama is lucky that his Republican opponents in Congress are disorganised, incoherent and without ideas of their own. The White House branded Rush Limbaugh, the populist talk radio host, leader of the opposition, following an assault Limbaugh had made on the President’s neo-socialist policies. This remark was designed not just to humiliate elected Republicans for their impotence, but also to attempt to terrify the American public at the thought of a man widely seen as a demagogue and an extremist leading a main political movement. It should worry Mr Obama that while the former part of the strategy has hit home, the latter hasn’t. >>> Simon Heffer | Wednesday, March 18, 2009

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Simon Heffer: Gordon Brown's Reckless Ruse to Make Money
THE TELEGRAPH: Gordon Brown won't stop borrowing because he can't stop spending, says Simon Heffer.

Should anyone have doubted the truth of a well-worn theme of this column – that politicians today, as a general rule, haven't a clue what they are doing – events this week should have put you right. Gordon Brown, Saviour of the World, left an imploding Britain for a preposterous circus trip to Washington, where he met the new Messiah, Barack Obama, whose own radical plans to stimulate the world economy have prompted the Dow Jones share index to crash through the floor, taking the rest of the world's bourses with it. And then scarcely has Mr Brown's special BA jet deposited him in the Royal Suite at Heathrow (delusions of grandeur? What delusions?) than Britain finally has its long-awaited Zimbabwe moment, and starts debauching the currency. How the printing of £150 billion to pump "liquidity" into the market differs from a bunch of East End villains printing forged fivers in a lock-up under some railway arches is something we should all contemplate.

I shall deal with Mr Obama's delinquencies soon. For the moment, trying to come to terms with the damage Mr Brown continues to inflict on our country should occupy us more than enough. Rather like the late Emperor Hirohito of Japan, he seems determined to go to his grave without the slightest recognition that he has committed any atrocities, and might have cause to abase himself before the British people. I suspect the British people will force an act of abasement when they get to the polling booths some time in the next 15 months – though don't bank on it – but even then Mr Brown would be at a loss to understand what he has done wrong. >>> Simon Heffer | Saturday, March 7, 2009

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Simon Heffer: It's the Europhiles Versus Reality, and Reality Is Going to Win
THE TELEGRAPH: Milton Friedman was right to predict that the euro might not survive a recession, notes Simon Heffer.

During the current crisis we have several times heard invoked the wisdom of Milton Friedman about the unfeasibility of the euro as a currency surviving a recession. In an interview not long before his death three years ago, Friedman said: "The euro is going to be a big source of problems, not a source of help. The euro has no precedent. To the best of my knowledge, there has never been a monetary union, putting out a fiat currency, composed of independent states. There have been unions based on gold or silver, but not on fiat money – money tempted to inflate – put out by politically independent entities."

It is what lies below the surface of this observation that is putting not just the euro, but the entire confection of the European Union, under such intense pressure. Any recession would bring into play tensions between idealism and nationalism: the desire by those who pilot the European project to maintain the confection for as long as possible and as intact as possible, that it might come out on the other side of this economic horror bloodied but unbowed; and the inevitable identification of hundreds of millions who stand outside the fantasy world of the political class with their own nation state, their own nationals and their own national interest. Without a degree of coercion beyond what even this undemocratic, Sovietised swindle has attempted in the recent past, the national interest will in the end prevail. >>> Simon Heffer | Wednesday, March 4, 2009

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Simon Heffer: David Cameron's 'Moral' Capitalism Is No Better Than Socialism
THE TELEGRAPH: The Tory leader has revealed his true colours – he misunderstands the market, argues Simon Heffer.

Because of the disaster Gordon Brown has made of our economy, ensuring that we (according to the International Monetary Fund) have the worst recession of any developed country, it may now be difficult for him to win an election. Therefore interest turns to what the Conservative Party might do were it in power. Let us mark one thing: that a Conservative victory some time in the next 16 months will have nothing to do with the alternative that party offers to the electorate, other than the specific alternative of its not being the Labour Party.

In case you think I am merely being beastly to Mr Cameron again, please do me one courtesy. Go to the internet and type "Cameron moral capitalism" into Google. Within moments you will read the text of a speech the putative next prime minister gave at Davos last week to an audience of people who, unlike him, must make serious and informed decisions about the use of capital every day.

I understate my case to say that it is one of the most shallow speeches by a supposedly serious politician that I have ever read. It should also terrify anyone who might feel he or she should vote Conservative at the next election, because it promises that what we should get would in most respects be little better than what we have.

My first thought was the quizzical one about Mr Cameron's speaking on this subject in the first place. In pure terms it is a tautology. Capitalism is deeply moral and hardly needs the adjective to qualify it. It is moral because it is about the exercise of free will between buyers and sellers: and few things can be more moral than allowing someone to be free.

Capitalism is about the link between effort and reward. It is about the creation of wealth according to the quality of one's enterprise. Without wealth creation there is no scope for the taxation that enables the functions society deems moral: a welfare state, the defence of the realm, the maintenance of law and order. So anybody who feels he needs to make a speech about capitalism while qualifying it in this way at once raises the suspicion that he is being in some degree specious. >>> Simon Heffer | Tuesday, February 3, 2009

THE INDEPENDENT: The Postman Who Wants to Deliver the End of Capitalism

He has the cheerful, inoffensive look of the ageing star of a boy-band. He wants to destroy the institutions of the French state but cultivates, brilliantly, the image of a concerned, plain-talking, working-class boy-next-door. He has become the second most popular political figure in France, after President Nicolas Sarkozy.

The baby-faced postman and Trotskyist idol of the young, Olivier Besancenot, 34, will launch this weekend something which has been, until now, a contradiction in terms: a mass-appeal, far-left party. The Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire (LCR) is dead. Long live the Nouveau Parti Anti-Capitaliste (NPA).

The party, which plans to build a non-capitalist state and is looking, first of all, for a catchier name, will be founded during a three-day conference starting on Friday at Saint Denis, just north of Paris. With the world's financial system in crisis and with bankers universally loathed, with the working class restless and the French parties of the centre-left rudderless and divided, there could hardly be a better time to launch a radical new movement of the left.

M. Besancenot's old party, despite its workerist rhetoric, was mostly middle-aged and middle class. The new party to be born this weekend will be younger and will include some working-class, trade union activists but will be dominated by the "lost" generations of French middle-class youth who reject middle-class ideas – extreme ecologists, feminists and anti-globalists, people who are fiercely in favour of illegal immigrants or fiercely opposed to advertising.

The NPA already claims almost 9,000 members. This is three times as many as the outgoing LCR, the most powerful of the many French Trotskyist groups, which will "dissolve itself" tomorrow to provide the organisational structure and the leader of the new party.

Above all, the leader. The NPA – or whatever it finally calls itself – is unashamedly a vehicle for the personality and communication skills of the LCR's "spokesman" M. Besancenot. Le petit facteur (the little postman) with the clean-cut looks and jargon-free language was the political revelation of the 2002 and 2007 presidential elections. >>> By John Lichfield in Paris | Wednesday, February 4, 2009

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Harriet Harman: If You're Middle Class, You Can't Work Here
Photo of Harriet Harman courtesy of The Telegraph
THE TELEGRAPH: Simon Heffer wonders if Miss Harman is modelling herself on Stalin with her latest attempts to remove Britain's class divide.

With all the zeal of one born into upper-middle-class comfort – she is, after all, the niece of an earl – Harriet Harman is setting out to remove Britain's class divide . She has done her bit by marrying a prominent trade unionist; though the gilt went off that particular piece of gingerbread when she contrived to send one of her children to a school miles from her home to get a decent education.

However comical it may seem, Miss Harman thinks she has a chance of being the next leader of the Labour Party. Those who want to accept this increasingly poisoned chalice know they must grease up to Labour's somewhat neglected core vote of disadvantaged working-class people and the hard Left. Miss Harman does it by saying she will ensure that working-class people have the same advantages as middle-class ones. >>> By Simon Heffer | Friday, January 16, 2009

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Gordon Brown's Behaviour Is Simply Immoral
THE TELEGRAPH: We are still recovering from his inane observations of earlier this year on the usefulness of sharia in Britain and the rabble he leads as Primate of All England could not be a clearer advertisement of his talents. But we must give him this: what he said about the immorality of the Prime Minister spending (or, more accurately, attempting to spend) this country out of a recession was absolutely right.

It is time we stopped suspending disbelief and took account of two things. First, if the current economic miseries are a global problem, why are things so much worse here than anywhere else? Why is sterling taking a more or less unique hit on the world's currency markets? The answer is simple: it is that the fundamentals of our economy are so much worse than almost everyone else's, and that is because of the mess Mr Brown has made of running it, in one capacity or another, for the last 12 years.

Then we need to suspend disbelief about how we best get out of this mess. Why, when Mr Brown created it, should he be trusted to extricate us from it? Isn't that a little like suggesting al-Qaeda rebuild the World Trade Center? Isn't it quite clear that the best thing for Britain is to have these charlatans removed from power as swiftly as possible, even if it means replacing them with the Disney characters of the Tory front bench? >>> By Simon Heffer | Friday, December 19, 2008

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