Yes, this is how the New Labour propaganda machine is trying to spin the news and its readily taken up the “useful idiot” Tory haters on blogs and in the Media. However, the truth is the Tories are offering an alternative to prolonged unmanageable debt, initiatives to help small businesses, initiatives to help savers and the low paid, initiatives to stimulate business lending, they want to simplify the present complicated, bureaucratic tax system that penalises and disincentives the poorest, they attacked the waste of £12.5bn, temporary VAT rate cut and have been proven right. Their message is proper and effective regulation, not more regulation. They have supported the Govt.s actions where they believe they are acting in the country’s best interest, e.g. the Bank bail out. They have correctly exposed the mishandling of the economy that has undoubtedly worsened the recession and the housing crisis. They have exposed Brown’s ineffective management of the FSA.

Grabbing headlines is not easy for the Tories. They are competing with the biggest propaganda machine in Europe, a Media that mostly ranges from the hostile to the cynical and one that contains too many unprincipled hacks prepared to drink milk from New Labour’s tits.

“There are some great ideas for reform and building a new economy out there”

Such as?

“This country cannot export anything or create any new jobs unless it invests in new industries. So Osborne can’t legitimately complain about our Chinese fuelled consumption boom unless he plans to invest in infrastructure here himself… or at least push some industries. The last few decades have shown that in fact manufacturing in contracting and going overseas. How does he plan to counteract that?”

By supporting and encouraging small businesses, as opposed to Labour who have removed corporation tax relief for the smallest (often start-up) businesses.

You are correct to highlight the decline of manufacturing which has declined at a rate as bad as the time of major restructuring under Thatcher. So despite, their rhetoric on the loss of our industrial employment under the Tories, they have done nothing. Osbourne does not criticise the consumption of Chinese goods, he merely describes what happens. He does not expand on the point, as he should do. This allows you to submit your own interpretation.

I agree the Tories should set an agenda about fuelling our industries and show some national self-interest (and tell the EU to FO).

Put the fire out.

Brown land is a gloriously happy place which , like the world of Harry Potter , lives alongside the real world .Here no-one is ever fired , no-one goes out of business , pensions are final salary and recruitment continues right now faster than ever . You enter this state within a state by reading the Guardian and answering one of their scented invitations you to liase with community interface committees .
There ,sipping nectarand slipping your un roughened palm languorously into the ambrosial streams of taxes your life is an earthly paradise lacking only a good supply of tractable virgins
Wonka made such a world for his umpa lumpas . Oddly enough Wonka is almost exactly how I habitually refer to Gordon Brown.

Thats your problem

( Anyone know how to stop a smoke alarm going off all night ?)

I agree with that. I think we should spend more time on that this year trying to think of where this should go. If the political establishment can’t do it… why can’t we?

Orator – the infrastructure goes to the heart of Osborne’s fumble.

This country cannot export anything or create any new jobs unless it invests in new industries. So Osborne can’t legitimately complain about our Chinese fuelled consumption boom unless he plans to invest in infrastructure here himself… or at least push some industries. The last few decades have shown that in fact manufacturing in contracting and going overseas. How does he plan to counteract that?

See here – http://theorator2009.blogspot.com/2009/01/what-i-dont-get-about-browns-stimulus.html

Of course if one is only quoting from the NuLabour Talking Points Memo then one will ignore this fact.

For example, few would have realised that bringing Ken Clarke back to shadow Peter Mandelson, (because of Dave’s worries about how Gideon, the wallpaper heir, is playing with the voter) was in fact George’s own brilliant idea all along.

Must be true: it is in tomorrow’s Telegraph.

In unrelated news, I seem to have a very itchy chin.

(More childishness on this here)
http://www.nextleft.org/2009/01/boy-george-ken-clarke-and-jimmy-hill.html

The problem has been the political establishment has become so ideologically homogenous (economically speaking) that visions of a future economy have been excluded from mainstream political debate for so long (Indeed what passes as political debate between Labour and the Conservatives has been a joke for years, if not decades). There are some great ideas for reform and building a new economy out there, but they have tended to be advocated by people or groups outside the three parties, and indeed have largely come to the field of economic policy via routes like environmental science. But the main Political Parties have been a major barrier towards good policy for so long that I don’t hold much hope of policy becoming sane, ambitious and successful for a while.

The fact is they can’t do anything anyway, and as the Opposition they are within their rights to criticise Government strategy if they believe it to be detrimental to the economy

I think you’ve missed the point of the line of attack. It’s pointing out that the Tories don’t appear to have any real policies other than say anything to grab headlines attacking the government. They’re not providing a coherent alternative. Their slip in the polls can be argued demonstrates that point amply.

I’m just pointing out that right now Osborne makes about as much sense on our economy as an Australian koala bear. And he looks like one too.

I think that’s quite literally one of the funniest things I’ve seen you write!

Or you might not have run up debts when you should have been paying them down , and you should not have built in colossal Public sector drag we could not afford unless it never rained .
No more boom and bust .Genius . 40% over an economic cycle , what cycle is that brownie boy the thousand years cycle ? I dread to think what his under pants look like when they get out of the wash , “Poot it orn the fafty yar cycle wooman “ That is if any of them are not yet on fire .

What a clown , I ‘m starting to enjoy him actually , oo did you hear he made 100,000 jobs for us , yes he did , he made them in the little jobbies factory at the bottom of his garden with the fairies . That’s lovely Gordon what will you make with your magic wand now ? Tell the children …….

I wonder why it is I often feel a distinct sense of ennui whenever I consider contemporary British politics…

I still think we should be happy if the Tories are prepared to question the market, no matter how incoherantly, because there’s still the slight chance that Labour might get confused and try to outflank the Tories on the Left. At the very least its a stick to beat Brown with.

I haven’t. I’m just pointing out that right now Osborne makes about as much sense on our economy as an Australian koala bear. And he looks like one too.

By the way, that orange-sucking bit was a football reference, not a snide comment on autoerotic asphyxiation and I apologise if I have offended any Tories reading this, especially now they have rejected free-market fundamentalism.

What with the new-found commitment to civil rights I’m just glad the Labour Party are bringing in ID cards to remind me who I am.

Funny, I don’t remember Gordon Brown getting on a plane and flying to America every Monday morning for the last 5 years, and then running Leman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Aig etc etc. I don’t remember him working for the American credit agency’s which decided how much should be leant to sub prime borrowers.

I also don’t remember him then flying back to the UK, and sitting in the boardrooms of Northern Rock, HBOS, and Bradford and Bingley and destroying their business.

But then this is classic businessman for you. Fuck up their own industries, and then blame everybody else for their own idiocy and Greed. The MS media seem to have airbrushed out of history the fact that Cameron was calling for more Banking deregulation about 2 years ago, so British banks would become more like American ones.

See ‘New Labour’ as led by Blair (1994-2007) and Brown (2007 – ?) – with a bit of help from Mandelson – but then again they aren’t ‘the Left’.

But you are right about Osborne…he is not a strong performer.

Brown would be shitting his pants if they broguth back Clarke…but they won’t, will they?

He’s young, can at least string some kind of sentence together and has a full head of hair: he’s perfectly telegenic compared to say, William Hague – and is nowhere near as other-worldly-seeming as, say, Oliver Letwin – blaming the media isn’t really an explanation (after all, look at Cameron).

And you jump to the conclusions that (a) the only alternative was a planned economy (b) I’m in favour of a Soviet-style economic system based on what, exactly?

Well dagnabbit if only the Soviet Union Zimbabwe and many more had not hidden the benefits of a planned economy so skilfully we might have avoided that wrong turn.
Well done Red Pesto I have finally found someone the creationists can call nuts .

( More celery in your ear ?)

Jeebus, yes – but I have low expectations of New Labour minsters’ ability to do a forensic evisceration of the Opposition (or maybe I just miss Robin Cook).

I agree with what you say, I think that George Osborne would not make a great Chancellor and it seems that David Cameron might be starting to think the same thing.

My point wasn’t designed to defend the Tories in this economic debacle, I just get increasingly annoyed with the soundbites that pepper politics, such as the ‘do nothing’ approach, that demonstrate political posturing and nothing of substance.

[laughs - I must have missed that bit, though I think asking about Deripaska allows Osborne off the hook]

True, the job of Her Majesty’s Opposition is to, well, oppose…but it’s hard to see how that’s going to work in the context of the failure of the dominant model of free-market economics for the last 30 years…when you’re the party of free market economics (including the begetters of the dominant model of the last 30m years). I mean, does he believe in government borrowing or not? Moreover:

First, we have to help the innocent victims of Labour’s recession – the pensioners and the savers. They did the right thing during the age of irresponsibility and now their incomes are being unfairly decimated as the Bank of England has been forced to cut interest rates. A further rate cut later this week may be necessary, but it will add to their misery.

Anybody who became a pensioner over the last 10 years had already ‘done the right thing’ before Labour even came to power. Presumably, in order to keep savers and pensioners happy, interests rates would have to be high enough to offer a good rate of return/incentive to save. Nice if you’ve got a big lump sum (you get a tax-free bonus, which you probably won’t spend), pretty useless for everyone else – that’s assuming, of course, that Osborne will somehow be able to ‘make’ the MPC set interest rates at that kind of level.

I increasingly get the feeling that Osborne got lucky when he panicked the government over inheritance tax, and he’s been trying for the same strategy ever since – but now the economic context is different (and Brown gives enough of an impression of A Man With A Plan, which isn’t saying much considering he bought into the same economic model), neither it or he is working in any coherent form (as his interview on Newsnight yesterday demonstrated…again).