‘ Their dismissal of the Libdems is odd…’

Not when you consider that the Lib Dems have gone down the route of pandering to populism by bashing the banks and general anti-City sentiment. Their ideas for financial regulation are also simplistic and populist. It is no surprise that the trade paper feels unable to endorse them. The endorsement of the Conservatives is hardly done with much enthusiasm and the FT should in the circumstances have abstained. In saying that, even although I disagree with them on many issues I will vote LD as the best of a bad bunch.

No, I’m with Sunny.

A consistent FT move would have been Lib Dem endorsement.

Shabby.

the odd whiff of anti-Americanism

WTF? Thank you, Gordon Brown, for injecting this silly bit of rhetoric into the campaign…

The Tories’ reflexive hostility to Europe

His team is young and for the most part untested

Talk about damning with faint praise…

Not when you consider that the Lib Dems have gone down the route of pandering to populism by bashing the banks and general anti-City sentiment.

Well, Cameron was doing the same in the third debate.

Yes, another former Labour supporter the The Economist has endorsed the Tories too. Perhaps surprising, because The Economist has been fairly hostile to the Tories on social issues (see their Broken Britain take down)

So it seems both papers believe that the deficit requires big spending cuts, and that neither Labour nor the Lib Dems would do the job. That, and the Labour have just been in power too long. Like others, I’m not really sure why they don’t endorse the Lib Dems, I don’t really have a view on how aggressive the Lib Dems would be, with respect to public spending cuts, which is what both papers claim to base their choice on.

I always wonder how important simply “backing the winning team” is for these papers.

(I left this comment at The Economist already but …) I don’t really buy the argument that “a 50% capital-gains tax, getting rid of higher-rate relief on pensions and a toff-bashing mansion tax” would make much of dent in the UK’s “entrepreneurial vim” … which appears to be the substance of their opposition to the Lib Dems (aside from The Economist’s baffling attachment to Trident).

I can see the arguments that higher capital gains taxes will slow down the rate of productivity growth (although I’m not convinced) but the other two points (pensions, mansions tax) I cannot understand.

The WSJ is beginning to make headroads into the FT readership and probably the Economist as well. Many business people are realising Brown’s stewardship of the economy is not as great as he tells everyone.

“I can see the arguments that higher capital gains taxes will slow down the rate of productivity growth (although I’m not convinced) but the other two points (pensions, mansions tax) I cannot understand.”

Agreed. There is no clear cause and effect chain for the latter two, it’s just an ideological reflex. CGT was until quite recently (2007?) taxed the same as income on 10/22/40%, which was the Nigel Lawson position. The Lib Dem plan is simply to return to that position, but in the meantime the top rate has gone up to 50%. So, although I can quite see how a chilling effect *might* operate, in practice we’re looking at CGT bills being a maximum of 25% higher than they would have been under Lawson (assuming no reliefs are used), and I’m not convinced that’s the game changer the Tory press claims (or at least, I’d need to see it demonstrated). A couple of years of an 18% CGT rate isn’t likely to have been long enough to have fundamentally changed the basis on which business investment works.

Alix,

A change from 18% might not change the basis on which investment works, but it may result in less investment. This is what is needed now.

Anyway, the main reason for the FT failure to back the Liberal Democrats is probably the fact that policy can be passed by conference, which considering the populist left-wing nature of many Liberal Democrat conference decisions is not going to give much confidence to those associated with the financial markets.

“A change from 18% might not change the basis on which investment works, but it may result in less investment.”

I think you miss my point slightly. I’m suggesting the short period for which the 18% rate has been in force probably isn’t long enough to have significantly altered the investment pattern, ie caused enough investors to absolutely rely for their continued operation on the rate remaining at 18%. Tax is just one factor in the risk/motivation calculation investors make – and investment boomed happily for years with a CGT top rate of 40%. If I’m right, returning to the income tax bands cannot effect a dramatic reverse – you can’t reverse something that hasn’t happened. What I agree *could* chill investment is the fact that the top rate is now 50% rather than 40%, but I would need to see the chilling effect demonstrated – with controls for all the other factors acting to constrain investment at the moment, of which there are, obviously, many.

From http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/may/05/election-diary-barney-ronay
Some might be surprised at the news that the Financial Times is backing David Cameron’s Conservative party after 23 years of going the other way, but only those outside the media-politico-Wikipedia-Google nexus at the heart of which the Diary proudly lurks. It seems that to the obvious advantages of Bullingdon club membership (nice waistcoat, own binliner to vomit in) we must now add influential friends on the pink paper. In this case new FT leader writer Jonathan Ford, who was head of the Bullingdon back in David Cameron’s time. Plus of course Jo Johnson, the FT’s associate editor and Tory parliamentary candidate for Orpington. It won’t be the FT that wins this election. Just quite a few of its friends.