http://blogs.independent.co.uk| Blogs from the Independent newspaper - news, views and features from the world's most free-thinking newspaper| Fri, 24 May 2013 13:51:55 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2| en hourly 1 http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/24/why-the-treasury-thinks-the-deficit-rose-last-year/ http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/24/why-the-treasury-thinks-the-deficit-rose-last-year/#comments Fri, 24 May 2013 11:49:57 +0000 Ben Chu http://blogs.independent.co.uk/?p=35167 The Chancellor only managed to get the deficit to fall between 2011/12 and 2012/13 by ordering departments to underspend their budgets before the end of the financial year and other desperate measures such as delaying subscription payments to the World Bank. Yet now it appears that all those efforts were all in vain.]]> http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/24/why-the-treasury-thinks-the-deficit-rose-last-year/feed/ 0 http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/24/men-of-secrets-ii/ http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/24/men-of-secrets-ii/#comments Fri, 24 May 2013 09:51:05 +0000 John Rentoul http://blogs.independent.co.uk/?p=35163 The video and transcript of the full interview with Robin Butler, Cabinet Secretary 1988-98, in the 10 Downing Street history series is now on the Mile End Group cabinet secretaries website. Interviewed by Anthony Seldon, Lord Butler reflects on the difference between the Margaret Thatcher he had known as her principal private secretary in the middle phase [...]]]> http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/24/men-of-secrets-ii/feed/ 0 http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/24/men-of-secrets/ http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/24/men-of-secrets/#comments Fri, 24 May 2013 06:06:13 +0000 John Rentoul http://blogs.independent.co.uk/?p=35152 All living cabinet secretaries, including the present one, Sir Jeremy Heywood, have been interviewed for the History section of the 10 Downing Street website, a joint project of No 10 and the Mile End Group. Highlights videos of two interviews, with Robert Armstrong and Robin Butler, have gone up on the Downing Street website, and the [...]]]> http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/24/men-of-secrets/feed/ 1 http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/23/the-dawn-of-time/ http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/23/the-dawn-of-time/#comments Thu, 23 May 2013 17:58:12 +0000 John Rentoul http://blogs.independent.co.uk/?p=35146 My esteemed colleague Jack Riley, head of digital at the Independent and Evening Standard, is leaving to join AOL/Huffington Post. I wish him well, and want to pay tribute to him for the success of The Independent on the web, but also, more selfishly, for helping me into the digital world. I started blogging in 2007, [...]]]> http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/23/the-dawn-of-time/feed/ 0 http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/22/the-fiction-of-gatsby/ http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/22/the-fiction-of-gatsby/#comments Wed, 22 May 2013 14:48:07 +0000 John Rentoul http://blogs.independent.co.uk/?p=35104 “In Britain and America, inequality is now back to Gatsby-esque levels.” So wrote Aditya Chakrabortty, Guardian economics leader-writer, yesterday. It is just not true. I don’t know as much about America, but it certainly isn’t true about Britain. It is a popular myth of anti-Labour propaganda: that the gap between rich and poor expanded greatly under Tony [...]]]> http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/22/the-fiction-of-gatsby/feed/ 4 http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/21/why-build-more-houses-is-not-the-answer/ http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/21/why-build-more-houses-is-not-the-answer/#comments Tue, 21 May 2013 21:18:03 +0000 John Rentoul http://blogs.independent.co.uk/?p=35085 Fine post by Hopi Sen yesterday that deserves a wider audience. Almost every hard political problem today can be solved, too many people seem to think, by "build more houses".]]> http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/21/why-build-more-houses-is-not-the-answer/feed/ 17 http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/20/cameron-on-gay-marriage-should-make-us-proud/ http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/20/cameron-on-gay-marriage-should-make-us-proud/#comments Mon, 20 May 2013 08:16:46 +0000 John Rentoul http://blogs.independent.co.uk/?p=35031 Apologies to Benedict Brogan, deputy editor of The Daily Telegraph, whose excellent morning briefing describes the fuss over gay marriage as “avoidable”. Avoidable how? Then we had Tim Montgomerie and Mary Ann Sieghart on the Today programme saying that David Cameron should have come out fighting for gay marriage. “That’s what Tony Blair would have done,” [...]]]> http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/20/cameron-on-gay-marriage-should-make-us-proud/feed/ 22 http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/19/what-focus-groups-say-about-ed-miliband/ http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/19/what-focus-groups-say-about-ed-miliband/#comments Sun, 19 May 2013 19:29:30 +0000 John Rentoul http://blogs.independent.co.uk/?p=35009 If people vote in the general election on 7 May 2015 the way our ComRes opinion poll today suggests, Labour would win a majority of 74 seats. But they probably won’t. So how will public opinion change over the next two years? Here are two schools of thought: Dan Hodges, my fellow zombie Blairite, has devised [...]]]> http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/19/what-focus-groups-say-about-ed-miliband/feed/ 6 http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/19/camerons-possibly-winning-position/ http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/19/camerons-possibly-winning-position/#comments Sun, 19 May 2013 13:57:18 +0000 John Rentoul http://blogs.independent.co.uk/?p=34987 My article in The Independent on Sunday today is part of a continuing series explaining why popular attitudes towards Europe might not be such a problem for David Cameron as might be assumed. Since May 2010, when the general election coincided with the start of the euro crisis, most opinion polls, including our ComRes today, have [...]]]> http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/19/camerons-possibly-winning-position/feed/ 3 http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/18/clearing-the-battlefield/ http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/18/clearing-the-battlefield/#comments Sat, 18 May 2013 20:54:48 +0000 John Rentoul http://blogs.independent.co.uk/?p=35000 Matthew d’Ancona says David Cameron’s talk is of “clearing the battlefield”. Which is a nice way of saying, “everything looks like a shambles now, but just imagine what it will be like the week after next when all this bad stuff is out of the way”. D’Ancona reports what I had heard, which is that No [...]]]> http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/18/clearing-the-battlefield/feed/ 5 http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/18/ukip-surges-to-record-high/ http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/18/ukip-surges-to-record-high/#comments Sat, 18 May 2013 18:27:26 +0000 John Rentoul http://blogs.independent.co.uk/?p=34996 The UK Independence Party is on 19 per cent, the highest share recorded by any pollster, in a ComRes poll for tomorrow's The Independent on Sunday, shared with the Sunday Mirror.]]> http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/18/ukip-surges-to-record-high/feed/ 33 http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/18/poll-alert-31/ http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/18/poll-alert-31/#comments Sat, 18 May 2013 09:27:50 +0000 John Rentoul http://blogs.independent.co.uk/?p=34995 We have a ComRes opinion poll in The Independent on Sunday tomorrow, shared with the Sunday Mirror. The results will cause a bit of a stir. As well as asking people how they would vote, and who would be the best prime minister, we asked if people agreed or disagreed with the following: If a referendum were [...]]]> http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/18/poll-alert-31/feed/ 0