“As with cake, so with rail fares”

Pedants, eh? What a nuisance. One or two of them have pointed out the flawed assumptions of a question asked by YouGov, which I cited in my article for The Independent today.

By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Wednesday, 22 August 2012 at 1:59 pm

The Golden Rule Revisited

Anyhow, my purpose in trying to get to grips with deficit reduction plans was to strengthen my defences against my admirable colleague, Steve Richards, who in his column in The Independent today urges Ed Miliband and Ed Balls to reject my advice:
They must not fall into the trap of apologising for the level of spending [...]

By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Tuesday, 29 March 2011 at 9:59 pm

Order to Go at Ed’s Diner

The Daily Politics sent me to Ed’s Diner for today’s programme to explain why I still don’t think Ed Miliband is the right leader for the Labour Party.

Which preceded a studio discussion with Chuka Umunna, Miliband’s parliamentary private secretary, and Charles Falconer, left over from a previous discussion about Labour’s attempt to split the AV [...]

By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Monday, 17 January 2011 at 4:29 pm

A Question to Which the Answer was No

I saw only a small part of Ed Miliband’s interview with Andrew Marr this morning. Enough to know that he looked and sounded more confident than he did in yesterday’s disappointing speech.
Now I have had time to read the transcript, and can confirm my assumption in the previous post that, while the style might have [...]

By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Sunday, 16 January 2011 at 8:13 pm

Commerce and the Common Good

Ed Miliband won good notices for his interview with Andrew Marr this morning, which help to offset the poor reviews of his speech to the Fabian Society yesterday.
Much of this is to do with style, which is important (good today, not so good yesterday), but my column for The Independent on Sunday is about the [...]

By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Sunday, 16 January 2011 at 11:22 am

Ed Miliband Ties Himself to the Wrong Gordon Brown

Esteemed Colleague Steve Richards has entered the debate between Gordon Brown Mk I and Gordon Brown Mk II.
GBI, you will remember, was the stickler for Prudence who, when the government raised £22bn from the sale of 3G licences in 2000 which now allow people to do clever things with smart phones and iPads, used it to [...]

By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Tuesday, 11 January 2011 at 10:18 am

The Three (or Four) Wasted Years

By the way, did you notice that line in David Cameron’s speech yesterday?
When we are done with these cuts, spending on public services will actually still be at the same level that it was in 2006.
Is that all? What, you might ask, have the last four years all been about? Well, I’ll tell you. Tony [...]

By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Thursday, 7 October 2010 at 9:58 pm

The New Managerialism

Sean O’Grady, our economics editor, has wise advice for the Labour leadership candidates in The Independent on Sunday today:
First, admit that the last government – “for all the right reasons” – ramped up public spending too much and left the public finances too weak to face the crisis. Unforeseen and unprecedented as the crisis was, [...]

By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Sunday, 22 August 2010 at 11:37 am

What Would Keynes Do?

Totally must-read article in The Independent by Professor Robert Skidelsky (right), the ex-SDP, ex-Tory peer and biographer of John Maynard Keynes, on what “the master” would have made of the coalition Budget. Here’s a key part, analysing the Treasury’’s claim that what the recession did was “reveal that the public sector was living beyond its means”:
This [...]

By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Friday, 25 June 2010 at 11:21 am

Why Labour should welcome the Budget

In the days after the general election, a former Labour minister said to me that it was “the perfectly wrong result”. By which he meant that it could not have been designed better by the gods to frustrate Labour’s hopes. Whereas a Lib-Con arrangement would deliver a solid parliamentary majority, any attempt at a Labour-led [...]

By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Tuesday, 22 June 2010 at 9:57 am