good morning. I gave that opinion last week, so I’m not going to write about the government’s debate plan to reduce welfare spending today.
I am not going to write about reductions in government’s further education spending. Because I want to write about it in the context of their welfare plans.
And I’m not going to write about the Treasury, which aims to be the government’s flagship GB energy. Because they don’t know enough about energy policies to dull it, to make it a kind of good idea.
Instead, today I’m going to write about what links all three of these.
You have to give something
Last week’s Robert Elimsley column helped me identify where the recent sense of deja vu came from. In a strange moment in early March 2020, it was clear that Boris Johnson’s still relatively new government would completely blow the course off the challenge of managing Covid-19.
There are some important differences. As Robert writes, one is that Kiel’s ancestors and his team look at the scale of what they face. But the whole politics “remains in half the world of both what we know and what we don’t know.” I think the most important decision of the Prime Minister in Priority was to declare last month that he was willing to put the British Ukrainian forces on the ground. Everything else flows from then on.
This is not an objective that can be met by increasing defensive spending to 2.5% of GDP and creating an ambiguous plan to reach 3% at some point in the future. (Yes, output targets are stupid in many ways. But the rule of thumb is that if you don’t spend as much as you did during the Cold War, we won’t get close to the right thing.)
Don’t worry, this doesn’t make episode 4,232 of “Stephen’s tax pledge must go.” Because, in my view, the government’s tax pledge is not the only one that has to bend.
Workers’ commitment to defense spending means that consumption needs to be redirected from elsewhere, whether from states or households. Given that, can fixing the UK’s crisis-stricken social care system actually remain a secondary or tertiary priority? Or is it a big sinking of government spending, household income, time and energy needed to shoot the list?
If the plan is actually to find the necessary defensive expenditures within government fiscal rules through daily spending, does the unscientific “everything that is not in a sector with a ring fence need to be obtained” approach work without interfering with the manifesto pledge? And if some promises are not met as a result of the new UK reality, shouldn’t the government decide which they want to throw with the public earlier than they have a “minimal resistance” approach in which the pledge of their manifesto is quietly dropped?
Try this now
I went to see the punch on Friday at Young Vick (a Christmas present from my partner) and found it to be as powerful as Sarah Heming saw the premiere at Nottingham Playhouse. I can’t recommend it enough. There are still a few tickets left, so try grabbing one if possible.
Today’s top stories
“10 Years of Innovation” | The government plans to impose performance targets on regulators, promote innovation and speed up the deployment of innovative technologies such as delivery drones, self-driving vehicles and laboratory-grown proteins.
Grade Disability | Emails obtained by FT Show were brought to the agency’s head of attention after one estimate sample size, the issue of the National Bureau of Statistics’ Labor Force Survey Survey was brought to the agency’s attention.
Whitehall Shake Up | New reforms announced by the government will make it easier to force a shortage of civil servants as part of a plan that “fundamentally restructures how the nation delivers to the people.”
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