Thought Id start this one going because its rather dead on this board at the moment and I suppose all my usual muckers are either at the Stella tennis event watching Dim Tim (lose again) or at Henly Regatta eating cucumber sandwiches (they wish,...NOT).

Anyway please feel free to just talk to yourself blast away and let it go on any company or subject you wish. Just wish Id thought of this one before.

cheers GF.

Labour will clear £86bn deficit by 2020, Ed Balls says

Shadow chancellor Ed Balls makes "binding fiscal commitment" if the Labour Party wins next year’s general election







Ed Balls, the shadow Chancellor, will unveil a 'binding fiscal commitment' to balance the books as soon as possible after 2015 and by May 2020 at the latest. Photo: BLOOMBERG




Watch the FA Cup 4th Round on BT Sport this weekend. Arsenal v Coventry City, from 7pm Friday. Stevenage v Everton, from 4.45pm Saturday and Sheffield Utd v Fulham, from 12pm Sunday.

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By Christopher Hope, Senior Political Correspondent

10:00PM GMT 24 Jan 2014







Labour has given a deadline on when it would eliminate Britain’s budget deficit.


Ed Balls will say in a speech on Saturday that the party will clear the £86  billion deficit in current budget spending by 2020 if it wins the next general election.


The shadow chancellor will make a “binding fiscal commitment” that a Labour government will balance the books as soon as possible after 2015 and by May 2020 at the latest.


It is the first time that Mr Balls has given a deadline on eliminating the deficit, which is forecast to be £51.4 billion at next year’s election.


George Osborne, the Chancellor, has committed by 2017-18 to eliminating the current account deficit, the shortfall between government tax revenue and spending on services. Labour is carrying out a “zero-based review of public spending” to root out waste and inefficiency “by examining every pound spent by government from the bottom up”.



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The party will hit its target by measures including removing the winter fuel allowance from pensioners who pay the higher rate of tax. It will also use proceeds from the sales of government stakes in Lloyds TSB and the Royal Bank of Scotland.

Mr Balls’s commitment will apply to current government spending and not capital spending, potentially allowing a Labour administration to borrow more.

Mr Balls will tell the Fabian Society: “The next Labour government will balance the books and deliver a surplus on the current budget and falling national debt in the next parliament.”

He will say that “where this government has failed, we will finish the job. We will abolish the discredited idea of rolling five-year targets and legislate for our tough fiscal rules within 12 months of the general election”.

He will add: “We will get the current budget into surplus as soon as possible in the next Parliament. How fast we can go will depend on the state of the economy and public finances we inherit.”

The commitment will allow the Conservatives to stoke fears ahead of the election that Labour wants to increase taxes and spending.

Mr Balls will also say that he has asked the Office for Budget Responsibility to “audit the costing of every individual spending and tax measure in Labour’s manifesto”. He called on Mr Osborne to agree to a similar commitment “to restore public trust in politics and improve the nature of the political debate”.

Mr Balls will say: “Without fiscal discipline and a credible commitment to eliminate the deficit, we cannot achieve the stability we need.”

The above is nearly as hilarious as watching Man Utd's penalty shootout against Sunderland on Tuesday night :O)

Yep remember that, since then Labour (Balls-up) have continued to promote their borrow, tax and spend policy, decrying G. O's austerity measures. Low and behold it appears G. O's pulling us (slowly) out of the s--t Labour left us in, so Balls-up has changed his mind and promises more austerity. Wouldn't trust him to run a raffle.
2517

Hays.

Stop being a prat.

The message left was in a similar vein as when Reggie Maudling left office.
=

It is called Black humour or even Gallows humour.

215 are you related to Georgie boy?

The present incumbent (a damp squib) of the purse has been in "power" for almost 4 years.

Look at his success.

Look at the GDP and other economic figures even if many think Cameron and his henchmen are falsifying them..

====================

Lots of success. We are growing faster than other developed countries. We were one of the first to come out of recession in the Eurozone and start growing. Osborne has done a brilliant job.

DC/GO are accident prone but surely the EM/EB combo take the trophy for plain stupidity

let's re-raise the top rate of tax to 50% says EB.... and we'll borrow lots more too

what a real dumbarse, for though that may appeal to a few on the left fringe, the reality of it is that raising top-rate tax will contribute very little more revenue and assuredly alienate an awful lot of potential voters

even more alienating will be the spectre of a labour gov't reverting once more to the party of more and more borrowing and ever higher taxes

==============

at this juncture, i'm sure fossy will start jumping up and down on his soapbox to try to convince us that this policy really is simply spiffing and should have been followed years ago

fossy may believe it, questionable in itself, but i doubt anyone else will

For those interested in photography, I just picked up a lens for my wife's camera.

It is a 70-300 Canon EF IS zoom. It has image stabilisation by using a gyro to spot the slightest movement in any plane. The onboard computer then moves one of the 15 internal internal lenses to realign the light path to hit the focal plane as intended. It is so good that it gives you three stops improvement in camera shake. You can hand hold it zoomed out at 300mm at 1/45 sec. Some people can manage to hand hold it at up to 1/2 sec at 300mm. Nice toy.

You can trust the torrid party after 4 years of broken promises and a broken fragmented country.

Suggest that Manuel should look at the various future independent projections as well as below.

The Nasty party is a party of PR agents playing to the the tunes of Bing Crosby.

I belonging to the past. Yesterday's men and women.


Current UK National Debt Numbers
Gross National Debt
FY 2013* £1.16 trillion
FY 2012* £1.04 trillion
FY 2011 £0.91 trillion
FY 2010 £0.76 trillion
FY 2009 £0.62 trillion
FY 2008 £0.53 trillion
Note:
* Future National Debt is estimated by HM Treasury.


-----------

These lefties don't like the fact that the Tories are (despite many mistakes) turning the UK around. No mention of Balls-up's U-turn from red1, given his propensity to highlight Tory U-turns.
2517

i wonder if i should actually squelch fossy, for i never read his posts any more as frankly you can't have a sensible discussion with him, and it's no earthly use posing him a question, as he never ever answers - i tried several times in the past

at least by squelching him, he doesn't take up unwanted space on the page

Interesting to look at the second chart where you can see the defecit increasing fast under Brown/Darling especially from 2008 to 2009 where it just shot up, more than doubling at 2.5 times. From then under Osborne it is shown to be falling year on year.

Georgie Boy is like the doctor who pronounces a patient is dead and orders the the body to be taken to the morgue.
At the morgue the mortician examines the body of the patient and notices that it is still breathing and returns it to the ward. With a note.

Dr Osborne examines the body, gives it a prod and shouts to his mates that he has performed a miracle and that the patient is now alive

He then looks a note, which reads, "in spite of your treatment, the patient is still alive, are you qualified to do your job?".

By Harry Wilson, and Tim Ross

8:30PM GMT 25 Jan 2014





Labour's plan to bring back the 50p top rate of income tax was ridiculed by the party’s own former City minister on Saturday night, who said that the economics behind it would not even get “a pass at GCSE”.


Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, promised on Saturday that Labour would reinstate the tax band for those earning more than £150,000, if the party won the next general election.


He insisted that increasing the rate from 45p to 50p — for “the richest one per cent” of earners — would make the tax system “fairer” and help cut the budget deficit.


However, Lord Myners, who served as City minister in Gordon Brown’s government, attacked the policy, saying it would take the party back to the days of “old Labour”.


“The economic logic behind his [Mr Balls’s] thinking would not get him a pass at GCSE economics,” he said. “By contrast to Ed Miliband’s recent interventions on energy and banking, which tried to reconcile competitive markets with Labour principles, Ed Balls takes us back to old Labour and the politics of envy.”


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His intervention came as business leaders, economists and the Conservatives warned that reinstating a 50p tax bracket would jeopardise the recovery, drive away investment and prove a “disaster” for the economy.

Katja Hall, the chief policy director at the CBI, said such a move could even lead to the exodus of the brightest and best individuals.

“We don’t believe that introducing a 50p income tax rate is the right way to raise the money because this puts talented people off coming to the UK to invest and create jobs,” she said.

“There is some concern that a higher top rate of tax could lead talented people to leave Britain. These people operate globally and can base themselves anywhere, so a 50p rate would not help their decision to be in the UK.”

Sir Stuart Rose, chairman of Ocado and former boss of Marks & Spencer, said the decision would “put at risk all the good work that has been done to put the economy back on track”.

Sir Ian Cheshire, the chief executive of Kingfisher, the home improvement giant which owns brands including B&Q and Screwfix, added: “Raising the rate is bad economics and sends an anti-business message that may undermine investment plans and the recovery.”

Mr Brown introduced the 50p top rate of income tax, which came into force in April 2010. In 2012, Treasury analysis found that it raised just £1 billion a year — a third of the amount expected.

The level of tax avoidance as high-earners dodged the increased rate was so great that HM Revenue & Customs predicted that reducing the levy by 5p would only cost the Exchequer about £100 million.

In April last year, the Coalition cut the top rate of tax to 45p, with George Osborne, the Chancellor, arguing that the 50p band had damaged the economy and raised “next to nothing”.

On Saturday, Mr Balls seized on new government figures which he claimed called the Treasury’s earlier analysis into question.

According to the most recent HMRC data, those earning more than £150,000 actually paid £9.5 billion more in tax than previously thought during the three years in which the 50p rate was in place. Treasury sources insisted that the change simply reflected the fact that there were more workers earning higher salaries over the period than previously thought. A similar rise would be seen in revenue generated by the Coalition’s 45p tax rate, the source suggested.

Sajid Javid, the Conservative Financial Secretary to the Treasury, said Mr Balls’s pledge showed that Labour politicians “have no long-term economic plan”.

He added: “Labour would put the recovery at risk, drive away investment and put our economic security at risk.

“That would put the financial security of hard-working people and their families at risk.”

Simon Walker, head of the Institute of Directors, accused Mr Balls of reviving the “Socialist” policies that damaged Britain’s economy in the past. He said: “It was, and remains, an envy-driven political gesture designed solely to drive a wedge between voters.”

The Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) said that the plans were “absurd” and would be a “disaster” for business and growth. It pointed out that those earning more than £150,000 already paid close to 30 per cent of all income tax and warned that the increase could “erode” the country’s tax base.

“The shadow chancellor need only look across the Channel to France to see the damage punitive levels of income tax can reap on the wider economy,” the IEA said.

Mr Balls set out his policy in a speech to Labour supporters at the Fabian Society in London. He promised that the party would run a budget surplus, cut the national debt and create a “fairer” tax system in which the richest paid more.

Mr Balls, the former chief adviser to Mr Brown, said that it was wrong for the Coalition to have cut the top rate.

“When the deficit is still high, when tough times are now set to last well into the next parliament, when for ordinary families their real incomes are falling and taxes have risen, it cannot be right for David Cameron and George Osborne to have chosen to give the richest people in the country a huge tax cut,” Mr Balls said. “That’s why for the next parliament the next Labour government will reverse this government’s top rate tax cut, so we can finish the job of getting the deficit down and do it fairly.”

If voters put Labour back in power next year, Mr Balls would also hope to introduce a 10p starting rate of income tax to cut levies for 24 million low-earners.

The policy comes ahead of new GDP figures this week which are expected to confirm that the recovery is gathering pace. The Prime Minister said last week that families were beginning to feel the benefit of a “recovery for all” as figures showed wages had started to rise faster than inflation.

Britain’s return to growth has presented a problem for Mr Balls, who made the “flatlining” economy Labour’s central criticism of the Coalition’s austerity measures.

The Unite trade union, Labour’s biggest donor, welcomed the policy, but warned: “This is a beginning; we would urge Labour to also tackle the disgraceful abuse of the system by the [tax] evaders and avoiders too.”

By Szu Ping Chan

9:30PM GMT 25 Jan 2014

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Britain grew at the fastest rate since 2007 last year, official data are expected to confirm this week, cementing its position as the fastest growing economy in Western Europe.


Economists expect the UK to have grown by 0.7pc in the three months to December, following growth of 0.8pc in the third quarter.


This represents an annual expansion of 2.8pc and equates to overall gross domestic product (GDP) growth in 2013 of 1.9pc – the strongest annual growth since 2007 - up from just 0.3pc in 2012.


Britain emerged as the fastest growing economy in Western Europe last year and Tuesday’s data are expected to confirm the UK grew four times faster than Germany, which expanded by 0.4pc in 2013.


Some economists believe fourth-quarter UK growth could match the 0.8pc seen in the previous three months, although others said a slightly lacklustre October performance by Britain’s dominant services sector suggested the economy saw a slowdown in the final three months of the year.


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“Services output was a modest 0.3pc higher in October compared to the Q3 average and would have to post decent rises in November and December to equal Q3’s performance,” said Jonathan Loynes, an economist at Capital Economics.

Michael Saunders, chief UK economist at Citigroup, said: “Partial data so far show solid growth in industrial production but a modest gain in retail sales and little change in construction output.

“We suspect some of these monthly activity readings understate the economy’s momentum but, unless the services output data released at the same time are very strong, we suspect growth will fall a little short of the 0.8pc pace seen in Q3.”

While Britain’s rapid growth rate is expected to continue this year, economists have raised concerns that the recovery is over-reliant on consumer spending and unsustainable without a significant increase in real wages, investment and export growth.

This was also stressed yesterday by Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England, who told a session at the World Economic Forum in Davos that the recovery remained fragile and suggested it was not yet strong enough to withstand an interest rate rise.

“As good as the numbers have been in the last three quarters in the United Kingdom, we’re talking about three-quarters of household-led growth, an economy that’s running 20pc below pre-crisis trends, that has substantial spare capacity, that has not yet rebalanced and that faces significant headwinds from its major trading partner from overall monetary conditions,” he said.

“Exceptional stimulus remains very relevant to the environment.”

UK growth of 1.9pc in 2013 would also be lower than the pre-crisis average of around 2.5pc and nowhere near the growth seen in 2007, when the economy grew by 3.4pc. The economy would also remain 1.3pc smaller than its pre-crisis peak in the first quarter of 2008. By contrast, Germany has already recovered from its GDP slump.

Last week, Mr Carney admitted that the Bank’s “forward guidance” policy on increasing interest rates would “evolve” at its next inflation report in February because unemployment had fallen far faster than expected toward the 7pc threshold set by the Bank.

Last August, Mr Carney pledged that the Bank would not even consider raising rates from their record low of 0.5pc until unemployment fell below the threshold. At the time, the jobless rate was 7.8pc but it has since tumbled to 7.1pc.

Mr Saunders said he expected the Bank to move away from “forward guidance” towards “fuzzy” guidance.

“We expect the Bank to shift to a more fuzzy approach, emphasising that there is no immediate need to hike rates, and when rates do rise, they are likely to rise only gradually,” he said.

“This will represent a move towards a neutral stance rather than restraint.”

I hope Cameron and Osborne take responsibility for what they have done and are doing.

That radical new Balls policy: increase taxes. Don’t say the bosses of some of the largest employers in Britain didn’t warn you:

Rob Templeman, chairman of the British Retail Consortium, Gala Coral and the RAC: “this tax increase would be bad for business in Britain. It would put the recovery at risk, deter investment and ultimately cost jobs”

Sir Stuart Rose, former executive chairman of Marks and Spencer: “This will put at risk all the good work that has been done to put the economy back on track.”

Mike Lynch, co-founder of Autonomy Corporation and former Labour donor: “The proposed tax increase would put jobs and the economic recovery at risk and discourage investment into the UK.”

Ian Cheshire, chief executive of Kingfisher: ”Putting up the percentage rate is the wrong answer. When the rate was cut the total tax paid went up and the top 0.1% now pay over 30% of all income tax. Raising the rate is bad economics and sends an anti business message that may undermine investment plans and the recovery”

Dracula will be a vegetarian before Ed Balls balances a budget.