| Teacher who criticised education standards to return to school A teacher forced to work from home after she criticised education standards at the Conservative Party Conference has been allowed to return to the classroom after she was backed by parents. telegraph.co.uk |
'Gas bag' One hundred years since six men and a cat tried to cross Atlantic bbc.co.uk |
Man convicted of killing parents A man is jailed indefinitely for the manslaughter of his parents at the family's home in south London. bbc.co.uk |
There's more than one game in the casino | Political briefing George Osborne's autumn financial statement shows he's banking everything on austerity measures. Everything?Two ambitious young men put their reputations on the line at Westminster yesterday, together with the future of Britain's fragile economic recovery in a storm-tossed world. Even if they are half right, factors far beyond their control may ruin them.But George Osborne's relative youth and impetuosity ensured that his autumn financial statement was far less measured than the number-crunching that preceded it from Robert Chote, at 41 two years the chancellor's senior.Newly transferred from the authoritative Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) to the Treasury-funded but independent Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), Chote has a more pristine reputation to lose. After a shaky start the OBR has yet to acquire one.Osborne has his party and twitchy financial markets to reassure. For him, benefit claimants and the newly unemployed come a poor second. So Osborne gave only a passing nod to the OBR's cautious forecast – "inherent uncertainty" and lower growth in 2011 and 2012 as the coalition's cuts bite – while sheltering behind its independence.Mostly he embraced the old-time religion of economic optimism which chancellors feel obliged to adopt. Osborne mocked Gordon ("no more boom and bust") Brown, but often sounded like him. He even gabbled.As Labour MPs repeatedly reminded him, along with a handful of the sharper Tories whose questions the chancellor sidestepped, he is heavily reliant on resurgent business investment and booming exports to make his predictions work: the deficit shrunk, 1m more jobs, unemployment down from 8% to 6% by 2015.Some of this sunshine talk has the OBR's qualified blessing, though a 6% annual rise in exports, not to mention 8% investment, sound very un-British even without the sharp fiscal tightening – lower spending and higher taxes – now under way. Yet no one has actually done it in such adverse circumstances, warned Alan Johnson in his response, which insisted that 2010's resumed growth is on Alistair Darling's account, not the coalition's.Osborne is "in the casino, but has not yet spun the wheel", Johnson told MPs. But Osborne has placed the coalition's bet. The wheel is spinning, but has not yet stopped. In this casino it acquires fresh momentum and speeds up again: everyone wins. If only.The chancellor, as chancellors often do, declines to acknowledge an inconveniently holistic view. Yes, he does see the need for supply-side reform – less red tape, more competitive rates of corporation tax (no Irish irony here) – to encourage wealth creation and growth. So did Labour in its fashion.But Osborne does not concede that mass public sector sackings, now under way in town halls and Whitehall, will burden the welfare budget, make it even harder to get the long-term jobless into work and undermine the economic confidence of those who fear they may be next. That is why the US is cutting its deficit at half the British rate and the Japanese – after a decade of Chote's "sluggish growth" – even more slowly, though their debts are both greater.The chancellor repeatedly expresses hopes of better private sector times ahead, including for the construction industry even as its public sector contracts are axed – though he has done his best to protect capital projects.He blithely talks of not "wasting" £19bn paying interest charges on government debt to "foreign governments and private bondholders" – as if they are not mostly UK pension funds and citizens who hope to spend it on goods and services. It all helps an economy tick over.If the deflationary implications of the Osborne analysis are not enough, he talked yesterday as if his austerity has guaranteed that Britain is now safe from a sterling version of the eurozone sovereign debt crisis that is devouring Ireland's public finances – despite Dublin's Osbornian cuts.He must feel less cocky than he sounds. Angela Merkel's government intends to impose export-led austerity on eurozone laggards. China feels the same lofty disapproval towards the US, whose imports sustain Beijing's boom.It is a familiar crisis reflex, but misguided. The world's national economies cannot all export their way out of trouble. Britain is not an economic island. Brown too used to sound as if it was.George OsborneEconomic policyMichael Whiteguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
BNP leader invited to meet Queen at Buckingham Palace garden party Nick Griffin, the leader of the British National Party, has been invited to attend a Buckingham Palace garden party hosted by the Queen, The Times has learnt. timesonline.co.uk |