| Train commuters face rising fares Millions of train passengers may face huge hikes in ticket prices as the government tries to cut costs in the spending review. bbc.co.uk |
BBC News 'short of cash after £100,000 spend' on Chilean miners' rescue The BBC has spent so much money reporting on the Chilean miners' rescue that coverage of other major events including the G20 summit and the Oscars will have to be scaled back. telegraph.co.uk |
Tower Hamlets: polling day I'm just back from a quick tour of polling stations in the borough, mostly in and around Whitechapel. The impression is that voting has been fairly quiet so far, but it's expected to become much brisker as the afternoon goes by. This scene in Brick Lane at Christchurch primary school is novel in that a Green Party supporter is among those outside. Take him away, and it's typical: Labour predominating but supporters of the independent Lutfur Rahman on hand too. The Labour machine seems to be running at full throttle. Their direct mail operation has included letters to known Conservative voters asking them to give their second preference vote to Helal Abbas in order to help keep Rahman out. The Labour group leader of a west London borough I spoke to on the phone was heading east. For Labour, getting their core support out is the key. The Conservatives are again making unhappy noises about the conduct of the election. They've seen things they don't like at one or two polling stations. I spoke to Councillor Peter Golds, leader of the borough's Tory group, who said he'd nothing from the local police about his complaint about Rahman's campaign expenses. Of course, everyone in Tower Hamlets politics makes complaints of electoral impropriety about everyone else. I'd be surprised if that didn't continue even after the result is announced tonight. Sighted on my travels: Conservative Councillor Tim Archer; former Labour Council leader Denise Jones; Green Party mayoral candidate Alan Duffell who was crossing Whitechapel Road by the Blind Beggar; Councillor Rabina Khan who either has or hasn't been expelled from the Labour Party for supporting Rahman, depending on which layer of the Labour Party you ask. No sign of Ken Livingstone. Boy, has he made some Labour people round here cross. I'll be at the count tonight. It's expected to be close.Update, 16:11 Operation Black Vote has called for an end to "the long standing political corruption that has blighted the area."London politicsLondonLocal governmentLocal politicsLabourConservativesDave Hillguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
BBC unveils sport award shortlist The top 10 contenders for this year's Sports Personality of the Year are revealed. news.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 |