All pretence that the Coalition government is merely trying to sort out the country’s public finances is long gone. It is a Liberal Conservative government, in the 19th century sense of wanting a small, liberal, state with the minimum of compassion for the ‘deserving poor’

Labour’s Leadership Contestants – “It Weren’t Me, Guv”? Written and prepared by Colin Talbot for Whitehall Watch. Professor of public policy and management at Manchester Business School. http://whitehallwatch.org

Well, not really. I’m here (Beijing) to speak at a conference on Public Service reform.

The Financial Times has now established that OBR “massaged” the employment figures it so helpfully produced for David Cameron last week… see here. By inserting some completely invented assumptions about possible future government policy, OBR trimmed 175,000 public sector job losses from the total, enabling Cameron to claim their job losses would be less than […]

Education Secretary Michael Gove is learning a painful lesson – things go wrong in government. One could almost be sympathetic, if it wasn’t for the sanctimonious way in which Coalition Ministers have been gleefully highlighting every little, and big, error of their predecessors in the Labour government.

The sudden announcement that Sir Alan Budd is to leave the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) after only 3 months may fatally wound the already less than fully credible flagship reform introduced by Chancellor George Osborne.

My advice to the Labour leadership contenders – admit Labour will never win a General Election again. It’s not as painful as it sounds, because nor will the Tories. The age of one-Party rule is over, and the sooner Labour admits it the sooner they can develop a realistic strategy for government and for opposition. […]

The BBC radio 4 ‘Today’ programme asked me if I’d give them an analysis of what a 25% cut in Departmental budegts would actually look like by applying it to one department: the Home Office (the interview is here if you want to listen).

Spending on public services is set to reduce by 25% in real terms by 2014-15 (apart from Health and International Development). One quarter of all other public services could go – that is the equivalent of around a fifth of all public sector staff or well over a million jobs.

We were promised as part of the new politics of the new Coalition government that everything would be much more transparent. Some of this supposed new transparency is proving comical, even farcical, in nature. Publishing the COINS database of itemised government spending, for example, is mildly interesting but to anyone but a researcher largely irrelevant […]