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 […]

Free schools are not, and cannot be, “free”. They certainly won’t be free in a financial sense. The tax payer will be paying for them. All tax payers, not just the few who currently send their kids there, or may wish to do so in the future. That includes all the taxpayers who send their […]

The June 22 Budget will herald major spending cuts to tackle the country’s debt crisis. But there is also a wider strategic goal, and it’s called rolling back the ‘Big State’ We are edging, slowly and hesitatingly, towards the sort of debate about the future of Britain that should have happened during the general election, […]

It was US President Harry Truman who reportedly said that he was fed-up with economists who told him “one the one hand Mr President…”, followed by “but on the other hand….”. Truman said he wanted a one-armed economist.

One of the new Commandments is “Thou shalt not accumulate public debts that have to paid off by future generations”. To which I answer, why not? Like most such axioms, any serious analysis soon shows that the Commandment isn’t quite as absolute, or a useful guide to action, as it first appears.