Rolling coverage of George Osborne and Ed Balls’ pre-budget interviews on the Andrew Marr show, and the Lib Dem spring conference in Liverpool, including Nick Clegg’s speech
- Osborne fails to rule out Tory pact with Ukip, as Balls fails to rule out Labour pact with SNP
- George Osborne and Ed Balls’ Marr interviews - Summary and analysis
How do we get there? First, we have to make it clear there is light at the end of the tunnel, he says.
We can end austerity in three years’ time, he says.
They showed children from the poorest backgrounds getting their best ever results and the gap between them and their better off classmates narrowing.
This was in large part down to two decisions Liberal Democrats took in Government.
I want every child to leave primary school to be confident at reading – ending child illiteracy for good.
Clegg describes the Britain he would like to see in 2020.
How about a Britain where a child can dream of what they want their life to be, and not be held back from getting there by the circumstances of their birth or the colour of their skin?
Where a young girl who saw Professor Grady’s tears of joy on television can know that with talent and hard work she too can achieve great things.
Clegg says he wants “us” to think big too.
(It is not clear whether “us” is the party, or the country.)
I want us to take just a little bit of the spirit of that audacious project and start to think big.
I want us to look to the future with renewed optimism.
Nick Clegg starts by saying there was lots of grim news around last November.
But then a different story emerged.
A small group of scientists and engineers had spent years tracking a comet the size of a city as it hurtled through space from the edge of the solar system.
And on that day in November, as that piece of rock was half a billion kilometres away, travelling 40 times faster than a bullet through the vacuum of space, they, we, humanity, landed an object the size of a washing machine on its surface ...
Ian Wrigglesworth has finished his fundraising appeal. The yellow despatch box raised £1,500 in an auction. Nick Clegg is now taking the stage.
The Lib Dems released a text of Nick Clegg’s speech under a 12pm embargo, and the Press Association has just released its first take on what he is saying. Here it is.
The liberal values of modern Britain would be under threat if either the Tories or Labour attempted to govern with the support of a “rag tag mob” of MPs from Ukip or the SNP, Nick Clegg warned.
The Liberal Democrat leader, who insisted his party was “here to stay” despite opinion polls indicating he will lose dozens of MPs on May 7, said the election was a fight for the “decent values of our country”.
Ian Wrigglesworth is now auctioning off the yellow despatch box that Danny Alexander used as a prop in his speech yesterday.
Alexander joked about having it ready for his Lib Dem budget after the election, but perhaps the party has decided it won’t be needing it.
Currently auctioning the Lib Dem budget briefcase...£500, £600, £750... #ldconfpic.twitter.com/gn2SVFsnrX
Nick Clegg will be giving his speech shortly.
Ian Wrigglesworth, the party treasurer, is now making a fundraising appeal.
Tim Farron’s Mail on Sunday interview (see 10.56am) may have backfired. On Radio 5 Live, Lord Ashdown, the former Lib Dem leader, delivered a withering put down, effectively telling him to curb his leadership ambitions.
I think his well-known ambitions would be better served with a little more patience and a little more judgement. Tim is a very able guy but judgement is not his strong suit.
Lots of people here at #ldconf deeply unhappy with Tim Farron for giving party leadership 2/10 for its handling of coalition.
Norman Lamb, the care minister, addressed the conference earlier. The Sunday Mirror has a story about his son being involved in a blackmail plot. Most of Lamb’s speech was about mental health, but he started with a brief reference to the Sunday Mirror story.
Before I begin my speech I just want to say a few words about a personal matter. Something you may have read about this morning.
My family has had our own experience of mental health problems as our son was diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder at the age of 15. It’s something he has made the decision to be open about.
In the conference hall Lib Dems members have passed two motions.
The first, an emergency motion on leaders’ debates, says that the debates should go ahead and that, after the election, a formal process should be set in place to ensure they happen every year.
Turning to the Lib Dems now, the Mail on Sunday has an interview with Tim Farron, the party’s foreign affairs spokesman and favourite to succeed Nick Clegg as leader, in which Farron says the party could suffer for a generation from its decision to go into coalition with the Tories. Farron said:
In 2010, many people said: ‘I am not voting for you because of the [1970s] Lib-Lab pact,’ when I was seven years old. Just think what going into coalition with the Tories will do to our brand over the next generation.
Here is a summary of the key points from those interviews, with some analysis.
I’ve got to say I’ve always felt coalition politics is corrosive to British public trust. And you’ve sort of proven why [a reference to Andrew Marr’s questions about Labour doing a deal with the SNP].
Ed Miliband said it’s nonsense. It’s not part of our plans. Large parties at this stage say they we are fighting for a majority and we are. I’m not getting involved in speculation about post election deals.
It’s a Tory party who want to deflect attention from David Cameron’s cowardice on the TV debates. The only party who has done a deal with the SNP in the last ten years is the Tories in Scotland in 2011. You can ask George Osborne whether or not he’s going to do a deal with Ukip. Michael Gove and Nigel Farage are apparently good friends; they agree on leaving Europe and privatising the NHS.
Even engaging with Nigel Farage on this is giving him credibility where he has no credibility. The truth is, a vote for Nigel Farage is a vote for the Labour party, a vote for Ed Miliband as prime minister, and it means no referendum on Europe. And people need to know that.
It’s a fundamentally different situation for this reason. Nigel Farage is not going to win seats in the House of Commons. Even on his own estimation, he says he’s going to win a small handful. The SNP are likely to win dozens of seats because of the collapse of the Labour party. Ed Miliband can’t be prime minister without the support of Alex Salmond. And that creates an alliance between those who want to bankrupt the country and those who want to break up the country.
Balls and Osborne are on the couch together now.
Q: You debated with the chancellor last time. Will you do it again?
Q: Why won’t you commit to keeping defence spending at 2% of GDP?
Osborne says we are meeting the 2% target now.
Q: You are announcing today that people with annuities can cash it in.
Osborne says there are 5m people with an annuity. For some of them that will be the right choice. But some will want the lump sum.
Osborne says he wants to improve travel links between the great northern cities, so that they are more than the sum of their parts.
They would then by a rival to London.
Q: If you won’t accept the term “colossal”, will you accept that 60% of the cuts are yet to come.
Osborne has set out the cuts he is planning for the next two years.
Q: The IFS says “colossal” cuts are to come. Is that a fair word to use?
Osborne says there are more cuts to come. There will be difficult decisions.
George Osborne is being interviewed now.
Q: Do you agree with Michael Gove that the Tories should be “warriors for the dispossed”?
Will shortly be on @MarrShow talking about the budget which is all about securing a truly national recovery #Budget2015
Q: Would you keep the 2% target for defence spending?
Balls says defence is important. Labour has said it would cut defence spending by less than the Tories.
Q: Where would the cuts fall under Labour?
Balls says the party has set out a lot of ideas already, in eight zero-based spending reviews.
Andrew Marr is interviewing Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, now.
Q: The SNP say you, like the Tories, are signed up to austerity economics. Why not say the deficit does not matter?
And here’s today’s Guardian seat projection.
Conservatives: 281
There are three polls around this morning.
YouGov has Labour and the Conservatives tied.
Update: Lab & Con tied - Latest YouGov / Sunday Times results 13th Mar - Con34%, Lab34%, LD7%, UKIP14%, GRN5%; APP-14 http://t.co/JZNhvzaAFz
Full @IndyOnSunday/@TheSundayMirror results: Con 33% (+1) Lab 35% (+1) LD 7% (NC) UKIP 16% (NC) Greens 4% (NC)
Opinium/Observer: Labour 35% (+1), Conservatives 33% (-1), Lib Dems 7% (-1), UKIP 14% (n/c), Greens 7% (n/c) http://t.co/uOHRQRZuFA
Here are some more budget-related articles from the papers.
George Osborne is to give the green light to High Speed 3 (HS3), a high-speed rail link between Leeds and Manchester in this week’s Budget as he seeks to resuscitate the North’s economy.
The plan, mooted by the Chancellor last year, is opposed by the same campaigners who believe that the £42.6bn HS2 railway from London to the North is a waste of money and will ruin the countryside. The Department for Transport is to release a business case endorsing the construction of HS3, which will reduce journey times between Leeds and Manchester from 48 minutes to around half an hour.
I said in 2010 we are all in it together - and I meant it. So this week my budget will set out measures to make sure we keep delivering a truly national recovery. We mustn’t go back to the bad old days of just relying on the City of London for growth.
In this budget we will take further steps to invest in and grow all parts and industries of the UK.
When he delivers this week’s budget the chancellor won’t be able to run away from five years of failure and broken promises.
Working people are worse off. Independent experts at the Institute for Fiscal Studies say that tax and benefit changes since 2010 have cost families an average of 1,127 a year.
The Observer and other papers are reported that George Osborne will use the budget to announce that pensioners with annuities will be able to convert them into cash lump sums without paying punitive tax rates. Here’s the Observer’s story, and here’s how it starts.
George Osborne will unveil plans this week to give up to five million current pensioners the right to swap their regular retirement incomes for cash lump sums when he unveils his final budget before the general election.
In a highly populist move designed to woo older voters into the arms of the Tories, the chancellor will say on Wednesday that a Conservative government would end restrictions on the sale of annuities, allowing people to cash them in without incurring the current punitive tax penalties.
George Osborne in new pensions giveaway http://t.co/URFxK4X9R0 Trying to buy an elelction through pension mis-selling.
If Osborne's pension plans were subject to regulation I am quite sure they'd be considered mis-selling, at best, and be banned
George Osborne is proud of selling £10 billion of pensioner bonds. But anyone can sell £10 notes at £9 a time, and that's what he's doing
Here’s the BBC’s overnight round-up of what’s in today’s papers.
It’s the final day of the Lib Dem spring conference and I’m still in Liverpool, where Nick Clegg will be closing the conference with his keynote speech just before lunchtime.
But it’s also the Sunday before the budget, and that means we’ve got George Osborne and Ed Balls both doing their pre-budget interviews on the Andrew Marr show - an event that has become almost as integral a part of the budget ritual as the red box photocall outside Number 11 on the day. I’ll be focusing on that first, before switching to the Lib Dems a bit later.
Continue reading...