PHOENIX — Legislation that would require proof of U.S. birth from presidential candidates is intersecting in Arizona with the question of whether U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants are entitled to automatic citizenship. Business secretary recommends using low interest rates to raise ‘crucial’ public investment in weakest parts of economyVince Cable has become the first cabinet minister to question George Osborne’s “plan A” economic strategy by suggesting that the Treasury should use Britain’s record low interest rates to increase borrowing as a way of stimulating growth.On the eve of a speech by David Cameron on the economy, in which the prime minister is expected to criticise Labour for demanding increased borrowing, the business secretary said that greater public investment was “crucial” to reviving the economy.The intervention by Cable, expressed in a lengthy essay in the New Statesman, exposes deep divisions on the economy within the coalition.The prime minister and Osborne regularly taunt Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, about economic responsibility, following the latter’s calls for increased public investment – which would, the Tories say, have to be financed by increased borrowing.But Cable comes close to siding with the shadow chancellor when he says it would be “absurd” to say that the government is incapable of mobilising capital investment.Cable writes:
“The more controversial question is whether the government should not switch but should borrow more, at current very low interest rates, in order to finance more capital spending: building of schools and colleges; small road and rail projects; more prudential borrowing by councils for house building. This last is crucial to reviving an area which led economic recovery in the 1930s but is now severely depressed.”Such a programme would inject demand into the weakest sector of our economy – construction – and, at one remove, the manufacturing supply chain [cement, steel]. It would target two significant bottlenecks to growth: infrastructure and housing.”Cable
challenges one of the chancellor’s central arguments – that increased borrowing would add to the fiscal deficit.He writes: “Such a strategy does not undermine the central objective of reducing the structural deficit, and may assist it by reviving growth. It may complicate the secondary objective of reducing government debt relative to GDP because it entails more state borrowing; but in a weak economy, more public investment increases the numerator and the
denominator.”He qualifies his remarks and makes clear he is not siding with Balls entirely when he dismisses the “crude and binary” argument that sticking to plan A poses a greater risk to
the economy.”There is a body of opinion arguing that the risks to the economy of sticking to existing plans are greater than the risks stemming from significantly increased and sustained public investment targeted at those areas of the economy where there are severe impediments to growth (housing; skills; infrastructure; innovation).”But
this is also too crude and binary a characterisation of the position; the government has carried out considerable policy reform in these areas, not least in my own department, the fruits of which take a while to mature. The balance of risks
remains a matter of judgment.”Cable’s
article was published hours after the prime minister once again attacked Labour for advocating increased borrowing. “He has no proposals to do anything about welfare other than to put up borrowing,” Cameron said of Ed Miliband.In his article Cable defended the chancellor’s deficit and debt reduction plan on the grounds that Osborne had been flexible.Osborne has acknowledged that he will not meet his target of reducing debt as a proportion of GDP by 2015-16. He will also not meet his informal target of eliminating the structural budget deficit by 2014. By extending his target he has avoided even deeper spending cuts and even higher tax rises.”The data does not support the conclusion that deficit reduction has had dramatic effects on the economy,” writes Cable. “There has been only modest
reduction in the budget deficit, partly because the government has been allowing counter-cyclical stabilisers to operate, and partly because we have taken the conscious decision not to introduce further cuts at a time when the weaker economy has damaged tax revenues.”Chris
Leslie MP, the shadow financial secretary to the Treasury, said: “Vince Cable may at last be seeing sense.
He is right to admit that there have been economic consequences to deep cuts to capital investment. But he has consistently supported a failing economic policy which has led to stagnation, falling living standards, slashed investment in infrastructure and rising borrowing to pay for the mounting costs of economic failure.”Now is the right time to bring forward infrastructure investment and build thousands more affordable homes. It would kickstart our flatlining economy, create jobs and in the long-term strengthen our economy and help get the deficit down.”Labour, business groups and even the IMF have spent the last two years making the case for this.
If Vince Cable is finally coming round to that view he needs to start winning the argument round the cabinet table, but his words today read like they have been written by a secretary of state who, despite being in office, is not in power.”Vince CableEconomic policyGeorge OsborneLiberal-Conservative coalitionDavid CameronEd BallsEconomic growth (GDP)EconomicsPublic
financeNicholas Wattguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies.
All rights reserved.
| Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel received a two-week extension to form a governing coalition, a situation complicated by an unexpected alliance of two rising political stars.
Gielgud, LondonPeter Morgan struck box-office gold with his movie The Queen. He’s likely to do so again with this play based on the private weekly audience given by
the monarch to the prime minister. But I’d say that in both
cases, PM owes a great deal to HM: in other words, Helen Mirren, who once again gives a faultless performance that transcends mere impersonation to endow the monarch with a sense of inner life and a quasi-Shakespearean aura of solitude.As a dramatist, however, Morgan faces two problems. One is that no one ever knows what is said at these weekly tête-à -têtes since they are un-minuted. The other, more serious, is that in a constitutional monarchy, the Queen has no authority to contradict policy: simply, in the words of Walter Bagehot in the 19th century, “to be consulted, to advise and to warn”, which would seem to rule out dramatic conflict.
I’d say that Morgan counters these problems with varying degrees of success.In a play that zigzags back and forth over 60 years and shows eight of the 12 prime ministers the Queen has dealt with (though not Tony Blair), Morgan is obviously free to speculate
about what was said. He does this entertainingly enough, showing the Queen often acting as a surrogate shrink to her harassed ministers: she offers a hanky to a tearful John Major (a very funny Paul Ritter) and counsels sleep and rest to a paranoid Gordon Brown (a highly plausible Nathaniel Parker).But
Morgan’s right to exercise dramatic licence goes way over the top in his portrait of Harold Wilson. This is no fault of Richard McCabe, who plays Wilson with a nice pawky humour. But I cannot believe that Wilson, the most calculating of politicians and an Oxford don before he acquired power, would ever have breezed into Buckingham Palace posing as a working-class “ruffian”; and, however chummy he later became, I find it unlikely that he would have cheeked the Queen about her Germanic origins, saying that at Balmoral, instead of the bagpipes, “you should have someone playing the accordion in lederhosen”.The
more serious question, however, is how you inject conflict into a situation that, constitutionally, precludes it. Morgan does this in artful ways by
showing the Queen using her position to speak
truth to power. In 1952, as a nervous young monarch, she stands up to an ageing Churchill (Edward Fox, gallantly taking over the role at short notice).
And in 1956 she smokes out the pretence of Anthony Eden (an excellently twitchy Michael Elwyn) that our invasion of Suez was a response to Israeli aggression rather than the result of military and diplomatic collusion.But, in demonstrating the Queen’s practical wisdom, Morgan limits the scope for conflict; and only twice, in a perky panorama of political history, did I feel the dramatic temperature rise. Once was in the 1992 scene when John Major relays Princess Diana’s scathing views about the monarchy and puts the Queen on the back foot by questioning royal expenditure. The other was the moment when Mrs Thatcher (Haydn Gwynne in a tearing temper) storms into the palace to attack, with some justice, leaks over royal dislike of her policies. But the virtue of this scene is that it leads to the one serious political debate over Thatcher’s determined refusal to apply sanctions to South Africa.However hard Morgan tries, the evening can’t help but seem like a series of revue sketches: a kind of “1956 And All That”. What holds it together is Stephen Daldry’s adroit production and Helen Mirren’s luminous performance, which, even in a non-linear script, pins down the Queen’s steady growth in confidence and authority. Daldry has had the witty idea of allowing many of the costume changes to take place on stage so that we see Mirren, like an upmarket Gypsy Rose Lee, shedding her layers of costume: in a trice she moves from being Major’s solid, elderly comforter to the lissom newcomer coping with a patronising Churchill 40 years earlier.But Mirren also captures the Queen’s mix of the extraordinary and the ordinary. Like HMQ in Alan Bennett’s A Question of Attribution, she has the capacity to see through all forms of pretence. And, in her dialogues with her younger self, she conveys the sense of entrapment and loneliness that co-exists with a life of royal privilege.
I have a theory that all plays about monarchy, from Shakespeare’s Henry V to Howard Brenton’s 55 Days, end up as studies of solitude.
That’s exactly what happens here. But if Morgan’s speculative and essentially static high-class political gossip – what you might call Pepys behind the scenes – acquires emotional resonance, it is largely thanks to the naturally majestic Mirren. Until 15 June. Box Office: 0844 4825130Rating: 3/5TheatreHelen MirrenMonarchyMichael Billingtonguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds EULESS, Texas — Former TWA flight attendants picketed their own union Friday, protesting what they say is the labor group’s unwillingness to help them get back their jobs, which were lost after the 2001 terror