Wednesday 31 July 2024

Andrew Neil is 'clueless'

I first started to suspect Andrew Neil wasn’t quite as clever as he liked to think after the referendum in 2016. Although he pretends to be impartial, it's pretty clear that he is a Brexiteer and on the right. How could he not be when he worked for Rupert Murdoch for years as editor of The Sunday Times? His articles in The Daily Mail show where his sympathies are when it comes to the EU. I confess that I regard leave voters 2016 as gullible at the very least and those who did the persuading as half-wits at best and charlatans or foreign agents at worst. But the media also failed in their duty to expose the stupidity of it all and I think many were ignorant as well complicit, Neil included.

Just how daft Neil is can be seen in his tweet about the £22 billion 'black-hole' that Rachel Reeves announced to MPs on Monday:

Neil didn't actually understand what the chancellor was talking about but is so convinced of his own superiority that he even took to the pages of The Daily Mail to 'explain' it all to their readers (I use the word  'readers' in the loosest possible terms):

He writes (behind a paywall too, if you want to avoid the ads):

"A predictably stern Reeves, brimming with faux outrage, told the House of Commons she'd discovered a £22 billion black hole in the public accounts that had previously escaped her attention.

"It's not clear why she missed it. Nobody else did.

"During the election campaign the Institute for Fiscal Studies warned that future fiscal sums did not add up. It even put the shortfall at around £20 billion (not far off Reeves' new estimate), which would require either taking an axe to spending or major tax rises.

"Reeves has discovered it's a bit worse than the IFS predicted thanks to what's known as 'kitchen-sinking' — you add everything that's gone wrong to what might go wrong and wrap it up in one huge, worst-case package (in other words, you throw the kitchen sink at it)."

Errr....no. Reeves' £21.9 billion is emphatically NOT the £20 billion that the IFS and others were pointing out before the election. That referred to FUTURE spending plans starting from next April. What she was talking about was a shortfall in THIS YEAR'S spending.

Jonathan Portes, a professor of economics at King's College London, and not a man who suffers fools gladly or is given to biting his tongue when it comes to putting people in their place, responded and tagged Neil in:

Usually, Neil would come back instantly with an attack, brutally dismissing anyone challenging his opinion, but it's notable that he hasn't and it's not hard to see why. Portes provides a link to the Institute for Fiscal Studies' response to Reeves' statement which backs us the chancellor's position and says she is "right to be cross."

The IFS says while some of the 'spending pressure' might have been foreseen::

"Nonetheless, some of the specifics are indeed shocking, and raise some difficult questions for the last government. If the scale of these overspends and spending pressures was apparent in the spring – and in lots of cases, there’s no reason to suppose otherwise – then it is hard to understand why they weren’t made clear or dealt with in the Spring Budget.  Jeremy Hunt’s £10 billion cut to national insurance looks ever less defensible. On asylum costs, the decision to effectively stop processing claimants, and to budget virtually nothing for the resultant costs of housing them, looks like very poor policy making."

This second black hole is the difference between the money allocated to each department (known as DEL or Departmental Expenditure Limits) and the amount actually needed, and more importantly KNOWN to be needed, to meet all the policy commitments made by ministers for this financial year.

Of course, the further ahead you look the more uncertain the estimates become, and even in-year spending has to be adjusted to take account of changing circumstances or emergencies.  What the £21.9 billion refers to are costs which, as the IFS says, should have been apparent and dealt with in the spring budget that Jeremy Hunt presented in March.

Neil has now exposed his own stupidity for all to see.

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