Oliver Letwin wants to prevent the common man enjoying his cheap holiday in Malaga and now Philip Blond, the so-called “Red Tory” wonk who markets himself as close to the Cameroons, wants to prevent common people buying olives. His thank-tank Respublica wants to tax larger shops more and subsidise smaller local shops. Guido sees a lot of red and very little Tory in his proposed tax on success.

Combine this nonsense with the Cameroon fetish for localism and you will raise the cost of groceries for everyone, fine if you are a Notting Hill trustafarian, for the squeezed middle-classes this will just add to the cost of the weekly shop. Local deli’s and organic butchers are all very well, but they are not cheap. Don’t forget Dave’s mate Zac and his eco-friends will have us all suffering from scurvy so long as we reduce our carbon footprint – there will be no imported fruit from Africa and the Caribbean if they have their way.

Imagine a Green-Red-Tory grocery store: Philip Blond behind the counter demonstrating natural goose fat hair creme, Zac offering samples of Dorset Strawberry Champagne, “sorry we have no bananas”, carbon footprint banned, ditto lemons. Handmade Melton Mowbray pies a plenty, no foreign exotica like peppers, or even pepper. Perhaps some celebrity cheese at £20-an-ounce, a home-baked loaf of artisan bread for £10 and a dozen local organic free-range eggs for a fiver. Nothing spicy or imported. This is the logical outcome if these out of touch Tory romantics get their way. Plenty of local cabbage and potatoes.

Food price inflation is bad enough as it is without Blond  trying to undermine the competitiveness of the supermarkets, who will inevitably just pass on increased costs to consumers. Blond and Zac are a danger to the affordability of basic needs to consumers with their attempts to foist a Tory form of autarky on us all. If Blond wants to open a grocery store good luck to him, no need to hobble the supermarkets in the process. Guido doubts he will do much business…

IPSA is under prolonged and heavy attack from MPs who are using every trick in the book to undermine and thwart it. It is fair to say that IPSA was a badly conceived idea produced in a panic during the dying days of the Brown tyranny, it wastes a lot of money itself and could in truth be better organised. Nevertheless one fact strikes Guido, the new expenses regime has saved £18 million. The fact that MPs hate the bureaucracy created might make them think about the quangos and regulations they inflict upon us. The political class has only itself to blame. Remember 52% of MPs had to repay fiddled expenses…

Back in 2009, before IPSA was set up, the Sunlight Centre produced recommendations which included a House of Commons debit card as the best way to regulate legitimate expenses. The transactions would as normal be electronically recorded and could thus be published online in real-time, the spending limits would be automatic and bureaucracy would be minimal. The idea was first proposed in Disinfecting Parliament, a report that recommended a number of measures based on best practice in the private sector that could easily be transferred to IPSA. Two years later IPSA has finally announced a plan to introduce debit cards…

One person who will have a closer than usual eye on the budget tomorrow is the Adam Smith Institute’s Madsen Pirie. Tobacco duty rising again is the last thing a blossoming cigar company needs. Putting his money where his mouth is, Pirie backed and remains a shareholder in Regius Cigars, who seem to have returned the favour with a nominally optimistic tribute:

 
Baron Fawkes or a cigar named after Guido. Tough call…

Left-wing bore and government advisor Will Hutton has reported back after being despatched to look into pay. His idea that public sector fat cats could have up to 20% of their pay docked for poor performance are welcome.  Though given the vast sums of money we are talking about, say £180,000, Guido was wondering what the criteria would be for the penalty to kick in..

Would failure to register your accounts qualify for a pay docking? Or how about having to surrender control of your insolvent organisation to a second-rate university in order to keep it alive? Better get your cheque book out Will…

We think of France as far more socialist than Britain yet French middle class families are far better off than their British equivalents in after-tax terms, despite higher basic rates. French taxpayers get an allowance of up to €2,300 per child under 7 years of age called les frais de garde d’enfants towards the costs of child care outside of the home, a small tax rebate called les frais de scolarité for each child in education and up to €6,000 rebated for l’emploi d’un salarie a domicile covering a house-keeper or nanny. In addition there is the quotient familial to minimise the impact of higher rates of taxation on families with children, it actually increases your tax allowance as you have more children. All these fiscal incentives encourage the French tax-paying middle classes to have kids.

The think-tank research out this morning showing that Britain is the worst country in Europe for taxpayers to have kids is only the half of it. In Britain we incentivise those who can’t afford to have children to have kids by paying them more welfare benefits and upgrading their state housing. This has created a multi-generational underclass who vote Labour to keep their benefits. Anyone would think it was Gordon’s deliberate plan…

In Ed Miliband’s big speech this morning about the cost of living he said:

The task is to create a more prosperous capitalism…

It seems Ed has been converted to the cause of capitalism since becoming leader, despite having called himself a socialist many times over the course of his leadership campaign. And with talk of a “fairer” capitalism, presumably he meant things like taxing the financial services sector in a “progressive” way?

The Resolution Foundation, the venue for Miliband’s speech, is bankrolled by Clive Cowdery, an insurance tycoon and Labour donor. He spoke alongside Ed today to launch the foundation’s latest report. Cowdery sold Resolution Plc in 2007 for £5 billion, earning himself close to £150 million. As is the way with these things, he has based his company offshore in Guernsey, to minimise tax exposure, like The Guardian does. The company is effectively run from London through the limited liability partnership Resolution Operations LLP, the company made £1,189 million in net profit. If it was domiciled in the UK corporation tax on these profits could have amounted to £333 million. Miliband said:

I want to begin by paying tribute to the work of the Resolution Foundation… Politics today is being conducted in the shadow of the financial crisis: the argument about the deficit and how to return the economy to growth. But what your work is showing is that we cannot settle for a return to business as usual: life before the crisis hit.

That deficit is not helped by Resolution shirking one-third of a billion pounds in taxes. Gordon Brown’s former deputy chief of staff and economic adviser, Gavin Kelly, runs the foundation. So Ed’s call for a new way of doing things was made to friends, donors, tax-shirkers and long-term colleagues…

Q. Which think-tank did policing Minister Nick Herbert work at before he became an MP?

Q. Which department do the think-tank Reform call the “the success story” in their review of Coalition public service reform?

Always good to keep in with the old boss…

Buried deep in Steve Hilton’s policy grid from the days in opposition are those pesky issues that nobody wanted to talk about so they were kicked into the long grass. One issue was quotas for women on the boards of major companies. Right out of Harman’s playbook.

Funnily enough a new report by the Centre for Policy Studies hasn’t got much traction with the BBC and the Guardian. Dr Catherine Hakim from the LSE has launched a feminist myth-busting book that pauses to say, hold on, some women might want to stay at home and, dread to think it, different people want different careers. The CPS may be violently off message in these “progressive” times, that doesn’t make them wrong…

Will Straw did a good job with Left Foot Forward, the “evidence based” left-wing policy blog that loves a graph. It was a critical success if not a box office success, voted the top left-wing blog in the Total Politics blogging awards – the British political blogosphere’s Oscars.

LFF is the blogging equivalent of a worthy art-house movie.

He is now off to the IPPR, the once influential think-tank which has sort of lost its way in the last few years. Guido has observed that it was contracting and last year’s 21st Birthday Party was more like a wake.  Will always was a bit of a wonk and his task is to restore IPPR to its former New Labour glory...

One of the biggest nights in the propeller-headed wonks calendar is The Prospect magazine’s “Think Tank of the Year Awards“. David Sainsbury’s new plaything, the Institute of Government, took away the big prize leaving many on the right feeling a little put out as they thought they’d had a pretty good year when it came to influencing the policy agenda.

The judging panel was somewhat slanted to the left: Ben Rogers from IPPR and Demos; Kishwer Falkner the Liberal Democrat peer; David Goodhart Prospect’s editor; the FT’s James Crabtree and for balance from Downing Street, Rohan Silva.

Hardly the most balanced of panels, but made worse by the fact that Silva didn’t bother showing up to meetings at which the awards were actually judged. In the right-wing think-tank world, where one would expect Conservative Downing Street policy advisors would be tight in with, there are some who were ticked off with him for not holding up the side. Rohan just seems to make friends wherever he goes…