“In an act of brazen Machiavellian chutzpah mixed with untold naivety“, writes Thom Brooks on The Conversation, “the [Conservative] party has tried to erase records of speeches and press releases published between 2000 and its coming to power in [2010].” They didn’t realise that to delete content permanently from the internet would be near impossible.

Commenting on David Cameron’s call for permanent austerity from a gold throne for The Guardian, Mark Blyth writes that “[t]he nice thing about cutting government spending in a highly unequal society, at least for the coalition, is that it doesn’t affect those with most of the assets and income.”

Energy companies, together with senior members of the conservative party, have blamed the rise in customers’ bills on what they have called ‘green taxes’, calling for their removal. On the PSA Insight blog, John Barry points out that at the same time “these energy companies are avoiding tax on a massive scale” and that “government subsidies for carbon energy … greatly outweigh those for renewable energy”. “The move to remove government support for green energy, while continuing to provide subsidies for fossil fuel /carbon energy and coming up with new and hidden subsidies for nuclear energy, gives a stark sense of the contradictions and difficulties within the coalition’s energy strategy.”

Chris Dillow, of the Stumbling and Mumbling blog, asks whether the unemployment figures tell us much, pointing out “that unemployment can and does change for reasons other than changing employment levels”.

On the NIESR blog, Alex Bryson examines the evidence behind pay for performance, finding “good reason to believe it’s not quite so important as most economists make out”.