Julia Hobsbawm, the persuasive daughter of the world’s most celebrated Marxist historian invited me to get up very early today for an Editorial Intelligence Briefing. We heard a thoughtful homily from Yasmin Alibhai-Brown about Baby P and what this told us about our expectations of the nanny state. We are generally on the same side. However, I was disconcerted to find myself not merely convinced, but empathising with an urbane and balanced Conservative Shadow Minister as to when and why Gordon Brown might call an election and what might happen if and when he did. The discussion was conducted under Chatham House rules, which I’ve already technically broken by revealing the political affiliation of the source, but it wasn’t George Osborne.
We agreed that Brown would lose the next election whenever he called it, unless the economy miraculously turned round in the next month. The chances are that it won’t do anything like that before 2010, and will almost certainly get worse as the Polonium cocktail of tax cuts, increased borrowing and increased public spending takes hold. Brown might narrowly win a snap election, but he is not a gambler and will have to be pushed off the diving board into the deep end. We agreed that Cameron had finally done the right thing in abandoning a fudgy Middle Way in favour of a straightforward alternative: no tax cuts and a curb on public spending in order to balance the books. It gives the public a straight choice.
The room, by a tiny margin, didn’t agree. They thought that Gordon would call an early election and would probably win on the basis that public perception still held him to have been a sound Chancellor, if not an inspiring leader. Cameron was an untried entity. I disagreed that Brown’s audacious economic strategy was a ‘new paradigm’ but agreed that lowering taxes while increasing public spending and expecting the bond markets to back Britain in a global credit crunch was unusually fruity for a son o’ the Manse.
To survive, Brown needs to convince a battered and cash-strapped electorate that he was responsible for the ‘good’ times but that ‘global economic conditions’ were to blame for the mess that the UK economy finds itself in. He might also tell us why he was obliged to sell our gold reserves and tax pension funds into the Stone Age during these halcyon days. He will also need to explain why and how we intend to pursue and persist with a costly and impossible policy of ‘liberal intervention’ in Afghanistan and Iraq and how we expect to pay for the crazy Private Finance Initiatives and Public Private Partnerships, which will haunt public finances for decades. I’m not a Tory, but I can’t vote Labour under the present lunatic circumstances. We’ve given this gang too many chances. They have widened the wealth gap and given us the highest levels of national debt for 50 years.
Don't sup with Russian sailors, George.
Whether or not I like it, the next election is for the Tories to lose. Labour can’t and shouldn’t win on their record. The Tories may need to redeploy their accident-prone Shadow Chancellor and keep his replacement away from Matthew Freud, oligarchs and yachts. Ken Clarke’s too old. William Hague would be a sound choice: he knows about making money and has a regional accent, even if it’s a bit spooky and, like me, he’s a slaphead.
Postscript: I’m not a Tory – tell me I’m not a Tory – but on the Andrew Marr TV show at 9 am yesterday Cameron said more or less the same thing as my Friday blog about ‘fiscal stimulus’. He said nothing about Europe, though.
3 Comments
How bad does politics have to get, John, before we say enough. You are saying, in effect, that this is a question of the lesser of two evils.
Was there any sense,in the discussion, that either party was talking about dealing with the root causes of the credit crunch, of addressing the craziness of debt, rather than asset – based financing, of keeping growth in the money supply in line with improvements in natural resource productivity? Don’t sound like it to me.
What I hear is a political community without the power or ideas to address the big issues. A very interesting discussion indeed, but for all the wrong reasons from my point of view. Surely we can do better than this.
With respect, Daniel, I’m not advocating the ‘lesser of two evils.’ I am saying that rewarding failure is a bad idea. No, the discussion did not extend to economics jibber-jabber, but addressed all your valid points in plain English. The root causes of the credit crunch are that we’ve spent too much money that we didn’t have, on things that we didn’t need. Now we’ve got to stop spending, and stop pretending that either MacJobs or endless public sector job creation schemes – including MacDegrees, by the way – will do anything other than prolong the illusions of progress and prosperity.
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘surely we can do better than this?’ Of course we can, in general, but what exactly are you suggesting? Not talking to politicians or hearing what they have to say? What ‘wrong reasons’ are you alluding to? I don’t have an agenda, or political allegiances. Neither does Thus, I hope.
Hey John,
With the upmost respect, I never said that you were advocating anything. Yes I agree, we have spent money that never really existed and that this ultimately caused the crunch. Yes, you are right for nuking me if I lapse into Jargon. And I can’t fault you for talking to politicians, the discussion was interesting, but what disturbed the hell out of me was the sense I got of the helplessness underlying it.
What am I suggesting? Fair enough, good question. We vote at a scale that the biggest decisions are not really made at. What are the main issues for the younger activist generations now? Climate change, global poverty, debt relief, the WTO, Iraq. People march on the streets about these, they organise camps, and yet the decisions that really affect these issues are made by representatives of representatives behind closed doors.
Our world is international, our problems are often global. Yet our elections are national and our electoral choices very limited as a result. The world over people are worried at the narrowing of politics, parties seem pushed together around an economic consensus that has recently faltered. Why this narrowing? Well perhaps it is because finance and commerce has globalised whilst democracy has not. I am advocating a democratic politics at a scale commensurate to the problems, and a political imaginary to give ground to that.
I suppose that means I have an agenda of sorts, though I am still working it out as I go along. Maybe I am just less patient than you, I am so frustrated with what is happening. True, the political changes taking place now are huge and rapid, but they feel glacial in relation to the problems we face. 100 months is not a long time, and 3 billion is a lot of very vulnerable people.
Hopefully Thus is more than any of us.