The myth of expansionary fiscal contraction
Posted on Tuesday 19 October, 2010
Filed Under Conservative Party, Economics |
10 Comments
IS IT possible for Britain to axe public spending by £83bn over a four-year period and nevertheless undergo substantial private sector-driven growth? The heir to the Osborne baronetcy wants us to believe that the answer is a resounding ‘yes’.
Ye of little faith should put aside your fears of a return to Thatcher-era public squalor and ruinous social problems. Unemployment, schunemployment. In Osborneworld, all will be resolved by ‘expansionary fiscal contraction’, as the jargon has it.
Cuts, the chancellor has repeatedly argued, will ultimately boost business to the point where it will take up the slack left by the state.
The only snag is that governments can only pull this particular trick off little more than 1% of the time. But don’t take my word for it. Look at what the International Monetary Fund has got to say on the topic. I am grateful to a colleague for drawing my attention to chapter three of the most recent edition of the World Economic Outlook.
The class politics of Lord Wolfson and his pals
Posted on Monday 18 October, 2010
Filed Under Business, Economics |
30 Comments
GENUFLECTION to the opinions of those we have come to call ‘business leaders’ has formed an unquestionable norm of economic orthodoxy under every British government since 1979.
Trade unions are repeatedly castigated as vested interests. By contrast, the agenda of the wealth creators is routinely presented as ideologically neutral.
OK, these guys dodge a bit of tax here and there, and get to run a yacht or three. But what’s good for business is good for Britain. Now shut up, chill out, and be intensely relaxed as governments tailor each and every policy to the facilitation of people getting filthy rich.
Seen in this light, the letter signed by three dozen FTSE 100 and FTSE 250 chairman and chief executives, and published in the Daily Telegraph this morning, is more than just one statement of opinion among many. Their call for public spending cuts to come hard, fast and all at once will widely be regarded as carrying substantial weight.
That’s the thing about Eton
Posted on Friday 15 October, 2010
Filed Under Education, Society |
43 Comments
IT IS terribly bad form for a chap to come over all chippy about his education. Frankly, that’s the sort of stuff one would expect from a provincial Grammar School boy, and not a journalist, novelist and historian of the stature of Guy Walters.
Nevertheless, the Old Etonian has devoted a post on the Daily Telegraph-sponsored blog to make plain his umbrage at the way a book review in the Jewish Chronicle casually takes a pop at him for being an Old Etonian.
‘That’s the thing with Eton,’ he notes. ‘A good schoolfriend of mine once said that you can be prime minister, attempt a coup in a West African state, even be a king, but to others, first and foremost, you’ll always be an Eamonn. I can live with it, even if Mr Low can’t.
An Eamonn, I hear you ask? Well, ‘Eamonn Old Etonian’ is apparently the punch line to a posh knock-knock joke.
On the spurious equation of Ahmadinejad and Hitler
Posted on Thursday 14 October, 2010
Filed Under Blogging, International |
16 Comments
YES, I know it ranks among the biggest clichés in all of barroom philosophy. But let’s say they do one day invent time travel and you could go back to 1907 Vienna. Would it be ethical to seek out a penniless postcard painter called Adolph Hitler and kill him, thereby sparing history World War Two?
The short answer to what is known as ‘the grandfather paradox’ is that this would be logically impossible. If it could be done, Hitler would already be dead at that point. But minor considerations such as unachievability aside, the proposition is otherwise a no brainer to all save those who hold to a notion of absolute sanctity of human life. Sure, you throttle him and scurry back to 2010, to widespread popular acclaim.
I only raise this hoary old debating topic after reading the remarks of Israeli parliamentarian Aryeh Eldad, who yesterday argued for the assassination of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during a visit to Lebanon.
The class struggles in France
Posted on Wednesday 13 October, 2010
Filed Under International |
49 Comments
‘SO, LIKE, what’s a general strike, Dave?’ This is a question I was asked in all seriousness by an intelligent twentysomething reporter yesterday, in a discussion about how the newspaper for which we work should cover the industrial unrest currently underway across the Channel.
For somebody not even born during the miners’ struggle of 25 years ago, and who cannot quite see the point of signing up to the National Union of Journalists, I suppose the puzzlement is not quite as naïve as it might seem.
‘It’s when all the unions come out on strike at once,’ I informed her, doing my best not to seem too pleased at the prospect.
‘So, like, nobody works at all?’
Lord Browne review: why not free education?
Posted on Tuesday 12 October, 2010
Filed Under Education |
43 Comments
FROM my first day as a five-year-old at Avenue Road Infants’ School to my final postgraduate seminar at the London School of Economics, my education was free all the way. Not only that, but for the last five years of it, I was accorded state support at a level comparable to a low-wage job.
That is a large part of the explanation of how the son of a railwayman and a nurse from a two-up two-down eventually landed a well-paid career in journalism. But posh kids got more or less the same deal, save for a reduced level of grant to reflect their parents’ prosperity.
In the 1960s, the 1970s and into the monetarist 1980s, the idea that this way of doing things would ever change substantially would have been unthinkable. Free education was an essential aspect of the social democratic settlement.
Not even Thatcher had the political confidence to scrap student grants and introduce tuition fees. Only New Labour could be that right wing.
What Amber Wellesley-Smith hates about Ed Miliband
Posted on Monday 11 October, 2010
Filed Under Conservative Party, New Labour |
17 Comments
AS A working journo myself, I do fully appreciate that the designation ‘Red Ed’ has attractions for tabloid headline writers that ‘meat and potatoes continental European social democrat Ed’ can never hope to match.
But even though Mr Miliband is the offspring of the second-greatest Marxist thinker Belgium ever produced, the latter is actually a rather more accurate description.
Even such a milquetoast political mindset is progress compared to the dismal benchmark set by the 1994-2010 period. I have listened to several radio and television interviews with the new leader of the party of which I am a member, and have not automatically disagreed with every single word enunciated. That in itself has been a novel experience.
Yet what amuses me is that there are people on the right who appear genuinely to believe that Miliband is a dangerous radical leftie rather than a reversion to Labourism’s historical mean. Take, for instance, this selection from a recent Daily Telegraph letters page. All genuine, I promise you.
Tories still hate proletarian fecundity
Posted on Friday 8 October, 2010
Filed Under Conservative Party |
53 Comments
MY SECOND daughter was, as the saying goes, a bit of an accident. Yes, I love her as much as the first one and all that, but the fact remains that I was not planning on knocking the mum up again for at least a year or two.
So had daddy been able to keep it in his trousers that night back in 2002, the world’s cutest seven-year-old girlie would not now be skipping and lisping around the streets of Stoke Newington, being utterly charming to everybody she meets.
I make this revelation after Jeremy Hunt’s announcement earlier this week that state support for large families will in future be capped at the level of average earnings.
The subtext here is that finally – finally! – a politician has the courage to tackle the monstrous regiment of sink estate slappers who drop sprogs on a production line basis to milk the welfare state. That’ll learn you, Tracy Towerblocks. You only spend the money on booze and fags, anyway.
My new conversation about fairness with David Cameron
Posted on Thursday 7 October, 2010
Filed Under Conservative Party |
20 Comments
WE NEED a new conversation about fairness, David Cameron pronounced in his speech to the Tory conference yesterday. Tell you what, mate. Next time you are in the London N16 area, give us a buzz and pop round for a cuppa and a chat on the subject. I have a few thoughts to share with you on this one.
Let me pick you up about your mate George Osborne’s emergency budget in June, for starters. The Institute for Fiscal Studies ran its slide rule over the numbers, and found that it will cost the least well-off families 21.7% of household income. That means they will be hit six times as hard as the richest families. Is that the sort of thing you have in mind?
And what about that Academies Act, then? Leave aside the broad principles involved for now. An anorak who knows these things tells me that local authorities foot the bill for children with special educational needs from central funding, based on contributions from all schools in their manor. If there are fewer schools to chip in, there will be less money for disadvantaged kids. How fair is that?
Simon Schama: Michael Gove’s history man
Posted on Wednesday 6 October, 2010
Filed Under Education |
158 Comments
THE Coalition has declared war on educational inequality, Michael Gove told the Tory conference yesterday. But its decisions to scrap Labour’s schools rebuilding scheme and pass the socially divisive Academies Act can only increase it.
The education secretary’s insistence that young teachers are his ‘heroes and heroines’ was cringe-inducing, and I could have lived without the rewrite of the Monty Python four Yorkshiremen sketch on which he closed.
But there was one thing Gove said that even I agree with, and that is his call for a return to the teaching of straightforward narrative history in British schools.
Simon Schama has been appointed an advisor to this end, he added. My guess is that a lot of lefties will have a problem with this.
