Day 5239: Worst! Election! Eveh!

Wednesday:


A British General election is NEVER an "edifying" process. The electoral system makes most voters irrelevant and the media craves the spectacle of a car crash not informed debate, so the voice of the people is most often lost under the slanging match.

In my fluffy lifetime, I've seen one or two British General elections. (Well, four, ACTUALLY, but I don't remember 2001 when I was 1 [R: nothing] –shut up, daddy), and my Daddies have seen LOADS more, but even THEY don't remember one that's been as HOLLOW and EMPTY a CHARADE as the current Cavalcade of Whimsy™.

The prospect of another hung Parliament, almost guaranteed if the current polling is even remotely close to accurate, has made the question of the Parties' policies, their differences and their overlaps, ever more vital to the empower the voter to understanding of how to use their choice.

So OBVIOUSLY the entire campaign has been reduced to two questions:
• who will "get into bed" (in a "darkened room") with whom – or, apparently more importantly, who will RULE OUT getting into bed with whom; and
• dividing ALL policies of all Parties into (not, as you might expect, those that cause cancer and those that cure cancer), but into those that are RED LINES and those that are TUITION FEES.

The media are of course completely culpable, and have totally let down the public (though the public's almost complete disinterest in controlling their own lives was just begging to be let down).

We have not had any representation of different policy or philosophy; instead, we've had a three-ringed circus, where the clowns throw meaningless custard pies at each other and the Nationalist/Green alliance – riding on the suddenly-popular coattails of Nicola Sturgeon (this year's Nick Clegg, lest she think she's in any way special) – have had three bites of the cherry in every debate while former media darlings the Farragist Kippers have been sidelined to their furious but impotent chagrin and the Liberal Democrats have been stitched up like, well, kippers.

Only the third, "Question Time" style "debate" came close to properly interrogating the leaders and drawing out any differences. Even then, the differences were primarily: "I won't tell you where I'm cutting" v "I won’t tell you I was overspending" v "sorry about that".
The meeja have OBSESSED about what the deals post-election will be like – it's almost as though they're deliberately ignoring the one part of the narrative that they cannot control and is increasingly predictable only in its unpredictability. So they've been pressing all and sundry on who would do the deed with whom, leading to this silly spectacle of ruling out partnerships that the public may press upon us.

Yes, I realise the Liberal Democrats did that too. Yes, we were wrong to. This is a democracy: we have to work with who the people send to Parliament to represent them. You won't beat the Nationalists by isolating them – that just makes them SPECIAL. Northern Ireland could only BEGIN the path to healing when we TALKED to the Irish Nationalists. Where does not talking to the Scottish Nationalists get us, other than BROKEN? Liberalism BEST represents people by bringing them together. We are pluralist by nature; we form coalitions because it is our PHILOSOPHY not merely pragmatism.

So please, no more ruling out deals before the people have got a word in edgeways!

And if I NEVER HEAR the words RED LINES again in my LIFE it will be too soon.

(Yes, we are guilty of this one too.)

The possibility that it might just be SLIGHTLY more complicated than "this policy will cause an irretrievable breakdown of coalition negotiations" while "this policy will be tossed to the winds for a whiff of the ministerial leather", does not apparently excite anyone.

So we see Cap'n Clegg trapped on Andy Marrmite's sofa between Nasty Nige and Yvette "the Snooper" Cooper and trying to put on a brave grin as he is harangued from left and right, as each howls like a banshee to demand that he rule out this or rule in that; while interviewers, thinking they are being SOOOO clever, try "trapping" candidates with the question "well, it's not on the front of the manifesto so is it a red line?"

(Apparently we're afraid to just answer: "no, we'd like it and we'll get it if we can", to this. It would be nice to think that that would be the grown up answer, but you just KNOW it only sends us further down the rabbit hole of "well, is it more important or less important than your pledge on tuition fees?".)

And you know what, not even the tuition fees policy was as simple as "red line" or "toss it aside": the Liberal Democrats had to barter it up to a better deal for students, effectively a graduate tax, and the price for that rather than just Labour's system plus unlimited fees, was having to vote for it.

CHAPTER ONE: LABOUR AND THE BIG LIE

The nadir of this is the blind arrogance of Hard Labour's "our entire manifesto is the red line"; the take it or leave it and accept nothing from anyone else approach. Well, it's what Mr Milipede and the rest of the Labour "negotiating" team "offered" the Liberal Democrats last time. Remind me, how'd that work out for him?

(Clue: it got his boss fired.)

The bitter irony is that there's nothing IN Hard Labour's manifesto, their anodyne pledges – carved, ludicrously, into a giant tablet (of soluble aspirin, probably) – do not amount to a hill of beans large enough on which to mount the fatuous Ed Stone!

I think – I hope – that people voting for the Labour Party are doing so because they hope for a better society, a more compassionate one, a more responsible one where people care for each other.

(Because the CYNICAL view is that it's a load of public and third sector workers demanding that the government spends a lot more of other people's money on the public and third sectors… and calling the Conservatories the SELFISH ones. But that would be – almost literally – uncharitable.)

What I regret, though, is that I see absolutely no evidence that the Labour Party will deliver on that hope.

Harriet the Harminator and Rachel the Reaver promising that Labour will get "tough" on benefits. Mr Milipede, son of immigrants, promising that Labour will get tough on immigrants. This is not a ploy to fool the Kipper vote and slip into power; this is what these people truly believe. If power means sacrificing some poor/foreign people, they'll be first to construct the giant wicker Kinnock.

I remember who it was who started taking away the benefits of disabled people because they decided that people too sick to get out should prove they were not fit to work. And it wasn't the "evil" Tories. The Tories may be VENAL, but they only want to cut the money. Hard Labour will sanction your benefits BECAUSE IT IS "GOOD" FOR YOU.

And so, the beginning, middle and end of ANY deal the Liberal Democrats do with the Hard Labour Party has got to be to require the HARM PRINCIPLE be made a fixture of the work and benefits system!

"First Do No Harm" is the Hippocratic Oath; we need a "First Do Not Starve People to Death Because You Believe They're Not Working Hard Enough" Oath!

(I refer again to how ANGRY I am with the Greens for making such a total DOG'S BREAKFAST of selling the Citizens Income!)

In spite of this… in spite, or even BECAUSE of the Milipede-crafted model of offering nothing to anyone in order to offend no one… I was almost coming to the conclusion that Mr Milipede, arrogant and yet useless as he is, with his talent for holding things together by an act of zen-like doing nothing, might be the man for the job, the Perfect Prime Monster for a Parliament that no one wins and cannot do anything.

And five years of Parliament doing nothing might be a blessed relief to us all.

But then he went and told a direct lie.

He told Mr Marrmite: "The deficit didn't cause the financial crisis; the financial crisis caused the deficit."

This is palpably, provably untrue. Hard Labour spent more than they raised in tax, and so had to borrow the difference – that is, in the jargon "ran a deficit" – in 2007. And in 2006. And in 2005. And 2004. And 2003. And 2002. And 2001. A Debt Odyssey. Long, long, LONG before the economy was consumed in the flames of Northern Rock's crash and burn and Lehman Brothers' self-immolation.

But that lie was a cock-up. A rhetorical spasm caused by trying to sound cleverer than he really is.

The real lie that Labour have been telling is a complicated one, hidden by claiming that they are the ones lied against: that the story of the recession is itself a lie, one told against them.

The left generally, and Labour particularly, have latched onto this line: "Labour's borrowing did not cause the financial crash".

This in itself is NOT clearly true.

Certainly it's not a DIRECT cause – the banks lent too much money to people who could not afford to pay it back, and in the end those loans (the so-called "sub-prime" mortgages) going bad is what toppled the global banking system.

But WHY and HOW did the banks lend that money?

WHY did the banks lend the money? It takes two to tango, so WHY did so many people go on a borrowing and spending spree? WHO – implicitly, even explicitly sometimes – encouraged them? Buy now pay later was the ethos of the naughties, condoned by a Hard Labour government "entirely relaxed about people getting filthy rich", and who totally played along with their PFI schemes, paying for vanity projects on the never-never.

The bankers were ABLE to lend too much because credit was so cheap, because the West's leading bankers – including those in the Bank of England – wanted to keep interest rates low to stop the bursting of the dot-com bubble from turning into a recession. Mr Frown's fingerprints are on that decision, entirely supporting the "wizard" Alan Greenspan at America's Federal Reserve, just as Lord Blairimort gave unquestioning support to President Bush.

And who should have been regulating the bankers? Step forward City minister, Ed Balls. Oh yes, egged on by the Conservatories. (And of course over the protests of the Liberal Democrats and sage warning of Dr Vince "the power" Cable!) And as the old saying goes, if Mr Balloon had said go "jump in a lake" would the Labour Government have done that too?

So Hard Labour are far from INNOCENT of responsibility when it comes to causes of the crash.

But that ISN'T the point.

Overspending IS A BAD THING.

It is A BAD THING regardless of whether the entire global economy goes into meltdown on your watch.

Hard Labour's BORROWING might not have led directly to money-geddon in 2008, but that absolutely does not mean that borrowing to cover your spending at the height of the biggest bubble in history was OK!

WHO said "no more boom and bust?" Who was proved SPECTACULARLY WRONG about that?

There's a very scary thesis about – called Modern Money Theory (but known as the Magic Money Tree for reasons that quickly become obvious) – that a lot of dangerously stupid people who think they are clever (cough cough Ed Balls cough cough) have latched onto, that says "if you print your own currency you cannot run out of money". Oh BOY are they wrong!

The Chinese famously invented paper money. The VERY NEXT thing they invented was HYPERINFLATION when the Emperor's children thought "if we're printing this stuff, then we cannot run out of money".

[Sidebar: In fact, Great Britain and Americaland HAVE printed a whole lot of money during the recession – the "Quantum of Easing" you may have heard of – and the Eurozone is doing it now. But we just about got away with it because the DEFLATIONARY pressures of the economy IMPLODING kind of cancelled out the INFLATION of blowing up the currency.

But when Mr Alistair "Captain" Darling – ADC to Mr Frown's General Melchett – printed a whole lot of money in 2009, there was a huge spike of inflation in 2010. Coincidence? (Darn it, fairness makes me admit that partly it WAS – food and energy prices also shot up as India and China expanded. But only partly!)

So it's treated like playing with FIRE because everyone but everyone knows that if it goes into a hyperinflation spiral then it's next stop Weimar Germany and literally Goodnight Vienna!]

And yes, it's correct, as they keep saying like it proves anything, the national debt WAS a lower share of national income in 2007 than in 1997 – that's because the debt was at a high point in 1997 and was brought down by following Ken Clarke's Tory spending plans for Labour's first term, and the economy was in a dip in 1997 (post housing crash, pre dot.com) and at the height of a boom in 2007, a bit like saying you're shorter as a share of altitude when you jump off Beachy Head than when you jump of Brighton Pier. It's still not clever to jump off either!

The Tories ran up the national debt in the Nineties to get themselves out of the political and economic hole caused by the Poll Tax and the ERM debacle and the house price crash. And they were JUSTLY punished for their economic incompetence. Why do Labour think THEY should be allowed a free pass for hosing money on THEIR political toys?

So Hard Labour say that it's a "Big Lie" that people say "Labour's borrowing caused the crash".

But that itself IS the lie – NO ONE says that; what they say is that Labour's borrowing (and their decision to put all our eggs in the City's basket, AND their failure to supervise the unscrupulous bankers, AND the climate of borrow today and leave the future to deal with the debts) left us in the WORST position to survive when the crisis hit.

We, Great Britain, had the longest, deepest recession and slowest recovery of the Western nations. But Labour says that was ALL the Coalition cuts, and nothing to do with the depth of the swan dive they had taken. Oh no, honest guv, you can trust us, we're mates with that Russell Brand now.

Labour's economic message is one of COMPLETE DENIAL, a total failure to recognise that they were in any way to blame for the pain of the last five years, or that they would have done anything substantially different, or to come up with any realistically different alternative plan for the next five years. ("The same but with the pain lasting a bit longer and not properly finishing the job," would be the fairest assessment. And the SNP's "end to austerity" is just "the same as Labour but with even longer pain again"!)

When Ed Balls (and those on the left who parrot him and retweet him mindlessly) accuses Master Gideon of ending up where Labour were planning to be in terms of borrowing as much as Labour planned and cutting as much as Labour planned… what exactly IS the accusation here? That Labour wanted the cuts to be deeper?

CHAPTER TWO: TORY FANTASY ECONOMICS

So how DID we end up where Hard Labour were planning to be?

Well, dur! Because Master Gideon's "long term economic plan" lasted about a FORTNIGHT!

It was about that long before the nice people in the Treasury realised he couldn't even work an abacus and gave him some bricks to play with while asking Danny Alexander to take charge. (David Laws, alas, not available!)

(Master Gideon, remember, is the "genius" who engineered the "No" vote in the AV referendum and thereby GUARANTEED that the Tories would LOSE this election.)

Lib Dem policy was to invest in infrastructure. Ooh look, the Coalition invested in infrastructure. Classic Keynesian spending in a recession and the economy started to recover. The quid pro quo of shifting to Plan B was we allowed Osborne to keep CALLING it Plan A!

Which of course makes even MORE ridiculous the Tory campaign of: "let us stick to the path we've been on (by veering off sharply to the right into these dark and trackless woods and I'm sure that's not a cliff ahead of aaaaghh!)".

Labour's total failure in the last five years to come up with ANY economic answers AT ALL, is intimately bound up with the Tory's decision to throw economic caution to the dogs and promise anything and everything to everyone: £7 billion for middle-class tax cuts; £8 billion for the health service; £10 billion for a free pony in every child's bedroom (not actually true); and a surplus on the accounts on top!

And all to be funded out of £12 billion of unspecified cuts to "benefits". But not pensioners. Or children. Or the disabled. Or workers. Or non-workers even… It seems we must give a LOT of money to IMAGINARY claimants! That must be why so many REAL people need to use FOOD BANKS!

But not content with stealing Labour's clothes to spend money we don't have, the Conservatories ALSO want to derail the recovery by clamping down on the people who are making the economy work (immigrants) and the people who are buying what we make (Europe).

Hard Labour may want to blame all the ills of the economy (since about 1799, it would seem) on the Coalition – while giving themselves a FREE PASS for "global events" – but back in the REAL world, we are part of the European economy and instability in the Eurozone – Greece, again, but also the domestic slowdown of our neighbours in France, and even Germany, not to mention the troubling, brooding presence of Vlad the Bad making war in Ukraine – are all bad for business.

All of which makes it a REALLY bad time to be causing EVEN MORE uncertainty over whether we might even stay IN the biggest economy on the planet for the sake of FLIRTING with Nationalism.

(It's possible that by now, the pressures that the Kippers and the Europhobe Tories have built up have reached such a pass that ONLY the explosive release of a referendum will settle them; that's no excuse for having built up those pressures in the first place, and this campaign has only stoked the fires further – all heat and no light at all. And, of course, as we've seen with the twisty-turniness of the SNP when avoiding ruling out a Neverendum for Scottish Independence, one referendum is never enough; it's just a temporary "hit" before the cravings start to build up all over again. Or until you kill the patient.)

As for the GROTESQUE pandering to the Kipper tendency over immigration – indulged in by BOTH Tories and Hard "Controls on Immigration, indeed" Labour – is just economically illiterate. The idea that you could just round up the unemployed youth of the country, ship them off to Norfolk or Morecombe and have them replace semi-skilled labourers like crop or cockle-pickers would be FARCICAL if it would not be so RUINOUS to our wellbeing.

(And the Liberal Democrats got burned on this last time so we are FAR TOO CAUTIOUS when we should be defending the rights of people to live and work and contribute where they wish. Immigrants, after all, are PEOPLE who have been GOOD enough to choose HERE of all places to make lives!)

So the Tories want to undermine our key economic strengths of being open for business; pull savings out their fluffy behinds by cutting benefits to they won’t say who; and at the same time spending like it's going out of fashion on unicorns and magic beans.

So OBVIOUSLY their entire campaign has been about the SNP!

CHAPTER THREE: SCARY MOVIES

It's been the FEAR election, hasn't it?

Hard Labour want you to be afraid for the NHS.

That is, the one Party that has NOT promised the £8 billion extra funding that the NHS's own Stephens report said was needed… and that privatised TWICE as much of the Health Service's services when they were in power than the Coalition ever did… says you should be afraid that the two Parties who HAVE said they WILL fully fund the NHS, and didn't put as much out to the private sector, will instead cut the service and sell it off.

So THAT makes sense.

Meanwhile, the Tories want you to be terrified that Nicola Sturgeon will wrap Mr Milipede round her little finger, that Alex (missing in action) Salmond will lead a tartan army of about 7% of MPs to overwhelm the decent yeomen and backbenchers of this very England.

That is, the one Party that is ACTIVELY campaigning for something that could break up the Union, by destroying the equality of MPs, by giving extra powers to the English only… is trying to tell you that Hard Labour must rule out ANY kind of Coalition… while being IN a Coalition themselves, AND playing footsie with the Kippers.

So THAT makes sense too.

And don't think that the Liberal Democrats fluffy feet are clean in all this – we've been putting out the fear of EXTREMEISM (left OR right) to convince people to try and stay with our nice safe middle-of-the-road managerialism.

That is the one Party that should be radical and mould-breaking and tearing down the walls of the establishment and letting in some light and change is saying "you'll be safe with us, snuggles".

So THAT makes NO FLUFFING SENSE AT ALL! But it's all we got. Along with the red lines and the tuition fees.

Everyone insists on talking about LEGITIMANCY (isn't that a spell from "Harry Potter"?) as though the British Constitution were set in tablets of stone (soluble aspirin, again) rather than a form of INTERPRETATIVE DANCE!

Once again, Hard Labour's MORE STUPID bellows of betrayal come back to bite it on the ARSE! Just as the nationalist chickens of blaming EVERYTING on a Westminster elite that takes Scotland for granted has come to roost in the rise of the SNP to supplant them in all their safe seats North of the Wall border, having spent five years slandering the Coalition as "unelected", they are REALLY in no position to claim a minority Labour administration will have ANY moral right to run the country.

Nicola Sturgeon talks about "legitimacy" only if a government draws members from all the nations of the Union, knowing full well how unlikely it is that Scotland will return Tories (Conservatories OR Laboratories!) in enough numbers to satisfy her test – and as a prelude for a pretext to claim "the Union has broken down; we must have another independence referendum!"

The Tories talk about "legitimacy" being conveyed by what I suppose we might have to call the "Clegg Doctrine" of the Party with the most seats and most votes having best and therefore first claim on forming a government. Of course, the Tories want to take this further and make it the ONLY claim on forming a government. Which is even MORE ludicrous, because they know they're not going to. The Party of the Union and tradition reduced to a dog in the manger.

CHAPTER FOUR: THE FUTURE'S BRIGHT; IT MIGHT EVEN BE ORANGE

If there's one good thing that might come out of this total disaster of an election it's this: the system is just so obviously, patently, totally broken, the result will be so plainly totally unfair and askew from what people voted for, and in such a way that it screws over both Hard Labour and the Conservatories AT THE SAME TIME, that everyone might finally realise it's time to stop using a Seventeenth Century system for the Twenty-First.

In fact, I'd say we should ditch ALL of our red lines for ONE thing: we will give you a government for six months – or a year – during which we will all take part in a Constitutional Convention under a Royal Commission that will let us TOGETHER sort out how we elect our Parliament (and executive, and if we want the one to be a chunk of the other or to separate them like America or France or Germany or, actually almost everywhere else, do); and who sits in Parliament (if we want unelected Lords and Bishops and Rooks and Castles, er) or even WHERE it sits (because they've got to move out of that Thames-side fun-palace before all the wiring catches fire)!

The answer is obvious so it will obviously take a great deal of time and patience to arrive at the obvious answer that we need a federal state with Parliament of multi-member constituencies elected by British Proportional Representation, and a national senate replacing the House of Lords Club.

But it can be done. The Scottish people showed the rest of us that it CAN be done: a proper reasoned – polite! – argument that sorts things out.

And maybe next time we can do this General Election thing PROPERLY.

And meanwhile we will rebuild a properly Liberal Liberal Democratic Party. A Party that exists to bring HOPE to people: a Party that will address the crisis in housing and give people the opportunity to live where they work; a Party that will invest in education and apprenticeships and even the living costs of all the students we now have going to universities; a Party that will clean up our environment, improve the quality of air in our polluted cities, by preparing the ground for switching to clean, all-electric cars (and there's a LOT of work that needs doing); a Party that will tax wealth more in order to tax income a less; a Party that will stop criminalising people for doing things that harm no one; a Party that will put a stop to bullying people for what they eat or how they dress or who they love or where they come from.

And, by Grimond, we might even do it in Government!

NOW, GO AND VOTE!

Day 5190: A Budget of Signposts and Pitfalls

Wednesday Budget Day Election Day Minus Forty-Nine:


So, for the last time in the first fixed term Parliament, Master Gideon did a thing.

Liberal Democrat policies once more featured strongly (and anonymously) in the form of future rises in the personal allowance towards the minimum wage and a promise of an end in sight of austerity.

But most of what he did was mess things about. A little. He cut some taxes a little; cut some spending a little less; made the tax system a little more generous to favoured industries/more complicated with more loopholes. And made several bad jokes. Mostly about the unfortunate Mr Milipede's kitchen arrangements.

When he wasn't cracking our sides with his rib-ticklers, he gave us not so much substance as a full meal, more a sort of taster's trolley to whet our appetites for the shape of Parliamentary things to come.

Most of the actual tax arrangements are, of course, post-dated, setting the sort of traps for a future Labour Chancer– in the decreasingly likely event of there being such a person – just as Mr Allstar Darling did for him, with the "for one month only" 50% tax rate (which did indeed successfully blow up in Gideon's face). The promise of a little less squeezing of the pips on higher rate taxpayers (in the assumption that the Venn diagram of higher rate taxpayers and Tory voters is quite a large overlap) gives a sweetie to his base today that might reward a second time if incoming Hard Labour have to reverse it to make ends meet after the election and post Financial Review. Likewise, the £1000 tax free interest is a giveaway to the "haves" that makes the tax system yet more needlessly complicated (with interest rates at ½% you can "have" up to two-hundred grand in the bank before paying any tax on the interest). And aside from the Chancer's personal delight in being able to string two catchphrases together do we really need yet more money injected into the housing bubble? I'm just surprised he didn't rename the newly in-out-shake-it-all-about ISA his "long term economic savings plan"!

Meanwhile he sketched out a – suspiciously "Coalition flavoured" – direction of travel, adopting that Liberal Democrat pledge to bring an end to austerity and offer a promise of better days to come. His compromise of beginning to increase spending on public services "after four more years" falling mid-way between the Lib Dem position of "after three more years" and the Tory one of "after hell freezes over". Cutting the lifetime allowance for payments into a pension was also a Libby Demmy way of raising a few more tax dollars from the richer end of the spectrum.

This is, as we know, typical Tory strategy: use the Lib Dems as a sort of THINK TANK from Planet Nice to generate socially acceptable policy and use this to detox the brand (while pretending to smile and nod along to the wingnuts, and occasionally unleash a "Go Home Van" to keep them drooling happily).

Just because he's EXACTLY as scary-right-wing as his Romulan haircut suggests, don't ever think Gideon isn't PRACTICAL.

(And, in many ways, another Coalition is actually the best way for GIDEON to keep his own job: if they lose, he'll have to come third to Boris and Theresa in the ensuing leadership bloodbath; if they win on their own, then he might have to think up some policies of his own without Danny to hold his crayons for him!)

And look at how he did bang on about how the Coalition had brought economic success.

Obviously that's a GREAT advert for letting the Tories RUIN it by running the country off the rails on their own!

Being in Coalition has given him GREAT COVER for making it all up as he went along (or in fact letting Nick and Vince and Danny make most of it up for him, and then copying their homework). For all that Gideon the Chancer is a man who's made much political capital out of sticking to "Plan A", it should be apparent that we are by now on something like the "F Plan" (the diet nobody sticks to) or the "G-Plan" (given his wooden delivery). Whatever, he's in danger of running out of letters!

"Plan A" only lasted about a year. That was the "stick to Alistair Darling's disastrous plan to cut all capital spending" Plan. Fortunately the widely underrated Mr Danny managed to persuade Gideon to go on an Obama-esque Keynesian spending spree. That would have been Plan B. Plan C was the disaster of the OMNISHAMBLES budget, quickly walked back to Plan D. The REAL disaster being that budget had contained some attempts to simplify some of the tax system, and there's no way Gideon was going to try THAT again! And even last year we were still on Austerity Eternal of Plan E, but it appears that that didn't test well with the voters.

The only thing "Long Term" about the Conservatories "Long Term Economic Plan" is how long they've been ramming the stupid message down our throats!

Not that Hard Labour have much to crow about.

(It won't stop them. That Mr Allstar Darling was on the radio last weekend crowing about his own last budget – because, as he himself admitted, nobody else would – and saying that the Coalition's plan has arrived us exactly where he predicted the economy would be… slightly overlooking the fact that this must mean his own plan would have missed the target by miles and landed us in much worse straits! And also rather undermining Hard Labour’s case that they’d have done anything at all DIFFERENT!)

But in the absence of having bothered to pay any attention to what Gideon was saying, Mr Milipede delivered the speech he'd memorised anyway. I KNOW it's the hardest job in politics, replying to the budget with no notes or notice, but do you think he could at least TRY to remain on topic?

And if "long term economic plan" is becoming the most BORING big fib in British politics, then surely there's some sort of mutant hybrid of Godwin's Law being spawned on the other side: "the longer a debate goes on the closer to 100% gets the probability of Mr Milipede claiming it will lead to the privatisation/dismantling (the meaning of these terms being indistinguishable to his audience) of the NHS".

So today Mr Milipede invented the Tories "secret plan to fight inflation"…

No, sorry, that's "secret plan to wreck the NHS"; it's just he's so clearly and painfully obviously been watching too many episodes of his "West Wing" box set. It's all that free time he has not doing any work on actual policies.

But PLAGIARISM, Ed? Again?

I mean, bless him, he's only got one trump card, but he does keep playing it… in fact, it looks like he's only got one card AT ALL, at least only one that doesn't say "the same as the Tories but, er, nice" (see also what Rachel the Reever wants to do with welfare and Tristram the, er, Hunt wants to do with Education.) But it's clear that his schoolboy debate club tactics are no good when the country is calling for a STRATEGY.

The worst part of his day was probably the moment where you can see the dawning realisation creep into his sad eyes that the Conservatories are going to win, to beat him, beat him probably quite a lot. It was probably the time when he laughed at the second or third second kitchen joke.

Even until recently I had expected Labour to improve, and the Tories at best to hold their ground in numbers of seats. How could the Conservatories do anything OTHER than go backwards after the PAIN and the AUSTERITY and the BEDROOM TAX? But today, Miliband looked like a loser. No, worse, he looked like HE believed he was a loser, and that sort of thing is INFECTIOUS.

And Gideon looked like HE thought he was a WINNER.

Because Master Gideon's real talent is luck. The sort of luck that lets him get away with it.

Because this recovery isn't really a result of ANY plan – long term or otherwise – by this Government. It's mainly driven by the Saudis response to American fracking, pumping oil like it's going out of fashion (because it is!) driving down energy prices.

What the Coalition has actually done is a series of smart economic tacks across the wind, sheltering most people from the worst of the storm of the recession, while the rest of Europe has been battered by the ongoing Euro crisis, and while the rise of China and India drove a huge spike in energy prices and food prices, all of which delayed any chance of real recovery. We’ve been keeping more people in work – at the price of depressing earnings; keeping down homes repossessed; shifting the burden of taxation a few notches up the income scale. When the Lib Dems were stronger, we also kept benefits rising with inflation.

That doesn't mean that the austerity was WRONG or didn't work. If nothing else, thanks to the Coalition Britain was at least in a position where we COULD take advantage when the wind changed in our favour.

But what we've also done, again largely Lib Dem policies, is laid the groundwork for FUTURE economic strength: the pupil premium, and add to that free school meals, already giving kids a better education; the apprenticeships scheme, not just getting young people into jobs, delivering two million more quality training places, but kicking off a total reappraisal of the worth of vocational verses academic further education; even the hated tuition fees cum sort of graduate tax has delivered more young people from less well-off backgrounds into higher education.

You can, as Cap'n Clegg is fond of saying, still do a lot of GOOD with a bit of goodwill and three-quarters of a trillion pounds!

All of which means THIS is where the fight gets DESPERATE.

Liberal Democrats, we might have thought that we could go quietly into Opposition, sit the next Parliament out, lick our wounds – which will be many – and rebuild our tattered reputation under the cosy leadership of Saint Tim, while enjoying the no-doubt-hilarious spectacle of a minority Labour administration giving new definition to being propped up with a (lack of) confidence and supply (of demands) from the SNP.

WE MAY NOT HAVE THAT OPTION.

The Tories are already planning how to wreck democracy: that infamous "black and white ball" they held, that wasn't to raise funds for the General Election. They've already GOT the funds to fight the General Election. THAT was to raise funds for the SECOND General Election.

Remember, our slogan is "Stronger Economy; Fairer Society; Opportunity for All".

It's NOT because we'd deliver a fairer society than the Tories and a stronger economy than Labour. (Though we would. But that's OBVIOUS.)

It's because we'd deliver a FAIRER society than LABOUR and a STRONGER economy than THE TORIES!

Labour: the Party of I.D.iot cards, 90 day detention, dog whistles on immigration, cutting benefits for young people, introducing ATOS, introduction Work Capability Assessments, introducing tuition fees (yes, that burns), cash for peerages, cash for Bernie Eccleston, Iraq… no WAY are Labour the Party of "fairer society".

But equally, the Tories: the Party of throwing our relationship with our single biggest trading partner into doubt, the Party of toying with GBrexit, the Party of slashing immigration and all the benefits that come with it, the Party of slashing benefits(!), the Party of tax cuts for Dead Millionaires (promised again, this week), the Party of blowing dirty great wads on Trident… no WAY are the Tories the Party of "stronger economy".

People, if you DON'T want the LUNATICS to take over the asylum, if you don't want the drawbridge pulled up and the curtain run down on five centuries of Britain being the greatest trading nation on Earth, we CANNOT let the Tories win! Labour are about to surrender. It's up to the Liberal Democrats.

No pressure, then.

In this post:

Master Gideon = Gideon known as George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer
Mr Allstar Darling = Alistair Darling, his Labour predecessor
Rachel the Reever = Rachel Reeves, Labour Shadow Welfare Minister
Tristram the Hunt = Tristram Hunt, Labour Shadow Education Minister
Mr Milipede, reverting to Mr Miliband = Ed Miliband, probably-doomed leader of the Labour Party
Cap'n Clegg = Nick Clegg, Deputy Prime Minister and Leader of the Liberal Democrats
Mr Danny = Danny Alexander, Liberal Democrat Chief Secretary (i.e. second in charge) at the Treasury
Mr Vince = Dr Vince Cable, Liberal Democrat Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills and widely respected as Lib Dem economic spokesperson and stand-in leader

Day 5085: Master Gideon’s Mission to Mars – Some Thoughts on the Autumn Statement

Wednesday:


Do we really want another stimulus for the housing bubble? Really?

Raising some taxes is good (bankers and Starbucks, though… well, how amazing brave to pick those targets).

But hasn’t Chancellor Osborn sworn he wasn’t going to raise any more taxes? I dectect the hand of Danny Alexander; it’s of a piece with his efforts to tackle tax evasion and reduce opportunities for tax avoidance.

The extra funding for the NHS appears to have come from… underspedning in the NHS. Master Gideon as Baron Munchausen will thus clear the deficit by pulling himself up by his own bootstraps.

And there’s a distinctly Janus-faced feel to some of the Conservative’s pronouncements, crowing over our outpacing of other European economies while simultaneously whining about how this makes us too attractive to those waves and waves of immigrants, coming over here fixing our plumbing and so on.

Equally it seems very off to boast that our GDP is going up but our contributions to the European Union are going down in the same statement where you complain that Amazon’s profits go up but the tax they’re paying go down. Sauce for the Christmas Goose, you would have thought.

Ed Balls has some good questions, but no answers.

Why is it that the tax receipts have fallen short of expectations? Ignore the flashy rabbit-from-hat Stamp Duty give-away; this is the central question of the Autumn Statement. The Chancellor boasted that he’d be reducing the deficit in spite of falling revenue, but that’s not the same as having an explanation. Could it be that Mr Balls is finally right about something, and below inflation wage increases have hammered the Treasury’s income too?

I remain convinced that having more people in work but with lower wages across the board is a fairer way of sharing the pain of economic disaster than the ‘Eighties approach of dumping the bottom three million on the dole; nevertheless, it does point to Balls having a point, and it plays well to crosslink Labour’s “cost of living crisis” narative to the Tories failure on their own terms to cut the deficit.

And while it might be fairer, it might not be good politics to give everyone a resentment against the government instead of just a minority who you can marginalise. Labour have clearly been trying a number of formulae – “squeezed middle”, “one nation Labour” whatever it was Mr Milipede forgot to say this year – to try and saddle this resentment to their political cause.

(It’s ironic that the non-Labour left have largely undermined this by shreiking and carrying on that marginalising a minority is exactly what the government is doing – helped, it must be said, by the Tories’s rhetoric and Iain Drunken Swerve being allowed to continue to exist.)

But low wage inflation isn’t the whole story. The dramatic fall in the oil price – generally welcomed by the Chancellor as a good thing, not least because falling energy prices makes Labour’s energy price freeze policy look rather silly – has a knock-on effect in terms of treasury income as it reduces the fuel duty, VAT, petroleum tax, supplementary charge to corporation tax and even the climate change levy.

(And while we’re at it: building a whole load of new roads is hardly in line with the “greenest government ever” line, and rather more school of Mr Balloon’s “drop the green carp”. And, as Jennie reminded us, probably counter-productive – if you want to improve travelling by road… spend the money on public transport. The number of road users is a function of price and convenience versus the alternative, so you would reduce congestion by making it preferable for people to tavel by train. The government appears to be doing the opposite. I suppose it might drive receipts from petrol taxes back up.)

Plus the UK’s economic growth has not yet translated into a boom in consumer spending, again forestalling a surge in VAT receipts at HMRC. In fact, largely the growth seems to be being directed into the housing bubble, which brings us back to point one.

Even so, granted Mr Balls has some grasp of some of the cause of the government’s income not coming up to scratch, it’s still a bit of a leap from there to “and Labour will fix this by…[insert policy when we think of it]”.

George Osborn has some answers that need questioning

Which leaves us clinging to nurse in fear of something worse. Though what could be worse than nurse being revealed as Master Osborn in a pinafore?

The Chancellor’s promise to clear the deficit by 2018 – although more realistic than Labour’s “sometime” in the next Parliament aspiration – is undermined not so much by his already having failed at this once (seriously, giving the finite nature of British Parliament’s you have to start out with a plan for one term at a time; given the slow reveal of the scale of the problem, the Coalition’s cautious approach balancing cuts with stimulus – again at Danny Alexander’s urging – has trod a fine line that has ended up closer to the Liberal Democrats timescale for cutting the deficit than the Tory’s and seems to be paying off, at least at the moment), but much more by the frankly fantastical idea that almost all the remaining cuts can come from the benefits, largely in-work benefits, paid to working age people.

Employment is already at record high levels. (This is a good thing!) But without some unforeseen huge increases in wages – again, see Mr Balls point – it is difficult to see any substantial ability to cut the support we need to give to keep these jobs viable.

On Sunday, on the Andy Marr show, the Chancellor was challenged on the way that spending cuts have fallen largely on not merely “welfare” but specifically on working age benefits. Pensioners have largely weathered the economic storm protected by the Coalition’s triple lock. The Tory Treasury team have clearly war-gamed this one, as Master Gideon came out with a very convincing-seeming answer: “Oh but I have hit the pensioners – I’ve taken half a trillion out of pensions by raising the retirement age”. Well, that’s quite an impressive hit against your core vote, isn’t it?

But take a moment to think about it: raising the retirement age does not affect existing pensioners; it’s actually another blow to those of us in work saving money by putting off the day when we will be able to claim back some of the fortune we are currently paying in.

And of course these cuts depend largely on the Tories being in power after the next election. Vince Cable – who has been quietly getting on with the business of being business secretary: increasing investment to manufacturing and boosting apprenticeships (notice the National Insurance cut to help more there) – has written to the Office for Budget Responsibility to ask them to point out how the Tories’ “no tax please were the British Tea Party” approach is wildly at odds with the Liberal Democrats’ fairer, balance tax and cut policies.

Overall, this was a typically theatrical financial moment from a Chancellor who has learned all his lessons from Gordon Brown. The splash of largess to catch the headlines; the smoke and mirrors over where the money comes from; some nasty medicine in the details; the hidden hand of the Liberal Chief Secretary trying to steer us a little away from full-throated Thatcherism and a little towards more social justice.

This is the course we are committed to now: from here on it’s full tilt towards the General Election and (subject to Nigel Farage and the Tory suicide-squads on the back benches derailing them onto Europe again) this is the ground that the Chancellor has laid out. It is, as President Clinton used to say, the economy, stupid.

And believe me, George Osborn is the economy… and stupid.

Day 4735: If the Economy Is Getting Stronger Why Are the Queues at Food Banks Getting Longer?

Wednesday:

The latest figures show that unemployment has fallen to 7.4%, the lowest since 2009 (i.e. now lower than Labour left behind), and an email from Mr Danny Alexander arrives to celebrate that there are now thirty million people in work.

Inflation, down to 2.1% is also at a four year low.

So “Yay!”

But there’s also been a huge rise in people getting emergency food from food banks – as highlighted in today’s Opposition Day debate in the House of Commons.

We need to cast some light on this debate; we need some understanding of what’s driving this increase.

At the moment it’s all too easy for the Left to cry “Evil Tory Government” as though that was all the explanation necessary (and for some of them, all too often, it is); while the Right respond with “poor people have made poor decisions”.

(In fairness to Gove, he actually said “…so we need to help them”; that is, he meant to be patronising, not dismissive.)

The Tory responses in the debate – essentially to blame it all on Labour – won’t wash. Worse, they’re a cowardly approach, denying that the Coalition has changed anything.

The actual cold, hard, statistics – employment, inflation, interest rates, or my personal favourite the gini coefficient that shows that for the first time in thirty years, and uniquely among Western nations, inequality in the UK has actually fallen (as a result of the Coalition’s changes to taxes and benefits pushing the tax burden up the income scale) – all point to the UK having worked well together to mitigate the harm of the recession and to be moving into recovery.

But people don’t believe statistics.

Or rather, they’ll believe a statistic that says the use of food banks has trebled, but not ones that say the economy is growing.

And with inflation still running ahead of wages it’s easy to see why: a lot of people still have to live with their pay frozen – yes, including MPs’, despite what you’ve heard; IPSA’s recommendation still only being a recommendation so far, but massively unhelpfully adding to the prevalent (and probably untrue) “them and us” narrative. By spreading the pain so broadly we’ve avoided the horror of huge spikes of unemployment that the recessions of the Eighties saw – unlike the Thatcher governments, the Coalition hasn’t “written anyone off” – but at the expense of a whole lot more people feeling the impact of 2008’s economic disaster.

This is why Labour get traction from their “cost of living crisis” rhetoric. It’s a cunning way of turning the Coalition’s “we’re all in it together” into “we’re all hurting” (particularly when tossing in the odd sly reference to the “1%” who somehow aren’t in it together), while stealthily dropping that “Plan B” that they’ve been banging on about since 2010. (And how has borrowing more and super-taxing the rich worked out for France, by the way, Mr Balls?) What it doesn’t disguise is that Labour still only have one policy and that it won’t work. (Hence Ed’s… er… difficult time responding to the Autumn Statement.)

Hysterical commentary from Labour supporters, cherry-picking this food bank statistic and saying “we haven’t had food parcels since the Second World War so things are worse than they have been since the Second World War” simply is not credible in light of the overall picture. We can’t compare the use of food banks now to how they were used in the recessions of the Eighties (or Seventies) because they simply didn’t exist then. In fact, as an extra-governmental route for the “haves” to help the “have-nots” they’re a perfect example of Mr Balloon’s “Big Society” (though the Conservatories have dropped that as quietly as Labour dropped Plan B).

But we cannot in conscience ignore this evidence either.

It’s no good denying that some of the decisions of the Coalition government have caused genuine hardship, either directly by cutting people’s benefits (through the benefit cap, through the second room bedroom tax, through continuing to employ the evil of ATOS) or indirectly by the increase in decisions to freeze or stop payments (decisions often later overturned).

Actually, Mr Iain Drunken-Swerve’s DWP (the Department of Workhouses and Prayer, a ministry well known for their accurate use of statistics) does deny that decisions to freeze or stop payments have led to more people using food banks. Which comes back to begging the question: what does?

The most urgent question has to be are more people in poverty?

(Let’s not mess about with terms like Food Poverty and Fuel Poverty as though people have a meaningful choice between the two; if you’ve not got enough to meet your basic needs you’re screwed one way or the other so what’s the difference.)

There are a number of fairly hefty policies in place that are supposed to stop this: Labour’s minimum wage and tax credits; the Coalition’s triple lock on pensions; Liberal Democrats also managed to strong-arm the Chancellor into indexing benefits in line with inflation through the difficult years when it was highest.

So are these failing? If so which, and how, and how do we stop them failing?

How much of this increase in food bank use genuinely reflects an increase in poverty? Is it possible that there are other factors? I can think of a couple of alternative, not to “explain away” the rise, but to try to think about there being more to the picture.

The most obvious would be people who were previously choosing “eat” over “heat” now have another option: instead of deciding that they must have food and then shivering under a duvet, they can now pay for the heating bill and go to the food bank and get some emergency supplies. What has happened is that an “invisible” poverty has become a visible one.

Another is what you might call the “NHS” effect. If help wasn’t there, people wouldn’t use it. Since its inception, NHS use has grown almost exponentially even as the nation has become fitter and healthier. Similarly, as more food banks are introduced, and more people become aware of food banks, so more food banks are used by more people.

It’s possible that that interpretation is even supported by the authors of that “use of food banks has trebled” statistic: the Trussell Trust, a food bank provider – in fact they describe themselves as “a Christian charity that partners with local communities to provide practical, non-judgemental help to people in crisis”. (Although that’s not an interpretation they would put on it as they’re not as non-judgemental about the Government, whom they blame for the “scandal” of their own success.)

Their accounts (available on the Charity Commission website) say that they’ve demonstrated that their franchise model is “scalable and sustainable”, which suggests that they’re not so much answering an acute need as having found a necessary niche.

(Incidentally, almost all the stories of food banks seem to stem from an October press release of theirs. Though oddly, in researching this, I came across virtually the same story – same source, the Trussell Trust, same number, 350,000 people needing food parcels – but from May relating to 2012.

I’m not saying it’s wrong; it looks a bit weird but it’s probably just a coincidence when the October story compares April to September 2013 with April to September 2012, while the May story is comparing April to March 2012 with April to March 2011. As they say: they helped as many people in six months this year as they did in their whole 2012/13 year. I’m not surprised they have to help more people in Winter when the choice between heat and eat becomes acute.)

Stories about the increase in the use of food banks serve as publicity for food banks; so the Trussell Trust’s press release is not just impartially informing us of the situation, it’s also advertising their product. (Indeed, Tesco, for example, are now encouraging people to donate a shop – at Tesco of course – to the food bank, so turning them into advertising for Tesco!)

You could also say that if people in need are discouraged by shame from looking for “hand outs”, hearing that many more people are using the food bank reduces that disincentive, in a way “permitting” the people who need the food to go and claim it.

Let me emphasise though that just because I can hypothesise alternate explanations for some of the rise in food bank take-up, that doesn’t mean that they’re right. That’s why we need to be asking questions.

I don’t want to rain on the economic parade, but Labour and Labour supporters have latched onto this as “A Big Thing”, and I can’t say that they’re wrong to do so. I know that it’s a big cause for concern, for me and many other Liberal Democrats. We’re concerned for the human tragedy, obviously, but also because it seems to fly in the face of statistics that say the economy is getting both stronger and fairer.

Policy ought to be evidence-based (and unlike Labour I won’t just grab a statistic and say “so there!”), and we need to understand what this piece of evidence is telling us, so these are questions for which we need an answer.