That said, with a big majority Labour were always going to be able to ram things through with little proper discussion. This has been especially true on the economy, because Brown played a clever trick of combining policies popular with his own party with policies popular with the wider electorate. That meant keeping the economy growing while also increasing spending and redistribution. As anyone who keeps an eye on their personal finances will tell you, you can’t keep spending forever.
Despite Mr Brown’s fiscal rules, this country has been piling up on debt during a period of strong global growth. Our national income has been growing, but the spending grew faster. We are now at financial breaking point just as the economy goes into recession when we should have a nice nest-egg saved up to paper over the cracks while the downturn bites hardest.
It was excellent to see Cameron going on the offensive over this on Andrew Marr this morning. He pointed out that after fourteen years of growth, Britain now has the worst public finances of any industrial country. And Gordon calls this prudence?! Attacking Mr Brown is not enough, though. Cameron needs to do three things: what he would have done differently (easy: not spend as much and not let the housing/debt bubble run out of control), what he would be doing now (such as setting up a different regulatory regime to protect taxpayers from bank failures and pushing through planned legislation to protect savers) and tell us what he would do in the future to make sure this sort of thing won’t happen again (giving the Bank of England more say over the regulation of the banking system, proper fiscal rules). To his credit, in his Marr interview, Cameron got this message across very clearly. No “post neo-classical endogenous growth theory”, he spoke in plain English.
As I posted before, I think we need to get back to a plain English financial system where we live within our means as a nation and as individuals. We shouldn’t be relying on the Chinese trade surplus to finance our housing market, we shouldn’t be relying on outsourcing and immigration to keep inflation under control, we shouldn’t be putting our baubles on the 0% credit card to be paid off by the increase in the price of our homes. We should be running a public budget surplus while the economy is growing so that we pay down debt and prepare for the next downturn. Gordon’s rules were supposed to ensure that, the question is: why did they not? Gordon positioned himself as the architect of a brave new financial world, he can hardly be surprised when people point the finger at him now it’s gone wrong.
“As I posted before, I think we need to get back to a plain English financial system where we live within our means as a nation and as individuals.”
That would be wise, but I doubt it’s achievable now. Far too much emphasis has gone into the ‘have it now, pay for it later’ message, throughout the business world and the institutions of government.
There’s also been too much pushing of the ‘you have a right to feel good about yourself’ attitude, with the underlying message of ‘get credit if you can’t afford the things that will make you feel good, everyone does it’.
And, if we’re going to ‘live within our means’, will Cameron cancel vanity projects like the Olymmpics or the NHS computer projects, or the ID card? I don’t think so, somehow…
I know what you mean Julia, but at some point even the most die-hard buy-now-pay-later people run out of credit. I would rather the government and role-models started getting the message out that it’s not sensible sooner rather than later.
As for ID cards Cameron has promised to scrap them. He might not easily be able to scrap the NHS computer but he could easily say that no more of these grand schemes will be started under the Tories.
the new Tory proposals are pretty strong.
With a good promotion they easily top Labour’s crisis management strategy.
Blue Eyes, I think ‘plain English’ is a principle which needs to find a home in more places that just economic policy. The Irish polls said the number one reason for the No vote on the Lisbon Treaty was that the electorate do not sufficiently understand what’s in it. Were it written again from the ground up in plain English (or even plain French, or plain Latin, or plain anything for God’s sake) it might be received more warmly – of course we might all find out what it actually says then…
So, yes – plain English finance. Plain English education. Plain English foreign policy. Plain English
technology policy. Excellent principle on which to start – far easier to be ‘plain English’ than it is to be ‘transparent’, after all!
JuliaM, Cameron’s promised to scrap ID cards – that was one of the first commitments he ever made. Why would anybody cancel the Olympics? (and exactly how would the government cancel the Olympics…)
I think we need to get back to a plain English financial system where we live within our means as a nation and as individuals
That plain English principle also struck me I was thinking about how this all actuially happendd and it was via proces of misunderstanding and converting simple things into complicated things.
Brown would be right at home
Pointedly, although Cameron has committed to the discontinuation of ID cards he has not committed to the destruction of the ID database currently being created and on which the whole project depends. Accordingly, any future government would be able to resuscitate the ID card system with (relative) ease on the back of an existing all-embracing (if currently dormant) database.