Omnishambles, Chloe Smith and a Government without grip

On the internet today, in Britain at least, it is impossible to avoid comment about Economic Secretary Chloe Smith’s disastrous attempted defence in Newsnight last night of the Government’s decision not to implement a 3p per litre increase in fuel duty, due this autumn. The consensus is that she was utterly shredded by Jeremy Paxman, and completely failed to defend the tax change.

I’ve commented before on the unravelling of George Osborne’s budget proposals – drawing on my experience of working on Budget vehicle tax proposals in my Civil Service days.  Responding to Tory MP Douglas Carswell’s claims that the Civil Service had got hold of the Budget process, I concluded that that Budget process was so political that this was unlikely.  Since then I’ve seen a blog post by former Treasury official and adviser (and former colleague on a couple of Budgets) Damian McBride, whose explanation is closer to Carswell’s; that the politicians had lost their grip.  On the basis of yesterday’s events I conclude that Damian’s  thoughts were rather closer to the mark than mine originally were.

What was obvious from that interview was that Chloe Smith was appallingly badly briefed – something that suggests that the Treasury machine was caught badly on the hop.  The inability to specify beyond a vague reference to Departmental underspends where the money was coming from was an extraordinarily basic error; it’s difficult to believe that the Treasury machine, used to defending hard decisions and with a deeply-ingrained horror of unfunded commitments, could have swallowed that one.  That in turn suggests that this decision was a last minute political caving-in to a populist campaign run by the Murdoch media. As late as lunchtime yesterday, according to Newsnight’s Paul Mason, the Conservative line was to rubbish the deferral of the tax rise as opportunism.

The politics surrounding this decision are strange.  Labour chose to make this issue a point of attack, doubtless influenced by their old friends at the Sun.  It’s odd because  the recent falls in fuel prices have made the policy easier to defend; but in any event a cut in a tax which is overwhelmingly paid by the better-off (fuel use is closely linked to income) at the expense of spending on services which are more likely to be used by those on lower incomes is a curious position for Labour to take (even if it’s far from atypical – all of a piece, for example, with Labour’s backing for a council-tax freeze in Brighton at the expense of services).  And in real terms this is a tax cut – as Paxman pointed out repeatedly in the interview, if the Government is serious about deficit reduction, what business has it doing this?

And, yet again, a high-profile Budget measure is abandoned – this one at considerably greater cost than the others. I cannot think of any precedent for a Budget that has been so completely shambolic. If a Labour Chancellor had done this, you can only imagine the headlines.

The answer surely lies with Osborne, and the way in which he embodies what looks like the defining characteristic of this Government – that it wants to do politics, not government.  In a week when we have seen Cameron speculating in a wholly evidence-free way about ending housing benefit for the under-25s, based on a narrative which posits the hard-working against those on benefits when he knows that the vast majority of those receiving that benefit are in work, this is one more example of the bigger omnishambles at the heart of the coalition; the abandonment of evidence in favour of ideological narrative.  Labour Chancellors like Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling – and indeed old-style Tory Chancellors like Kenneth Clarke – knew that the detail mattered.  Osborne, who substitutes arrogance and entitlement for intellect and application, appears incapable of understanding this.

At the heart of all this is a simple question. In the midst of the worst economic crisis in living memory, can Britain really afford a Chancellor who prefers to play at politics than getting to grips with his job?

Tories are trashing their core supporters too

On the eve of the Tory Party conference, the anger among their opponents is very much – and rightly – focussed on the impact the coalition is having on the most vulnerable in society.  Unemployment, cuts in jobs and services, privatisation of the NHS, the bullying of the sick and disabled by Atos.  Single mothers are set to lose 20% of their overall income; of course the Left (an ambiguous term, I know) is bound to focus on what looks like a systematic attack on the old, the poor, the sick, women and children.  Tory populists respond by measures to allow faster driving, more bin collections, easier sacking – no Tory prejudice is left unstroked.

In the face of all this, it’s easy to overlook that the poor and vulnerable are not the only victims.  One of the most interesting outcomes is the way in which Tory policies are having a really devastating effect on some of the party’s most loyal supporters; older, hitherto affluent people, living in comfortable suburbia or in the nicer bits of the countryside, often on fixed incomes from private pensions, or from savings.  They’re people who have all the accoutrements of financial comfort, but are increasingly finding life very difficult.

Income from their savings has fallen drastically – and many of them are living off the sort of pension provision that was gambled away by speculating bankers before 2008 (there’s a trope about Gordon Brown’s raids on pension funds, but the total cost of Brown’s dividend tax is about £5bn per year. The cost of the bankers’ crash of 2008 to pension funds is likely to be around £500bn, and that’s before you consider the costs of the contributions holidays that companies regularly awarded themselves).  Many of them are people who were economically active in the Thatcher years, and heeded the calls to privatise their pension provision.  Now they’re facing huge increases in costs of living – double-digit increases in fuel costs – while their income stagnates and falls.  Ironically enough, these people are the backbone of charitable giving, the authentic heroes of the Big Society – but not for long as their income falls and they need to cut back to pay for their daily necessities, or prepare for an uncertain future of NHS cuts and private sector provision.  Some will still have children at university, or who cannot afford a home and are still living with them.

And even their environment is being threatened, as Tories eschew the obvious answer to Britain’s housing crisis – a massive social housing programme focussed on brownfield sites – to allow their friends and donors in the property business to build developments unhindered by considerations of sustainability or local impact on sensitive environments.

In other words, these stalwarts of Tory middle England are being trashed.  No, it’s not the same as the daily struggle faced by the low-paid, or those dependent on benefits as a result of disability, or single mothers. After all, we’re talking about people who own their homes outright and still enjoy a quality of life that is beyond the dreams of the poorest in society.  But the fact that people in their later years are having to count the pennies for the first time does not make their worries any less real.  It’s a telling comment on contemporary Conservatism that the Tory party no longer speaks for these people – in Cameron’s Britain, it’s the financiers and bankers who trashed the economy in 2008 who matter.  It emphasises that for all its attempts at populism, the Tory Party really only speaks for a tiny, financially-empowered minority.

Will these scions of middle England rise up against the party that has deserted them? It remains to be seen.

The Hounding of Gordon Brown

The latest allegations that the Sunday Times sought to obtain details of Gordon Brown’s personal finances, and in particular that it sought to publish information that his son Fraser suffered from cystic fibrosis, add a further twist to a crisis that, for News International, is spinning further and further out of control.  What possible public interest could there be in publishing details of a small boy’s illness simply because his father is a senior politician?  Whatever one thinks about the rights of journalists to inquire, it speaks much for the moral compass of those involved.

But there’s something particularly significant about the targetting of Gordon Brown.  It is difficult to think of any British Prime Minister – any senior British politician, really – who has endured as much personal abuse as Brown.  All that nastiness and innuendo – about his alleged temper tantrums, the suggestions that he was mentally unstable and socially dysfunctional.  There are a lot of Blairites who were quite happy to ride the tabloid tiger who should be consulting their consciences very carefully.

In my time in the Civil Service I only met Gordon Brown once – when he was still Chancellor.  Some of the stereotype was true – Brown in a big meeting with officials was concise and direct to the point of brusqueness, a rather louring presence digesting the evidence that was put in front of him, inpatient of lengthy explanations of things he already knew.  There was no bonhomie (and having seen what some Ministers think passes for putting their officials at ease, one could be grateful for that).  It was also obvious that he had a natural authority and formidable intellectual command.  It was that authority and command that, in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash, helped guide world economies through the immediate dangers.

And yet the abuse was profound – why?  Brown, put simply, is not a tabloid person.  Formidably clever and without what papers regard as empathy – presumably on the grounds that a smooth facility of Blair is some sort of political ideal.  And I think that is what the tabloids hated most about Brown – his cleverness.  Blair was prepared to engage with the fictions of the tabloid world-view – the belief that celebrities matter, that what matters is individuals not society – in ways that for Brown would have been simply dishonest.  This was not a man who could deliver lacrymose homilies to People’s Princesses, or look comfortable in t-shirt and shorts at Berlusconi’s villa – Brown was the geeky kid always with his head in some book or another.  The sort of kid who has been the sport of bullies since time immemorial, and we know there’s no bigger bully on the block than the Murdoch press.  Brown was not, in the sense of the tabloids, a regular bloke; therefore he was there to be taken down.

I’m tempted to say that Brown should wear the abuse of the tabloids as a badge of honour,  but then I’ve never had the serious illness of my child used as tabloid fodder.  What is clear that the treatment of Brown, as much as the treatment of the family of Milly Dowler, shows why we deserve news media that are so much better.

Tabloid newspapers delude themselves that it as their role, to use the old Quaker phrasse, to speak truth to power; but the role of News International, it becomes increasingly clear, is to spread lies and innuendo to the powerless, to keep them in their place. And, above all, it seems, to bully and harrass those who do not conform to the warped values they promote.

Solving the puzzle of gullibility

A great little post from nobel laureate Paul Krugman on his New York Times blog today asks why the pundit class are so gullible:

Looking at the House budget proposal, in all its ludicrousness, makes me wonder about an enduring puzzle: the gullibility of so much of our pundit class.

In the time I’ve been writing for the Times, I’ve watched my colleagues in the commentariat, en masse, agree that:

George Bush is a nice, moderate guy, who will work in a bipartisan way.

George Bush is a heroic leader, who has risen to the occasion.

The case for invading Iraq is overwhelming; only a fool or a Frenchman could fail to be persuaded by Colin Powell.

John McCain is an independent-thinking maverick.

Paul Ryan is an honest, deeply serious thinker who really cares about the deficit.

The tax cut deal paved the way for a new phase of bipartisanship.

The Ryan plan sets a new standard of seriousness.

In each case, any educated citizen with internet access could quickly see overwhelming evidence that these things weren’t true. And you would think that people would learn something from the repeated failure of these kinds of consensus.

And yet LinusCharlie Brown keeps trying to kick that football, over and over again.

It wouldn’t take long to pull together a similar list for the UK:

• We are facing an unprecedented level of public debt, necessitating severe cuts in public expenditure;

• Public expenditure was allowed to run out of control in the by NuLabour and we now have to pay for Gordon Brown’s profligacy;

• Cutting people’s benefits will encourage them into work;

• Public servants are highly-paid feather-bedded wasters who can expect to move from cosy jobs-for-life into early retirement on gold-plated pensions;

• Bureaucracy is a public-sector phenomenon;

• Health and safety legislation has proliferated to the point where it is undermining the competitiveness of the British economy, and is preventing British people from enjoying their traditional pastimes;

• Mass immigration has destroyed jobs and lowered pay;

• Privatisation and competition lead to greater efficiency and productivity;

• Political correctness has gone mad;

• The Liberal Democrats are a left-of-centre party exercising a profound influence on government, protecting the vulnerable;

In all of these cases, ten minutes with Google will be enough to dispel the myths.  Yet they persist – despite the fact that in many cases they directly conflict with the day-to-day realities of life.  Of course, much of it has to do with a mass media that has a distinct social and ideological agenda, and in the BBC a public service broadcaster that has lost sight of its responsibilities.  And it’s easy to cry “false consciousness” and to disappear up the fundament of cod Marxism, and the reality is much more subtle than that; it’s a mix of ideology and the way in which political discourse has become disengaged from daily reality.

And that detachment lies at the heart of what looks to me like a real crisis of democratic legitimacy, when political discourse loses its grounding in day-to-day reality and those with wealth and power both promote and exploit that.

Gordon Brown's educational recipe: more school sport

Following on from Britain’s record-breaking Olympic performance, Gordon Brown has issued a call to bring back competitive sports in schools. Some will be surprised to learn that it has ever been away; but then one feels that this is just one more example of New Labour’s easy acceptance of the tabloid view of the world.

Whatever the cause, the substance is clear. Thousands more sports teachers are to be trained. More money for school sports. The time spent on sport in schools to be expanded from two to five hours a week. The result, according to Brown: better opportunities for sport, fewer smokers, less obesity (not that any of this is really about competitive sport – but again one has to respect the tabloid myth).

Sport and ideology

What fascinates me about this is the stark contrast with other areas where – rather more objectively – our school system isn’t really delivering. I’m thinking in particular of music, and of Britain’s atrocious track record in learning languages.  So why sport? 

At one level, the cynic might suggest that the combination of easy populism and the public school ethic is uniquely attractive to New Labour – and, on top of that, there is Brown’s rather desperate attempt to forge a British identity.

But there’s more to it than that, I think.  The salient feature of New Labour’s approach to education seems to me to be its economism.  Where once Labour politicians talked about the development of the individual – Ellen Wilkinson, Labour’s first education secretary, talked of her aspiration to a “Third Programme society”, in which the cultural riches that had been the preserve of a privileged minority, would be available to all – now the rhetoric is all of economic competitiveness, of developing skills.  One can easily see New Labour’s approach to schools as being places where children sit in uniform behind desks, being prepared for a lifetime of sitting in uniform behind desks, obedient and well-drilled.

And the language of sport is strikingly similar to that of free market capitalism.  Indeed, many of the more desperate cliches of the workplace – “picking up the ball and running with it”, to take one – are lifted directly from sport.  The discipline, the rule systems and the urge to victory are all there; it’s also a very masculine, testosterone-fuelled vision of the world, and I think that is all of a piece with what New Labour has come to stand for. More school sport, the Olympics in London – it all fits very well with an agenda, conscious or not, of turning us all into disciplined and focussed consumers and workers.