Tag: Liz Truss

The day after election day

Elections are emotional occasions. And referenda: I remember lunchtime drinks after a night watching (literally, as a teller) as voting slips were unfolded in 2016. The empty glass. This time, a chunky bacon bap and a full cup of coffee at the local village hall.

As for the big-timers. Exultation: arm-waving and Sweet Caroline if you’re Ed Davey, big big smile if you’re Keir Starmer. Glad-I’m-out-of-it chuckle from Jacob Rees-Mogg. (He may be fooling us.) Hiding on the age of the stage, in a state of shock, thoroughly deserved, if you’re Liz Truss.

But then there’s Nigel Farage. He’s going for Labour, he says. He thinks their support is wafer-thin. That he can win folk round with his rabid ‘Britain is broken’, left-behind, anti-immigrant narrative. He’s now in parliament. He has a mouthpiece.

I’d like to disregard him, but he is a superb maker of noise. A favourite word of Labour in its early days was fellowship: Starmer is part of a long tradition. Compare Farage. A man without a sense of history. He pitches one group against another. He feeds off hostility behind that over-wide smile. He’s at home with Trump. Half-truth comes easily.

Contrast key words in Starmer’s Downing Street speech yesterday: ‘stability and moderation’ (two words working as one), and ‘service and respect’ (again, two as one). Compare the provocateur that Sunak had become, pushed by party and media.

One interesting stat: more than half the new intake of MPs are new to parliament. In 2019 only 21.5% were new. In every way, we’ve a clean sheet. Farage and his small team won’t be the only newbies, though they may shout more. 

Also catching my eye. Larry the cat has now over thirteen years outdated five Tory prime ministers. The green of Angela Rayner’s trouser suit walking to 10 Downing Street. (She is Stockport. Her, and my, home town. I’m proud of her.) And Wes Streeting lost in a sea of nautical metaphors. Don’t sail when you’re tired!

Back to the essentials. How will Tories respond now? Penny Mordaunt, speaking when she lost her seat: make it a broad church. Robert Buckland and Grant Shapps are of similar mind.

Invite Farage in, match him with Braverman, and the Mail and Telegraph, and we will have division, and some pretty wild misreporting. If Starmer can push through his agenda, then Farage and the Tory far-right will have less and less to rant about. The far-right want there to be battle-lines. Play their game, put our liberal democracy into play, and the battle would become existential.

A not-so-warm welcome for our new PM

As we change prime ministers, a few thoughts.

Let’s start with integrity. Journalists at the self-described ‘right leaning’ GB News weren’t like the BBC, ‘because at least they got their facts right’. This was Liz Truss a few weeks ago. A throwaway line from one of the candidates in the Tory leadership debate. No more than that? Or Truss, in pursuit of Tory member votes, peddling a ‘fake news’ agenda.

Emily Maitlis just now setting up her own podcast with Jon Sopel is good on the subject. Politics she argues has changed fundamentally and journalism and broadcasting haven’t caught up. ‘We haven’t realised that when people say fake news they are trying to disorientate you and demean your work, so they can ignore any scrutiny you put them under.’

I jib at calling the new incumbent ’our PM’, just as I did with Johnson. Playing the ‘fake news’ game is, let’s not beat about the bush, pretty base. Not that she would understand for a moment the deeper implications of what she said. She’s doing no more than her predecessor did during the Brexit debate. Plus ca change…

Another cheap line from Truss: the jury is out on whether ‘Mr Macron is Britain’s friend or foe’. A quote from the poet Ian Duhig’s ‘Fauvel’s Prologue’ applies:

‘De Gaulle would snigger; he well knew
The tactic of imperialist Brits
Who ruled by inculcating splits.’

Tories of the current dominant persuasion have this preference for enmity over amity, for two fingers rather than a handshake.

Facts are one thing. What about opinion? Maitlis is also good in this subject. The BBC back in Brexit time tried to balance argument. But their notions of balance were politicised.

‘Balance is a word we always used at the BBC but balance is complicated. If it takes me five minutes to find ten economists who think Brexit is a terrible idea, and five hours to find an economist who says it will be absolutely brilliant, then having one of each side isn’t balanced.’

The Daily Telegraph carried an interview a few days ago with someone who might claim to be ‘the one economist’. (Though to be fair there are a few hanging out at the Institute of Economic Affairs, Policy Exchange and the Adam Smith Institute – low-tax ‘free-traders’ all.) I’m thinking of Patrick Minford, one-time advisor to Thatcher. He rails against the Treasury’s short-term rules ‘in which borrowing mustn’t happen’.

But with massive support about to be announced for energy bills, £100m or more, and built-in increases in health and social care expenditure, and defence, and other areas, which will push borrowing to an even high level, maybe unsustainable as the Institute of Fiscal Studies has warned – how and where do we cut?

Borrowing as a proportion of national debt was 41% in 2007 and 74% in 2010, and it’s 99% now. But Minford remains cool. ‘Solvency doesn’t mean we should be paying off debts tomorrow. It means a long-term strategy in which state spending is consistent with our tax revenues…’ Minford argues for the importance of infrastructure, health and education, ‘but ‘state spending has to be controlled’.

‘The NHS has to be made more efficient.’ One good example. For Minford and far right opinion more generally this is an ancient mantra. And we can all agree. But they see it in market terms. The competition-led Lansley reforms under Cameron were a miserable failure. So where now for ‘efficiency’. The focus should have been then and must be now on the better integration of health and social care. What chance Truss?

A recent Telegraph leader laid into Matthew Taylor, CEO of the NHS Confederation, for highlighting the impact of the energy crisis on the NHS. Focus on reform and leave the energy crisis to others was the deeply unhelpful conclusion.

Taylor, policy advisor to Tony Blair, author of a key report for Theresa May on employment practices, and for fifteen years chief executive of the Royal Society of Arts, is one of the people to get behind to help reform the NHS, someone with a skill set and experience way ahead of anything the government, or a Telegraph leader writer, could offer.

Policy Exchange, a right-wing think tank, reminds us of the wider context. ‘Public spending that yields clear economic and social returns, including spending on the welfare state, enhances the performance of the economy, but beyond a certain point the cost is greater than the return and government spending begins to crowd out private sector economic activity and the tax base that public spending depends on.’

It’s an old-as-the-hills mantra. ‘Crowding out the private sector.’ And it might have applied in the days of mass nationalisation. But the state these days works, and has to work, in different and much more productive ways – working with the private sector.

Ultimately, we’re back to the old small-state low-tax trickle down shibboleths. Free traders argue that recent Tory governments pushed up taxes and obsessed about borrowing. The wrong targets they think. They argue for a diametrically opposite approach. At the same time they miss altogether the real focus, which has to include maximising opportunities in markets close to home – far more important than the Antipodes. Also, the Chinese aren’t a bunch of free traders. And the Americans have a vast internal market. We’re 70 million, and on our own. We need to get real.

Let’s see how the next year or two pan out. I think Truss and her team will find that they are radically disconnected from realities. Also, that they simple lack the ability to carry their policies through. They’ll jib at Civil Service resistance – from people who have to be cautious because they know the implications of foolishness.

They’ll also increasingly divorce themselves from the levelling-up cohort within the party. To argue that levelling up has to come from improved economic performance will not cut the mustard. The regions have been promised some evidence of jam now, or in the foreseeable, and they won’t get it.

Truss is also on record as saying that people outside London don’t work hard enough and, going back to a book she co-authored in 2012, that British workers as among the ‘worst idlers in the world’. ‘If you go to China it’s quite different. There’s a fundamental issue of British working culture.’ Yes, we are falling short compared to our neighbours on measures of both growth and productivity. I’d agree absolutely we need a more entrepreneurial spirit in this country. But blame the workers??

From all I’ve seen I have to conclude that Truss is simply unqualified for the job, a woman lacking the experience and the ability, and connection with realities, that we have a right to expect from our prime ministers. The same applies to her cabinet, a right-wing rump which has self-excluded the wisest and brightest in the wider party.

Do I (and so many others with me) misjudge? Time will tell. But I thought I’d put marker down, against which I can judge her in future time.

The new buccaneers

A curious piece, tongue-in-cheek, but neat, in a recent edition of The Economist.

‘Mr Johnson understood intuitively that the financial crisis had ended the neoliberal consensus…No mere Trumpian wrecking ball he is trying to reshape globalisation in the mould of Britain’s buccaneering maritime past, rather than in the European Union’s bureaucratic pettifoggery.’

Buccaneering. How do you ‘buccaneer’ these days?

Container ships could be the new buccaneers. Where once we had tea clippers and cargo ships. We’ll need a bit of the old aggression, against Chinese and indeed the Americans if we’re to capture markets, and of course against our old friends, the Europeans. Piracy would help. Conquest shouldn’t be ruled out.

Or if that’s beyond us, overseas markets will least welcome a bit of the old imperial chutzpah. It will be as if we’d never been away.

The EU’s ‘bureaucratic pettifoggery’. But isn’t it what successful free trade requires, a bit of pettifoggery? Small print. A few regulations, so we’re all on the same page. In olden times, we wrote our own. It was easier then. (Yes, regulations need to be reined it: it was always thus.)

You need the high seas and a big reach if you’re to buccaneer. But ‘big reach’, also known as globalisation, isn’t really that fashionable at the moment, beyond our shores. Buy American is the watchword over the pond. China is focusing more on its internal market, and on its Belt and Road for which there’s no equivalent here in the West. China on its doorstep bludgeons with overwhelming economic power. We negotiate as best we can.

We had our own strong internal market, just twenty miles away over the Channel, twenty-eight countries strong, but we gave it up, and put stop-gaps and confusion in its place. And hide our confusion with hyperbole.

Liz Truss’s article on the Politico website back in March is a fine example. A few quotes:

‘We will work together to reshape the rules of global trade to reflect our core values…The U.K.’s values-driven policy has already delivered successes in trade negotiations….Just as free trade made the U.K. great in the 19th century, we can be even greater still in the 21st by becoming a global hub for services and digital trade.’

We’re back to being … buccaneers. And nowadays the world’s awash with buccaneers. We could find ourselves with brief spells of comparative advantage, where we outperform our rivals, or corner a niche in the market, only to find we’re overtaken as other countries seek to build advantage for themselves in the same areas, which could be digital, medical or services. As a mature economy we specialise at the high end. As other economies mature, so will they.

Free trade in the highly fluid modern world can’t remotely be compared with the 19th century as a driver of community prosperity. That was built on certainty, and the confidence born of certainty, and it was even then a long, rocky, risky and highly uncertain road. Politics in the wrong hands deals in simplicities. History hits you hard with a reminder of just how extraordinarily complex is the reality.

Strong communities and long supply lines can be a poor mix, with little connection between businesses tucked away in business parks and nearby towns and villages. Community in its widest sense requires shorter, more guaranteed lines of supply, with industries which can sell strongly into local markets, or into UK-wide markets, or indeed into EU-wide markets. We need a different and wiser mindset, which focuses in developing our UK and European markets, and which, while promoting trade with China, Japan, India and the ASEAN countries, avoids obsession.

We’ve also had Johnson’s 15th July ‘levelling up’ speech.

‘We are turning this country into a science superpower, doubling public investment in R and D to £22 billion and we want to use that lead to trigger more private sector investment and to level up across the country so that we have hubs or research and innovation like the one we are in today which is actually driving battery technology.’

All this is admirable. But is this government competent to deliver? Have we any reason save their bluster to believe them? Our best hope lies in the local mayors of cities lie Manchester, Birmingham and Bristol, also Teesside. Labour and Tory – they do have the competence.

We simply have the wrong people in power to get close to addressing, let alone solving, the issues of our time. We’ve over the last twenty years seen the disappearance of men and women of calibre from our politics. Johnson has ensured that the old high-calibre politicians won’t touch his party. On the other side, Corbyn didn’t help. The way back isn’t proving easy.

Distant rooftops

I watched Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats last night, via YouTube and The Show Must Go On.  I loved it – for its music, its singing, dancing, choreography, characterisation. The whole things knocked me out.

I’m taking it as my stepping-off point on a very different subject. From musical theatre to hard-core political theatre.

There’s a revealing short article, part of a feature on trade, by Liz Truss (Minister for Distant Rooftops) in the current edition of Prospect.

She highlights the many long international supply chains ‘with little resilience to shocks’. The answer is, she believes, ‘not isolation and self-sufficiency – neither of which are credible in the interdependent world we live in. Instead we should broaden our range of trading relationships, so we are not limited to just one country, bloc or continent. We can then begin to achieve the kind of diverse supply chains that will safeguard us against future crises.’

This is what you’d expect from one of the authors of that cheerful libertarian document, Britannia Unchained, and trailblazer of the dream world of Global Britain.

(I’m reminded of Dick Whittington, a cat from another time and place, seeking his fortune – but this time in China.)

I’d like to pitch against that, as a down-home example, Preston’s policy of prioritising local suppliers. Two radically different paradigms. Preston’s is compatible with global trading relationships. But not with a libertarian free-market paradigm, whereby you source the cheapest goods and services, regardless of origin. Boris Johnson has indeed singled-out Preston for back-handed praise: recognising its success but making it clear it isn’t the way forward for the country.

(Boris, our absentee prime minister: ‘Whatever time the deed took place,/Macavity wasn’t there!’ Only, in Boris’s case, he too often hasn’t been there in the first place.)

It should be self-evident, but sadly isn’t to the current Cabinet, that local and international need to work in tandem.

Diversified supply chains, even if they are achievable in Truss’s romanticised world, will not safeguard us against future crises. The further we reach beyond Europe, and the more we’re exposed to issues of distance and transport, and all the problems that arise from political and military conflict, the higher the levels of risk.

The latest edition of The Economist is on the same page, though not quite the same tack, as I am: ‘The pandemic will politicise travel and migration and entrench a bias towards self-reliance. This inward-looking lurch will enfeeble the recovery, leave the economy vulnerable and spread geopolitical instability.’

No-one is arguing against global trade. The reverse. Pursue it as hard as we can. But it’s essential we secure our base, and that is our local and national economies – and indeed European economies. That need not be ‘an inward-looking lurch’.

I shouldn’t push parallels with Cats too far. But – secure your own rooftop, then your wider patch. Don’t rely on Mr Mistoffelees, aka Dom Cummings, to magic your way out of trouble.

An obsession with global trade is especially bizarre from a government which secured its election on the basis of an appeal to the country’s insular instincts. But that’s taking us back to old arguments.

‘… a new day will begin,’ as Elaine Page sings. It won’t come the way we’re going now.