Skip to main content

Dear Prudence...

The OECD - the club of relatively rich states has spoken unusually forthrightly about British government finances. In particular it highlight "unique risks' that the government now faces: unable to cut taxes in the face of the gathering downturn.

After the early years of Brown-Blairism, most of us got pretty sick of the endless mantra of "prudence", "prudence with a purpose", and "an end to boom-bust". We saw it for the flannel that it was, and understood that much of the so-called prudent margins for error were simply accounting tricks. Meanwhile, by dint of such "off balance sheet" tricks as the PFI and the PPP, the overall level of government obligations (as opposed to recorded government debt) has grown explosively. Debt is up, but guarantees and other obligations are now truly enormous- just the contracts related to defence are now rather larger than the annual defence budget. It is also difficult to see how contracts are being policed when we see such appalling screw-ups as the UK Chinook helicopter contract seem to be repeated on a regular basis.

Well after hubris, comes nemesis- and now Brown has precisely no room for manoeuvre. Yet what is particularly galling is just how much of this overall increase in the size of the state has been wasted. It is not just defence where we can see "gold standard cock ups". Agriculture, education, health care have all seen gigantic sums of money wasted in cancelled contracts, unnecessary procurement or poor contract execution.

The state is probably too unwieldy as it is, but the elephant trap that Brown fell into was to trust the system too much -and of course to believe his own rhetoric. After all Prudence was never as popular as she was proclaimed to be.

In the words of Lennon and McCartney:

"Dear Prudence, let me see you smile
Dear Prudence, like a little child
The clouds will be a daisy chain
So let me see you smile again
Dear Prudence, won't you let me see you smile?"

The answer, seems to be... No, not any more.

Comments

Newmania said…
The systemic problems of the enlarged state were mostly arrived at when the Liberal party were criticising from the left if at all.I `m sorry , I agree but you have to say the hard things as well as the asy things.
Anonymous said…
Just for you Cicero. From your Dear Leader:

"“the UK is enjoying the benefit of currency flexibility and the devaluation of the pound against the Euro is giving a stimulus to manufacturing.” Doesn’t sound like someone who wants to join the single currency, does it?

Ah you know what they say about Sinners eh. I think we Eurosceptics might have to summon a Te Deum for this.


Lepidus

Popular posts from this blog

Post Truth and Justice

The past decade has seen the rise of so-called "post truth" politics.  Instead of mere misrepresentation of facts to serve an argument, political figures began to put forward arguments which denied easily provable facts, and then blustered and browbeat those who pointed out the lie.  The political class was able to get away with "post truth" positions because the infrastructure that reported their activity has been suborned directly into the process. In short, the media abandoned long-cherished traditions of objectivity and began a slow slide into undeclared bias and partisanship.  The "fourth estate" was always a key piece of how democratic societies worked, since the press, and later the broadcast media could shape opinion by the way they reported on the political process. As a result there has never been a golden age of objective media, but nevertheless individual reporters acquired better or worse reputations for the quality of their reporting and ...

The Will of the People

Many of the most criminal political minds of the past generations have claimed to be an expression of the "will of the people"... The will of the people, that is, as interpreted by themselves. Most authoritarian rulers: Napoleon III, Mussolini, Hitler, have called referendums in order to claim some spurious popular support for the actions they had already determined upon. The problem with the June 2016 European Union was that the question was actually insufficiently clear. To leave the EU was actually a vast set of choices, not one specific choice. Danial Hannan, once of faces of Vote Leave was quite clear that leaving the EU did NOT mean leaving the Single Market:    “There is a free trade zone stretching all the way from Iceland to the Russian border. We will still be part of it after we Vote Leave.” He declared: “Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the single market.” The problem was that this relatively moderate position was almost immediately ...

Liberal Democrats v Conservatives: the battle in the blogosphere

It is probably fair to say that the advent of Nick Clegg, the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, has not been greeted with unalloyed joy by our Conservative opponents. Indeed, it would hardly be wrong to say that the past few weeks has seen some "pretty robust" debate between Conservative and Liberal Democrat bloggers. Even the Queen Mum of blogging, the generally genial Iain Dale seems to have been featuring as many stories as he can to try to show Liberal Democrats in as poor a light as possible. Neither, to be fair, has the traffic been all one way: I have "fisked' Mr. Cameron's rather half-baked proposals on health, and attacked several of the Conservative positions that have emerged from the fog of their policy making process. Most Liberal Democrats have attacked the Conservatives probably with more vigour even than the distrusted, discredited Labour government. So what lies behind this sharper debate, this emerging war in the blogosphere? Partly- in my ...