Storms and Teacups

I made a mistake at work. I made a mistake and for three whole months nobody noticed. Yesterday, somebody sort of noticed; they were confused, because they didn’t understand what they were looking at but, called in to help, I found it and fixed it... and then happily admitted that it was my fuck-up. Had I been a politician... or Katie Hopkins, I would have been pilloried on social media, tarred and feathered in the national press and hounded from my livelihood, the snapping jaws of angry commentators at my heels.

Humans make mistakes. It’s what we do; it’s actually how we get good at stuff. Everything is simultaneously both more simple and far more complex than it seems from the outside and it’s only by prototyping, failing and trying again that we have ever achieved anything. If at first and all that... Pretty much every minister, in every administration, from any party in any given year has fucked up. Given that they rarely get the chance to stay in office for long, so demanding are public expectations and so destructive a force is politics, that it is a wonder anybody manages to get good enough to achieve anything satisfactory at all.

So, Spreadsheet Phil’s fiscal calculus turns out, on examination, to be not to everybody’s taste. But what a circus has surrounded what has now been concluded was a failure to check what the party to which he belongs had committed to at the last general election. If that’s true – and it seems highly unlikely on the face of it – it was a fuck up, but then 2015 is an entire political era ago. So what? He has cancelled what was genuinely a pretty insignificant policy in order to quell a potential revolt at a time when a low-majority government needs the support of its back benches. The ‘optics’ may have been clumsily managed but it’s hardly the major political nightmare some people so desperately want it to be.

Labour MP Angela Rayner tweeted “Philip Hammond announces full U-turn on National Insurance hike for self-employed workers, the Tory budget continues to fall apart.” Which is somewhat odd as she is on record as having been spitting mad on behalf of the self-employed in her constituency when he announced the policy. Is this really the job of opposition? To boo and jeer when absolutely anything is announced by government and then to boo and jeer when, on further reflection, a proposal is rejected or reversed? We hate you for suggesting it and now we hate you for acting on our hate?

Storm still comin'...

Meanwhile in Holland, the governing party losing a few seats, but not as many as expected and the Freedom Party gaining a third more, but not as many as hoped is being portrayed in all the media as some form of rout for Geert Wilders. The focus shifts from Phil Hammond’s so-last-week affair to – in the view of the more lefty press – the utter defeat of the ‘far right’. Is it any wonder we get the politicians we do? Has nobody been noticing all the attention given to misinformation and ‘fake news’ and sheer, unadulterated, hyped-up bullshit that spews from the partisan press on all sides? As one storm subsides another gathers and every now and then comes a storm big enough to change everything. Brace yourselves.

Strong enough for you?

“Tax cuts for the rich!” goes the familiar refrain. It is Labour’s only response to a budget that had to be. It has been their response to every budget that has not been their own. What would Labour do, then? Why, they would create a workers utopia where everybody wins. All of which makes it decidedly odd that they never thought to do this during their thirteen years in government. Possibly their last period of power for a generation because apart from a few diehards and a clutch of young fools, people aren’t buying it any more.

“But Labour cares!” they insist, not like those nasty Tories... who you voted for... again. (Isn’t it curious how, whenever the left loses the argument, the voters didn’t know what they were voting for?) Of course the caring answer is to take even more of people’s hard-earned cash and give it to others who haven’t worked as hard. When leftist governments are broke it’s the workers they come for, every time, despite their rhetoric in opposition. Capitalists are evil until the socialists want their money and the most accessible capitalists are ordinary people, trying to get on in life; the fat cats they like to demonise are usually well out of reach.

As for the ‘attack on working people’ portrayed in the popular press, the increase in National Insurance contributions for the self-employed to near-parity with the rest of us is practicably the embodiment of the very fairness principle which Labour claim to espouse. Anyway, given that a huge proportion of the self-employed – I’ve been there – ‘forget’ to declare every scrap of income and over-claim business expenses as a matter of course, any actual rise will be absorbed by the normal process of ‘adjusting’ accounts to suit how much tax they want to pay. To insist otherwise is wilful blindness to reality.

Throughout my life I have been bemused by the newspaper treatment of budgets. I have never known a gasp-inducing, life or death budget; most people shrug, assume it will make them slightly worse off, then carry on keeping their own treadmills turning. But see the press and the words ‘fury’ and ‘unleashed’ and ‘cruel’ and ‘heartless’ are liberally sprinkled throughout the tabloids with only slightly more sober reportage employed in the serious papers. Most of the people, most of the time, don’t run their lives on the basis of being a few quid – and it is a few - up or down over the course of a year. Cumulatively, yes, there may be a gradual increase in tax take from NI as more people go self-employed, but individually, meh... 

What is far more important it how the government approaches Brexit and beyond and there are far more serious issues than the pound in your pocket. If we can get past the negativity of the persistent talking down of our prospects by remainers-in-denial it should be possible to imagine a positive future which is entirely within our control. Trade will sort itself out – profit-seekers always find a way – what is more important is how we use the ability to govern ourselves again. Post-Brexit, we really can become stronger, in more ways than money.

Strong enough to care properly for our genuinely weak and sick and elderly. Strong enough to resist the mindless pull of ever greater diversity. Strong enough to tolerate the multiculturalism we already have, but also to tame it; turn it British and dial down the ‘vibrancy’. Strong enough to reform education by selecting and improving and giving youngsters the tools to flourish. Strong enough to properly punish crime but offer genuine redemption and rehabilitation.

Time to crack on with it...

Labour doesn’t want any of this, no matter what they say; without dissent they have no purpose. In a day or two the budget will be forgotten, as it always is, by the vast majority of the population. It’s really not that important; we have far greater challenges ahead and it is about time we got on with tackling them. 

Autumn Statement

Why do we put ourselves through the annual – recently bi-annual - ordeal of suspending our natural inclination to pragmatism for a day in which everybody has to pretend to believe in A) what the Chancellor of the Exchequer says, or B) the opposite of what the Chancellor of the Exchequer says? The big guns of the Office for Budget Responsibility is wheeled in to present grandiose projections of what might happen in the future, always supposing the world doesn’t end tomorrow, after which everybody gets up and A) agrees with the OBR’s projections, or B) flatly refutes the OBRs outrageous assumptions.

The economy, one might paraphrase, is an ass. It is an ass, donkey-wise, in that it is driven by simple desires and it is an ass, sphincter-wise, in that it has the propensity to shit on anybody at any time, unless you have taken the wise precaution to stock up on economic Imodium®. Of course the notion of saving for a rainy day has taken many knocks of late given the ultra-low interest rates and the dangerously uncertain nature of investment in shares, whose value is determined not by reality but by perception.

For a start, there is the sheer generalisation of all the forecasts, assuming that everybody will behave in the same way and not seek to act independently of groupthink. Actually, that’s not so bad an assumption - proportion of people who do actually manage to go off-grid is vanishingly small. But you don’t need to decouple from the economy altogether in order to exert some control over it. There is talk of falling consumer demand; surely a large part of that is down to simple caution. The numbers don’t need to be very large for the cumulative effect to be noticeable.

If every family – say 30 million households – spends £2 a week less, (less than a stupidly-named coffee in Starbucks) that’s £100 per year and thus, at a stroke, £3billion fewer pounds-Sterling per year circulating in the economy. And if an outcome is that Starbucks branches close down, consumers have lost nothing but the spurious notion of choice. Oh, but wait, they have exercised choice in quitting the daft habit of queuing with hipsters to collect an overpriced cup of brown liquid to then wander the streets with. (I never did understand the attraction of portable coffee as a status-signalling fashion accessory.)

But, you object, what of the employees of those now empty cafes? Well, tough, but it may just have the knock-on effect of making those now ex-employees seek more fruitful and useful employment. It might cause more parents to encourage more kids to work harder at more useful subjects than ‘Being Everybody’s Soulmate Studies’ and in a few years Chancellor Hammond’s longed-for increased productivity might actually come about. As gently as you might want to be with others it is my experience that a kick up the arse is often a far better way of focusing the productive mind than groups hugs and clearing-the-air meetings; everyone’s input is not of equal value.

How the budget works...

Of course, everything bad is blamed on Brexit and everything good is just – phew – lucky happenstance. In reality the budget is never either good or bad, it is a simple fucking about with numbers, a political prestidigitation to make believe that somebody, somewhere has their hairy mitts on the levers of economic power. If the media gloom over ‘the cost of Brexit’ manages to achieve one thing – the big kick up the arse that persuades more people to take responsibility for their own budgets, rather than imagining government can do it for them – it will have been worth every penny.