The Obscurer

Wednesday 13th February 2008

Pump It Up (When You Don't Really Need It?)

The BBC managed to get awfully excited by yesterday’s inflation figures; both Five Live and Newsnight led on the news that the Consumer Price Index had risen, from 2.1% to 2.2%, while the more widely trusted Retail Price Index had also gone up, from 4% to 4.1%. Cue doom and gloom all round.

But is that it? Inflation up by 0.1%, leaving the CPI at just 0.2% over the government’s target? If the inflation rate had risen by any less it wouldn’t have risen at all. Jackie Long on Newsnight preceded her report by stating, “in some ways, today’s official inflation figure could have been read as a bit of good news”. “But we decided to run with the story anyway”, I interjected, finishing her sentence for her. And fair enough; no doubt the guests were booked in the studio, the bulk of the report had been filmed, and we don’t want to be wasteful when there are some potentially straitened times ahead.

I don’t want to sound complacent, I appreciate that the economy is in a tricky position just now, and that while inflation, unemployment and interest rates are still historically very low there are storm clouds on the horizon, with concerns over commodity prices, the knock-on effect of the slowdown in the US, and the amount of personal debt in the UK economy; but still, talk about talking ourselves into a recession before it has even happened.

There are a couple of things I could do with being answered, though, by anyone out there with the requisite knowledge. Whilst I acknowledge that the state of the public finances is a concern in itself, what is all this talk bemoaning the way it is restricting our ability to use fiscal policy? For years monetarists have told us that we shouldn’t use fiscal policy at all, even if we are in a position to do so. That always seemed a bit daft to me; after all, changes in taxation have a fiscal effect even if you don’t want them to. Now, however, not only is fiscal policy seen as desirable but almost magical, as if any tax cuts or increases in public spending will only have the wished for effect in stimulating demand without adding to the inflationary pressures that are already a worry and inherent in the world economy. So what’s going on there?

Secondly, if part of the concern at the moment is the high level of personal debt and the bubble in the housing market, themselves a consequence of the low interest rates we have enjoyed for so long, is it really a good idea to cut interest rates still further in response? Isn’t that a bit like reacting to the sight of an over-inflated tyre that is leaking air and looks as if it is about to burst by pumping in even more air, when really we should be looking at releasing some of the pressure through the valve? In other words, rather than calling for a frantic cutting of interest rates and considering fiscal stimulus packages, shouldn’t we just accept that a slowdown will have to happen at some time, that it may well be happening now, and that rather than strive to prevent it or delay it just so it can wreak even more havoc another day we should prepare for a downturn, perhaps even for some sort of recession, and we should be putting our efforts into engineering as soft a landing as possible?

Or have I just demonstrated why my career in economics stalled abruptly on my graduation day?

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Friday 8th February 2008

A Penny For The Old Guy

A couple of years ago, when talking about Guido Fawkes and his role (or lack of it) in Mark Oaten’s withdrawal from that month’s Lib Dem leadership race, I signed off by saying that “with luck our paths won’t cross again”. Well, no such luck unfortunately, and while I would love to take DonaldS’s advice and “just ignore him”, that is easier said than done if you read many of the blogs I do. It can be just as hard to escape Guido elsewhere, be it making a tit of himself on Newsnight, or being credited by Dianne Abbot on This Week with breaking the story that brought down Peter Hain (true, if by “breaking a story” you mean adding a footnote to something the media had been running with for days.)

Guido is at best a knob, someone who ruthlessly hunts down political scandal by regularly checking his in box and tossing his newfound trivia and hearsay the way of the world wide web, all the while dressing up his gossip-mongering as some sort of libertarian master plan to bring down the political class. Well, he had to do something when the serious projects where he masqueraded under his real name such as Global Growth went nowhere. Alongside his failure to break the Hain story, Guido’s successes include the aforementioned erroneous claim regarding Oaten (which only works if you equate paedophilia with homosexuality), something about a love-child triangle amongst some journalists that is of no interest to anyone other than the individuals involved, and his revelation that John Prescott shags around a bit. If that latter story were an attempt to undermine politicians and show them as a separate class of “others” then I would consider it a failure, adultery being a fairly common human fallibility. Certainly Guido’s muckraking doesn’t have the desired effect on me; reading his blog and the comments therein usually makes me sympathise with a group of people I otherwise have little time for. Far from destroying the political class he is merely an echo chamber for the already disaffected; I doubt he has changed anyone’s mind on the matter of our public servants.

So why am I wittering on about him, then? Good question. I have recently been following this story regarding Tim Ireland who made some allegation about Guido on his Bloggerheads site; I’m not bothering to repeat them here because they are the least interesting facet of the affair. Tim gets criticised by his opponents sometimes as being obsessive, and worse; I prefer dogged myself, although I admit he can take things a bit far at times. Anyway, the allegations were straight forward enough, so it would have been a simple matter for Guido to have just refuted them; so why didn’t he? Instead he reached for his lawyer, a tactic he has used before.

Fair enough you may say, and perhaps this shows that Tim’s attack was the straw that broke the camel’s back, a consequence of the running sore that is his and Guido’s relationship. But then Sunny Hundal at Liberal Conspiracy revealed that he too had had the frighteners put on him, in his case simply because his site had linked to Tim’s original post. Sounds as if someone is getting a little out of hand. All this is reminiscent of the sort of tactics employed by Schillings, with the libel laws being used not to put a stop to lies, but to silence free speech, and coming from someone who once complained that “the libel laws in Britain have long been overly restrictive and frustrated Guido’s efforts…Guido has a few things he has been itching to write about some very rich people.”

Perhaps he just meant richer people. We are all hypocrites to a greater or lesser extent, but even so it is still rare to find such a cut and dried example of the art. I have a lot of time for the more thoughtful libertarians out there who are dedicated to their high ideals of freedom and liberty, but by his actions Guido seems more the instinctive, knee-jerk sort, who dreams of ending state coercion not so it can guide us from the world of the dead hand to that of the invisible hand, but just to ensure that he can pay less tax while power resides with those with the deepest pockets. Or perhaps I am showing my ignorance of what libertarians really stand for.

All of which is a long and roundabout way of saying that, for what it’s worth, should Tim and Sunny require the support of a blog that hardly anybody reads, they’ve got it.

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Tuesday 5th February 2008

Raise A Toast

I bring good news for those of you fortunate enough to be within spitting distance of a Sayers or Hampsons bakers.

Introducing new “Toast Plus”, a bold and startling innovation. Just in case, whether through failing eyesight or sheer laziness, you are unable to read the accompanying photograph (left), “Toast Plus” re-imagines the humblest of breakfasts by offering the delighted consumer the possibility of “thick cut toast with a choice of toppings”. Interested? Better still; each topping retails for a mere 15 pence each.

I’ll level with you. I really don’t think that coming up with the concept of selling toast and toppings is worthy of branding the whole experience “Toast Plus”, still less of designing a little accompanying logo of a stylised half-eaten slice of bread. I always thought that toasting some bread and slapping on some spread and jam was a pretty open-sourceish, public-domainy kind of thing. Just what have the bakers done to claim it as their own? Should they really be troubling the patent office? Sure, they boast of their toast being “mega thick”, but that is an option only denied most of us because of the tyranny of the sliced loaf that some of their fellow baking brethren have foisted upon us.

I am not disparaging bakers in general, I acknowledge that they are vital to the production of bread, which is an important ingredient in toast; but if we allow one of their number to get away with this, then we can only imagine what could happen next…

Air™A refreshing blend of Nitrogen and Oxygen, with just a hint of Argon. Perfect for that early-morning pick-me-up, when taken copiously whilst exercising, or for just everyday breathing.

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Thursday 31st January 2008

Same Difference

It is tempting to say that the two main political parties are almost identical to each other these days. Tempting, but wrong. There are still some significant differences; for example, I would rather set myself on fire than vote Conservative, whereas I think a mere scalding from a just-boiled kettle would be preferable to voting Labour, though only just. That’s quite a gulf.

But this squabbling between the Tories and Labour over who first thought of reviewing the police stop and search laws seems a sign of the times. It is not as if this is the first occasion that something like this has happened; there were similar complaints last year over the parties’ inheritance tax plans, and the accusations that one party is stealing the other’s clothes go round and round. There needn’t even be any policy in the first place for the parties to mirror each other; re-defining the term “brassneck”, the Tories have been accusing the government of dithering over Northern Rock since September, all the while shuffling around without a coherent thought to call their own on the subject. Well, that is until recently, since the odd shadow junior minister has now been allowed to appear in the media and, when pressed and pressed on the matter, eventually been permitted to mumble “administration”, sotto voce, in the hope that no one hears.

What a change around. Perhaps it is because my political consciousness was forged and battle-hardened during the Thatcher years, but I still find this all quite peculiar. During the ‘eighties it was all but unheard of for Labour and the Conservatives to agree on anything, and often their disagreements were quite vicious. At that time any bad economic news was greeted with fury on the Labour benches – quite unlike the smug and gleeful hand-rubbing you currently sense from the Tories – and if a single proposal from either party had appeared to mimic a policy of the other you can only imagine it would have caused revulsion, soul-searching and self-flagellation on the part of the policy makers.

It is undoubtedly a good thing if political parties don’t reject a policy out of hand and out of dogma simply because it is part of the opposition’s manifesto, but I’m not sure we are any better off nowadays. Rather than seek to present their own firmly held beliefs in order to win the hearts and minds of the electorate all that seems to matter now is winning a handful of votes in a handful of swing seats; and yet all the while each party still instinctively opposes whatever the other party says, only on ever more spurious grounds. How can the government prevent people from being daft enough to leave a laptop in a car? How can the opposition prevent it in the future? The parties fight it out in wheezes and japes, through proposing unsolicited terror legislation in order to characterise the opposition as being weak on security when they’re not, or by asking a question at PMQs just a few days before a report is to be published on the very same subject – knowing full well that the prime minister can’t pre-empt the report – purely to portray him as someone who can’t answer a straight question.

All this rather than doing the job they are paid for doing; to introduce only the laws that are necessary, or to effectively hold the executive to account. It seems to me that Derek Conway’s sons aren’t the only ones to have received public money while failing to do the parliamentary work we should expect of them.

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Thursday 24th January 2008

Think For A Minute

Peter Hain has resigned from the cabinet, following the news that the Electoral Commission, which had been investigating the late declaration of £103,000 in donations to his Labour deputy leadership campaign, has referred the matter to the police. I bet the cops can’t wait to get cracking, but in their haste I do hope they don’t get sidetracked by the whole case of the Progressive Policies Forum, where many of the donations are alleged to have originated, or “the think tank that hasn’t done any thinking”, as it is probably better known.

So? Can anyone tell me what’s suspicious about that? Isn’t that usually the score? I’m struggling to see the problem here. Since when has a think tank, any think tank, ever thunk? A misnomer if ever there was one, I’ve always thought their purpose is to commission reports that will bolster and support their pre-existing policies; that rather than actually think, their job is to start from a conclusion that concurs with their political philosophy and then work backwards to decide what questions should be being posed, like some sort of ideological Jeopardy. I’m not saying it’s an easy thing to do, joining the dots like that, that it isn’t hard work, and time consuming; but can it really classify as thinking?

Well? Am I really so very, very wrong?

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