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The Budget

“You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it. You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that, my dear friend, is about the end of any nation..” So said Abraham Lincoln, and it’s as true of this week’s budget as ever it was.

The facts are stark: the national debt stands at £1.4 trillion, so that every child that is born from now onwards will be born owing £22500. The International Monetary Fund stepped in within hours of the Chancellor’s speech to contradict his very optimistic forecasts and predict a £23 billion black hole; The Government’s borrowing is more than all governments from the start of time up to 1997, and the interest payments on it alone will exceed the entire transport budget; our debt is the worst of any developed nation; our unemployment figures are rising faster than any time in history – the plain fact is that out Nation is on the brink of bankruptcy, but the Chancellor and Prime Minister, no doubt fearful of the Election which must happen by next May, simply refuse to admit it. They are in denial.

Surely it does not take an economic genius to tell them that the first step towards curing a financial crisis of the kind we are now facing, is to start by admitting that it is there and then facing up to the possibly politically unattractive solutions which will be necessary. Mr Darling used wholly fictitious figures to predict that we will be out of Recession by the end of this year -a prediction scotched by every single commentator and widely mocked by the newspapers; he pulled simply laughable growth figures for subsequent years out of mid-air in a desperate attempt to predict that our finances will be back in balance by 2018 – while most people agree that it will take a generation to pay off his profligacy; in an absurd piece of spin he tried to show that he will raise £5 billion out of taxing the super rich (it will actually come from duty on fuel, and alcohol and National Insurance hikes- taxes on the many not the few); and he ludicrously claimed that somehow or another he will raise £15 billion out of “governmental efficiencies.” (Implying that they have been monumentally inefficient for the last 12 years, but giving really very little idea of where theses savings are to come from.)

We all remember the Winter of Discontent, the bodies unburied and the rubbish piling up on the streets; we all recall Jim Callaghan and his “Crisis – what crisis”, as he came back fro his cap-in-hand visit to the IMF. Well our indebtedness and the risk to our currency and our ability to balance the books now is significantly worse than it was then.

I fear that my prediction last week of political expedience and spin rather than statesmanship of any kind has come to pass- in spades. We are facing an economic catastrophe of the worst kind, and I fear that this week’s Budget did nothing at all to address it.

Statesmanship, not Spinning

                                    Statesmanship not Spinning

My post-Easter treat was a trip to the excellent and aptly named Little Theatre in Bath to see the new spin-doctor film In The Loop- a remarkably accurate portrayal of the spin and deceit in the run-up to the war in Iraq, together with the non-stop foul language which seems to be the common currency of modern Special Advisers. (I was one once – things were different in those days!)

Damian McBride could have been a character straight out of the film, sitting around the Prime Minister’s War Room in No 10 Downing Street planning smear tactics. And the other Damian- Mr Green - the target of an absurdly excessive police operation to prevent him fingering the inadequacies of the Home Secretary could have been a victim from it. Miss Gould probably deserves a place in there too, since she apparently used New Labour spin techniques to secure a safe Labour seat, only to have the process undermined by breached ballot boxes and dirty tricks.

By the time you read this, you will know the content of this week’s Budget – or at least those parts of it which have not already been selectively leaked. All that we can be certain of is that the Nation is facing its worst financial crisis at least since the Second World War, that our borrowing is spiralling out of control, that there seems to be a tragic likelihood of further increases in unemployment, and that at least a good part of the crisis was made in Downing Street over the last twelve years. (But don’t hold your breath and wait for an apology.)

But will the Chancellor actually be brave enough to say so on Wednesday in clear and uncompromising terms? I doubt it.  Bearing in mind that I am writing this before the Budget to meet my Gazette deadline, I predict that Mr Darling will try to find a way of saying that its not all as bad as some people imagine; that it may be a bit bad for a few more months, but we can expect decent growth and a return to prosperity from next year; that the way out of the hole is to spend more money; and that he will only put up taxes on the fat cats who can really afford it. In other words, I predict that he will try his best to spin his way out of trouble; he’ll defer the really hard times until after the next Election, which they now know for sure they will lose; and he will focus on trying to keep his own reputation more or less intact, with a view to a future career in the City of London. It won’t be until next Sunday’s papers that it will all start to unravel.

Well it seems to me that the crisis facing us is gargantuan and that the solution to it should therefore be above party politics, rather as it was in the crisis we faced in 1939. A truly great Chancellor should be ready to admit as much in his Budget speech,  and then take the unpopular steps necessary to put it right, whether that be increasing taxes or cutting public spending, or very probably a bit of both. They should put spin and plots and smearing to one side for once, be ready to acknowledge the mess they have got us into, and lay out the tough times that lie ahead and the difficult things they are going to have to do to get us all out of it. It’s a time for Statesmanship, not spinning.

G20 Summit

Right. So that’s it then. They all flew in to London, escorted by hundreds of officials and security people; they had a few dinners and receptions, met the Queen, shook a few hands, looked into a big meeting in Docklands; meanwhile a token bunch of anarchists staged rather a half-hearted protest outside the Bank of England. And the end result? The saving of the World.  I am afraid that I find it all simply incomprehensible and frankly rather unconvincing.

There would presumably not have been a Summit had there been any risk of anything other than an agreement at it. So if it was all stitched up in advance, then why were we wasting millions of pounds and countless tons of carbon to rubber stamp something which could have been agreed over the telephone? And anyhow how will the trillion dollars plus which they pledged to spend help us?  Is it new money, or all previously announced? And if the former, where is it all to come from? And where’s it going to? To be fair,  I suppose it may have been an orchestrated attempt to persuade the world’s markets that things are going to get better in the hope that somehow or another that will of itself become a self-fulfilling prophesy. Perhaps what really mattered was the unity, the getting together, the end-of-summit photo opportunity? And to be fair, if that has an effect on the confidence of the world’s markets then I wish it well, although was glad to escape London to Wiltshire to avoid it.

I was pondering all of this as I attended, and then handed out the trophies at the Chippenham and District Canine Society Dog Show. Why do so many people preen and train their pooches, travel such distances and make such an immense effort to show off their dogs to the best advantage? Is it a love of dogs? A competitive love of the many trophies and rosettes on offer? A social get together of people of a like mind? It was a very English event. There was very little barking. Losers accepted their fate – handed down by widely respected judges – with stoicism; winners collected their prizes with all due sporting modesty. Owners of each breed and class bore a striking resemblance to each other as well, of course, as looking pretty much like their own dogs. A tall handsome, hirsute gent with a beard was showing his Afghans; a diminutive, rather wiry lady won the miniature dachshund class, and the lady with the Chihuahua was ready to admit that she looked just like one; rather dashing country looking types with respectively red and grey hair owned the red and English setters, although I hesitate to suggest that the lady with the bearded collie looked anything like her charge! The dogs loved their owners, the owners taking huge pride in even the least well presented; offered deep respect to the judges and organisers, a thoroughly enjoyable day was had, rounded off with a splendid photo opportunity for the visiting dignitaries. What’s certain is that the very existence of shows such as this excellently-run one in themselves makes a huge contribution to the better breeding and better care of our canine friends. All together just like the G.20, really.

I was, nonetheless reminded somehow of that old Wiltshire saying, “A cat looks down on you; a dog looks up to you; but the great thing about a pig is that you can look it square in the eye as an equal. G20? Give me a pig-sty and PG Wodehouse’s Empress of Blandings any day.

Government by Distillation

Some MPs love their constituency work, others thrive in Westminster; I count myself amongst the lucky few who do both – perhaps because as a humble backbencher (for now at any rate), I have the time and freedom to do both without the heavy constraints of (Shadow) Ministerial office. Here’s a flavour of my last week or so:-

In Wiltshire: Neston Farm Shop Nature Trail Opening; Calne Branch AGM; drinks at Bowood to say farewell to North Wilts District Council, and the following Friday to do the same to the old County structure; cheque handing over ceremony to the Derry Hill Football Club; Surgeries in Chippenham and Corsham; a Wootton Bassett repatriation for (so sadly) three servicemen’s bodies; lunch in Stanton St Quintin and dinner in Broughton Gifford; door-knocking in Chippenham, Point to Point in Larkhill, and the Wootton Basset Mayor’s Ball.

In Westminster: Meeting Grittleton House pupils for a tour of Parliament; Welfare Reform Bill votes; Breakfast with Wiltshire CLA; PMQs and tickets for constituents; meeting the Reynolds family from Allington Farm Shop as they receive their Countryside Alliance Awards for best Wessex retailer; attending the Environment Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee (twice a week) and the All Party Group for the Horse; two days on the bench during the Coroner’s Bill Report stage, including a speech on Military Inquests; Holding my own 1 ½ hours debate on the effect of the Recession on the rural economy; speaking to two seminars on the current hot topic of food security; a question to the Foreign Secretary about an Enquiry into Iraq and to the Local Government Minister about high council taxes in North Wiltshire; discussions with the Multiple Sclerosis Society about their Parliamentary lobbying plans and a speech on RAF Lyneham at the very end of a six-hour debate in the main chamber on Defence in the UK.

And all of that on top of the normal busy Parliamentary calendar, a few private events, and of course the never-ending mountain of paper and- especially – emails. (I came back to my computer after 24 hours off to find 450 emails unopened, nightmare!)

You could, of course, argue that there is no real pattern to all of that frenetic activity, and I sometimes wonder which parts of it are really achieving much. The answer, I think, is that you cannot tell which of your arrows will strike a mark until you have actually fired them. Doing nothing will not achieve a great deal for North Wiltshire in Parliament. Doing a million things may – just may- result in half a million actually achieving something. And if you add to that a similar level of activity by the 5000 people who work in Parliament quite aside from the 650 MPs, then you begin to form a picture of the hubbub of activity and ideas, the end distillation of which is Government. And the quality of that Government is a direct product of the quality of the many different influences which flow into it.

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