Fisking the ludicrous Polly Toynbee

Saturday, 22 November 2008

 Fisking the ludicrous Polly Toynbee

There is much in Polly Toynbee's column in the Guardian today to rebut, mock and ridicule. However the important thing to take away from it is that the woman is going completely and utterly stark raving mad. I honestly fear for her mental health. Spinning in favour of Labour is bad enough, but in her attempts to land blows on the Conservatives, Toynbee is simply making it up as she goes along. This is all the more bizarre because there are issues on which the Tories are currently vulnerable to attack which she ignores.

Like a bad detective Toynbee decides where she wants end up, then corrupts the facts of the case in an attempt to make them fit together to support her pre-determined conclusion. The outcome is a complete nonsense. She may as well have teleported into another galaxy. Here are just some of the lines she uses - conspicuous for what she avoids saying as for what she does:

But modernisation finally died this week when Cameron said he would no longer stick to Labour's spending plans. What political folly!

The political folly was sticking to spending plans that cannot be afforded. The spending so far has been made possible by absolutely huge borrowing which has weakened our economy and ability to take pressure off taxpayers. More spending will require more borrowing at a time when our economy is less able to afford it.

Labour missiles, warning that schools, hospitals and the poor would suffer under the Tories, bounced off Cameron's shield. No longer. Faced with recession, Cameron has U-turned his party back to 1981, a retreat to traditional cut, squeeze and freeze.

Remind me again which party, which for years has made these claims, now says its efficiency savings target - spending cuts - will beexceeded? Ah yes, Labour. Did Toynbee forget that or was it just an inconvenient truth?

When Colbert, the 17th-century French finance minister, asked business what it wanted, the answer was: "Laissez-nous faire" - leave it to us, the market. Now that same reckless market that crashed the world economy is begging governments to bail it out. Intervene, is the cry: give us fiscal stimulus!

It was a handful of banks and financial institutions put under pressure by state rules such as 'mark to market' that have sought bail out. This is not 'the market' but it does affect the market. These banks were encouraged to lend. 'No more boom and bust' they were told by Gordon Brown, 'growth will be permanent' he told them. So the banks borrowed and loaned egged on by Labour which insisted on lightest touch regulation, gave us Brown's illusory era of wealth and prosperity - his faux economic miracle.

Now the debt chickens are coming home to roost Labour, which basked in the reflected glow of borrowing-fuelled growth, is saying the free market failed. The socialists are fleeing the scene of the crime and saying 'Not me guv!'. Who is to blame on Planet Polly? Never mind Labour having suckled the teats dry, it was those nasty Tories and their City friends of course. What absolute bollocks.

The IMF - hardly a socialist front - wants every country to borrow and spend, fast. So does the EU and even the Institute of Directors. The CBI wants money spent too, lots: it wants "cash in the hands of small business immediately ... we have to keep people in jobs."

But that is not what will happen. Labour's borrowing will be used to increase the size of the already bloated state. It will not go to small businesses. Why else is Labour saying to the banks, retrospectively, 'we gave you liquidity and are buying your shares so you must now lend to businesses regardless of the risks of losing that money', as a number of them are so far gone they will collapse and take the money with them?

Many other countries are able to spend from their own reserves and have less borrowing requirement to fund their plans. Thanks to Toynbee's Labour friends, such as Gordon Brown, the UK starts from an awful position. We have one of the worst budget deficits on the planet and we have be warned for years we were borrowing too much and relying on a house price boom that would eventually go bust.

Loading more debt on top puts our whole economy at risk. Yet sensible calls by the Conservatives (at last) to cut the UK's runaway borrowing and spending is condemned by Toynbee as the worst example of Thatcherite handbag economics. She is barking mad. Mandelson and Darling have already let the cat out of the bag - massive borrowing for short term tax cuts today, then the pain of higher taxes to start paying it back tomorrow. Only when the debt collectors come to collect, the economy might not have recovered enough to afford our repayments. Cue even higher taxes. Cue collapsing confidence in our economy. Cue less investment here. Cue further pressure on Sterling. Labour's is the economics of the madhouse.

This week's tally of horrendous job losses, tumbling stock markets and frightening news about withdrawal of insurance from retailers and suppliers, has brought into the open talk of a possible second wave of financial collapse. Woolworths' 800 well-loved pick'n'mix stores struggling to find a buyer for £1 is emblematic of yawning black holes to come in high streets. Thriving small businesses are desperate for credit.

Our job losses are so heavy, and will get much worse, because of the mismanagement of the economy. The UK is in the weakest position of the G7 nations thanks to tax, borrow and spend. But Toynbee's solution is more of the same. Lunacy. Toynbee is so ludicrous she points out Woolworth's inability to find a buyer for 800 stores for just £1. Why can they not find a buyer Polly? Oh yes, because the buyer would be buying £m of debt that they would have to pay back. You see in the world of business, you have to service debt through revenue earned from sales of goods and services.

Competitive businesses cannot just ramp up prices because they will lose sales and go out of business - and unlike Toynbee's idiot mates in government, they do not have the luxury of telling the public 'we are going to increase your taxes to pay off what we borrowed'. This is the real world Toynbee, not the parallel galaxy that your fertile imagination migrates to each time you sit at your keyboard.

But Cameron and Osborne don't get it, as they return to Thatcher's handbag economics. There is virtually no respectable support for their view anywhere. Rightwing governments, sober international institutions, all are for borrowing and spending. Alone in their clear blue water, Britain's Conservatives perch on their melting ice floe.

At long last Cameron and Osborne do get it. What they have not done is gone far enough with their proposed solution! I have criticised that myself. But perhaps as one correspondant told me, it is because they have no idea just how bad the nation's accounts really are and how much debt is being hidden off the balance sheet. The ice floe has broken away because of Labour's economic mismanagement. It is melting because Labour allowed house prices to overheat and stoked the bonfire of our economy with irresponsible borrowing. No other major economy is trying to deal with the financial crisis from a position as weak and precarious as ours.

If Gordon Brown splurges on general tax cuts it would feel suspiciously like a cynical bribe: Cameron's attacks would have traction. If, however, Darling finely targets every penny on obvious need - pensioners, unemployed, those in peril of repossession, those in need of social housing, businesses needing credit, and the young needing work and apprenticeships - then voters will see what the borrowing is for.

Ah yes, the 'Year Zero' plan. Let us pretend the slate is clean and that despite people asking 'where has the money we have borrowed over the last decade gone?' everyone will unite and rejoice in this borrowing having a purpose. The problem is we still have to pay back what we already owe. This new borrowing has to be paid back too. With fewer businesses and taxpayers in the economy, the cost to those that remain will be even higher. Labour has been spending on our credit card and the bill is going to be huge and we are the ones who have to pay it.

But Labour is back in the game, and the Tories have made a crucial mistake: they can never again pretend to be progressive. When tested, Cameron reverted to type - a laissez-faire do-nothing, unconcerned about mass unemployment when it mattered.

She is back in her parallel galaxy again. By the time the next election must be held, there will be more people unemployed than when Labour came to power. Again. As it has been with every Labour government since 1946. Where is Labour's concern about the mass unemployment that results from every Labour government? How is this the fault of the Conservatives?

Now Cameron will have to detail his cuts, as Labour MPs daily make scissor gestures across the floor of the House. Tory MPs are sending parliamentary questions scurrying round departments, asking after obscure projects: "cutting waste" is the last refuge of every opposition trying to make its sums tally.

Cutting waste is what Labour has said it is doing right now. How can it be virtuous for Labour to do it, but described as the last refuge of the opposition in trying to make its sums tally? Where since 1997 has Labour even tried to make its sums tally? It is not so much breathtaking ignorance that we see from Toynbee, but desperate and cynical deception. She finishes her piece with the most pathetic piece of buck-passing she has attempted in years, when she says of the Conservatives:

They should have stood patriotically by the government until the crisis passed, waiting for the time to come - which it will - when a grumpily convalescent country blames the doctor for the pain caused by the operation.

Stand by the government as it makes the crisis worse? Sit back as Labour screws us to the wall with more of the same incompetence? She really has gone insane. When the country blames the doctor for the pain caused by the operation, it will also remember that it was the doctor who put the country in hospital in the first place after running us over with its debtmobile and then picking our pockets while we waited for the ambulance.

The whole basis of Toynbee's article was trying to prove that the brilliant repositioning of the Conservatives has been scuppered by the response to this crisis. She has failed to make her case. All she has done is allow us to point at her criticism of the Conservatives and zoom in on the causes and failings of her socialist friends that brought us to this point in the first place. It is time for Toynbee to check in to the Priory and get the help she so desperately needs.