18 June 2011 9:58 PM
Britain PLC: welcome to the developing (or not) world
'Come on out! The dark is just beginning.'
- Bob Dylan (1965)
CROCODILE Dundee, held up by a would-be mugger in the New York of the Eighties, famously peered at the attacker's switchblade and declared: 'That's not a knife.' Producing what looked to my eyes like a machete, he added: 'Now, that's a knife.'
Last week, I thought I was thinking big in my column in The Mail on Sunday when I identified four possible major themes for the British economy in this decade, above and beyond the petty concerns of Osborne versus Balls, the speed (or otherwise) of deficit reduction, the VAT hike...and so forth.
They were the fall-out from competitive devaluation, the return of high(ish) inflation, tax, red tape and the misleading notion that, to pinch the title of one of Louis Armstrong's classics, we had all the time in the world, in terms of deciding how we want to order our economic lives, how much leisure we would like, how to strike our 'work-life balance', where the trade-off may lie between wealth and equality...and so on.
But hardly had Sunday afternoon turned to evening than the nagging thought took hold that I was not thinking big enough. Thus today's column takes aim at some meatier targets.
In short, I identify four possible large-scale problems that could dominate British economic thinking in this decade, once it starts (the Sixties did not really get under way until the third year, nor the Seventies, and the Eighties not really until 1985).
They are food, energy, population and political risk. We are precariously placed in terms of acquiring enough of the first two, over-abundant in terms of the third (thanks to a bizarre alliance involving weak Ministers, business people seeking cheap labour and dim-witted trade unionists who thought it was progressive to let their members' wages be undercut) and in serious danger in terms of the fourth, with a number of constitutional crises on the horizon (Westminster/Edinburgh, Westminster/Brussels, Ministers/Supreme Court and MPs/elected senate).
Sorry to be downbeat (again). But at least a developing country can...develop. A crumb of comfort.
Thanks for reading and enjoy the rest of the weekend.
The Gods that Failed: How the financial elite have gambled away our future, by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson, is published by Vintage (£7.99)
11 June 2011 11:55 PM
Britain's economic future: there will be trouble ahead
'It is later than you think'
- WH Auden; Consider; 1930
THIS is just a short PS to my column in today's edition of The Mail on Sunday, in which I suggest that the major economic problems of the next ten years are barely on the public's radar, yet are very much with us already.
Thus what is keeping them from general view is a sleepy consensus that they do not much matter.
I mention inflation (which is, apparently, always down to temporary factors), tax (we seem to be paying Scandinavian levels of tax for American standards of public services) and the booming red-tape industry, among others.
But perhaps the biggest problem is...us. 'Our people are our greatest asset,' proclaims many a dreary company mission statement. Ministers round the world say much the same thing about their country's populations. But suppose, in Britain's case, our people - us - are our greatest liability?
It is not that Britain's workforce is, from the kick-off, necessarily worse than that of any other country. But if its members are encouraged to believe that their academic qualifications are as good as they appear, to view their 'work-life balance' as of primary importance and to believe, in general, that it is the employer's job to arrange his affairs round the needs of the employee, rather than the other way about, then you have to wonder who is going to want to take anybody on.
'Employers must employ', ran a particularly fatuous trade-union slogan in the early Seventies. No, they mustn't, actually. Not if they don't wish to. At least not in Britain.
We have allowed our real economic weaknesses to pile up for too long. Time for action is running out.
Thanks for reading and enjoy the rest of the weekend.
The Gods that Failed: How the financial elite have gambled away our future, by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson, is published by Vintage (£7.99)
Posts
