frit

So Dave: this financial crisis Whaddaya gonna do about it?

Under a "people's right to know" scheme a Tory government would publish all items of public spending over £25,000 on a website and all public sector salaries over £150,000.

He’s going to have a website. Ahh. Sweet. Also, Blairism circa 1998.

I’m becoming increasingly convinced that the Tories, at least those around Cameron, don’t actually want power any more. It scares them. They’re frit. Cameron is supposed to have Blairised the Tories. But Blairism was essentially the idea that all fundamental economic questions had been settled and that government was simply a matter of deciding how to take advantage of the fact. It’s essentially an ideology for the good times, or at least one based on the idea that the good times would just roll on endlessly. Now the system’s run itself off the rails Cameron doesn’t really have a clue what to do, though he seems to be leaning towards the idea of entrenching a fully fledged Hooverite depression out of not much more than sheer panic.

Dave says that this is the new Age of Austerity. In the original Age of Austerity, we managed to create the National Health Service, keep a million men under arms through conscription, and, in the Tories case, embark on a mass house building programme: all of that with public debt at 250% of GDP, twice that currently projected. Just because you don’t have much money doesn’t mean that you can’t spend what you have more or less how you please.

But to do that you need ideas: Right now, all the Tories are willing to show us in this direction is Michael Gove’s proposal to extend Academy status to primary schools: another Blairite retread and one specifically mounted right now in the hope that people will stop paying attention to the inconveniently popular tax hike on the wealthy.

The irony is that as things stand the government is so discredited it won’t be able to give the Tories the opt out of a hung parliament and the chance to hide behind Vince Cable’s skirts. Perhaps the we’ll be hearing approving noises from them in the near future about the necessity of a government of national unity towards the same objective.

Comments

[Matthew]

I'm never sure what the point is for a country with floating currency and local currency denominated debt, but the time to take out a huge IMF loan would be presumably on taking office.

So there's my prediction. With "cap", or whatever Cameron/Osborne wear, in hand to the IMF, July 2010.

[Tom]

One rather conspiratorial reading of the whole Draper/McBride affair is that anyone left who matters in the Labour Party wants the Tories to win big in 2010, the Brownites to fuck off somewhere in ignominy and for Cameron's crew to screw things up so badly that a suitable son-of-Blair reasserts the natural order of things come about 2014. The last thing they want is someone competent running their online operation. The second last thing they want is for whoever the Chosen One is to be in power just now and associated with the current clowns.

I'm assuming no one believes for a second that the affair was a triumph for the selfless and noble paladins of the right-wing blogosphere.

[ejh]

No, but as simpler argument would be that these people live in a Westminster village world of their own, this is the stuff they do, sometimes they get caught, sometimes they do not get caught.

[Alex]

Indeed. I strongly suspect the Tories of planning a deliberate IMF crisis in order to pursue ulterior objectives, especially WRT two other well-known British TLAs. They are already blatantly trying to spook the gilts market...but then, no-one bets against Nat Rothschild and wins.

[Richard J]

I can figure out one - what's the other non-NHS one?

[Alex]

BBC. And I reckon a lot of MOD doesn't have much chance either; all the expensive stuff (Nimrod, ASTOR, the R1 replacement, lots of navy things, air transport, tankers...) that contributes to our sovereignty but doesn't get PARAS BLITZ DRUG TERROR headlines in the Sun is at risk, cos the yanks will provide....won't they.

[Richard J]

Ah, alles klar.

[Neil]

If Alex is right and the Tories want to starve the beast, as it were, why don't they just call for a 99% upper tax rate? Laffer says that's supposed to obliterate tax revenues, right?

Perhaps they don't really believe all that small state and back-of-a-napkin graphs crap after all.

[Alex]

The laffer is drivel, but the IMF really works.