Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Running away from the fuss towards the trouble

In Dr Johnson's oft-quoted (but not often enough) phrase, patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel. Old Macavity Brown, however, has given a new spin to this - the House of Commons liaison committee is the last refuge of the scoundrel; anything to avoid being seen signing a proper, but unpopular document. If the Committee weren't in town he would have found a supermarket to open, brushing aside the Duke of Kent, or flying to Bali to make sure Hilary Benn stayed on message, instead of telling the Americans where to stick their obstruction. No, he would sign the treaty in Lisbon when all the fanfare had died away a few hours later, as people were getting stuck into the canapés.
But it won't matter to Macavity. Everyone will have forgotten about it in two or three years time, just as they did with all the hoo-ha over the Nice treaty in 2000. He's basing his electoral success on 'economic competence'. What a shame for him, that now he's in No. 10 on a permanent basis, the Iron Chancellor has become the rapidly rusting prime minister. Soon his reign will be nothing more than iron oxide and as dead as the surface of Mars, for woeful economic incompetence is being most impolite by rearing its head, irrespective of the data loss and party funding scandal.
Of course, even as Chancellor, Macavity was not immune to missteps over micromanagement. If you have a reputation among the civil service as Stalin, a man of steel, then you must flex your unbending will in being inflexible. Mistakes are made by capitalists and Tony Blair. Those civil servants should be grateful that he is not like Mao, for he would then have purged their bourgeois tendencies along with them. But was there even a smidgen of thanks that they didn't have to twist their tongues labelling him Djugvashilli? Answers, plus names, addresses, phone numbers, medical records and bank details on a postcard (or preferably an ID Card, but not if sent by HRMC internal courier procedure).
But mistakes there were since "things, can only get better." Bulldozing through the Public-Private Partnership on the Tube was a piece of political spite at that enemy of the revolution/Project, Red 'Trotsky' Ken. Mayor Livingstone I presume; have I introduced you to my icepick? Rated 14th out of 15 possible solutions to the Tube (the 15th was unregulated privatisation) and with such obscurantist maths in the hope that people would lose interest attacking it, the whole menagerie has come home to roost with one of the companies supposed to be running it going bust, as tube services remain the way they were in 1997 i.e. ropey. Things, can only stay the same.
Then there's the sale of the MoD's research arm, Qinetiq, known as the goose that lays the golden eggs, for a price that, after legal fees, is actually a cost to the taxpayer while company directors (including one Tory adviser, hence their quiet) dived into a pool of cash. Just as well it wasn't an infinity pool. Yet there's not enough money to improve soldiers' housing (or pay police officers or keep post offices open or...).
What about, as I read in Private Eye last year (under the heading "Gordon is a Moron"), sacking several score of revenue officers from HRMC, in the name of cutting red tape. Ah, but wasn't New Labour supposed to abandon dogma in favour of what worked? Yeah, right. The money those ex-revenue officers chased up was actually a greater sum than removing their wages from the department bill.
But in his Chancellor of the Exchequer capacity, Macavity's greatest blunder was unnecessarily selling gold at the bottom of the market. The subsequent rise in the value of gold, all told, is now higher than the losses on Black Wednesday which destroyed the Tories' reputation for economic competence.
And there were more, but Blair is just as interlinked as his bosom enemy. Such as the wilful thrusting of private enterprise, bizarrely subsidised by the taxpayer (which surely would violate the very principles of involving private finance, notably there's no safety net for failure), into the public sector. Healthcare is a particular bugbear that the new PM is trying to reverse, but what about HRMC to name one area where PFI is falling down on the job. The reason they didn't remove all the wanton details from the 25 million records they subsequently lost was because it cost too much. But as Private Eye reveals, HRMC's in-house audit team could have done it very quickly and for no cost, but that would have breached the contract with IT supplier EDS. All this wastage and inadequacy for the sake of dogma, it all feels very much like New Labour saying of the taxpayers "let them eat cake" (and we all know what happened to the person who coined that phrase).
The more this New Labour government goes on, the more one thinks that their only claim to economic prowess is not having mucked it up, rather than anything they’ve done, even if that involves the ordinary person being loaded with debt to keep the economy moving. In all truth, it is hard to think of a single successful fiscal policy that hasn’t involved throwing oil tanker-style oodles of money at it, whether appropriate or not. Apart from that is one early decision in 1997, that is, putting the Bank of England vis-à-vis the government on the same footing as East Germany to the USSR i.e. quasi-independent (setting the terms under which it operates).
Macavity’s hand-picked successor, Alistair Darling, is trying his best to emulate his boss in terms of results, if not presentation of those results. The reason Darling was thought a safe pair of hands was because as Work and Pensions Secretary and Transport Secretary, he did nothing of any value (as pensioners and rail commuters found out). To do nothing of any value at the Treasury, however, means bankruptcy. Therefore, the ‘streamlining’ of all government funding. As one potential bankrupt to another (very real one), he bailed out Northern Wreck, with Bank of England money and government-secured loans. An affinity can be the only reason why he blocked Lloyds TSB from taking over Northern Rock, at commercial rates of interest, in the first stages of the crisis. Other areas of the public sector must cut back as Darling blows a king’s, queen’s and whole royal household’s ransom because he created an entirely avoidable run on a bank. And where’s Macavity in all this - he’s trying desperately not to be found (out).

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