The bottom of the barrel

If we need convincing that times are hard, look no further than, eponymously,  The Times‘s list of les Grands Projets that are supposed to bring Britain out of its slough of economic despond. Or as David Wighton’s piece puts it: Quick fixes to get economy up to speed.

Wighton sets the scene:

Thirty-five road and rail projects got the go-ahead yesterday as George Osborne made infrastructure investment the centre of his economic package.

So, where’s Blasted Boris’s airport (some £50 billion)? After all, that has again been a main feature in The Times these recent days, even given the Wighton Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval as recently as … well implicitly, today, actually:

Maintaining a hub airport was identified as a key government commitment yesterday as part of 500 infrastructure projects worth more than £250 billion to be deliver over the next few years.

Only later, in the fourth paragraph,do we realise this is all pie-in-the-sky stuff, because:

About two-thirds of the £250 billion will come from the private sector and the Government is in talks with two sets of British pension funds that are expected to invest more than £20 billion over the next five to ten years.

£20 billion! Wowza! That’s a whole 8% of the £250 billion already at the “in talks” stage. Perhaps a third or a quarter of just one year’s income received by UK pensions funds  —money that has to be invested somewhere. Convincing, what? And the UK pensions pot totals in excess of a trillion — so there’s a contribution, even if not a staggering one.

But George Osborne is sadly not thinking as BIG as Mr Wighton. He is proposing those 35 projects cost much as £5 billion for the next three years. Which is a fair bit of difference — a factor of fifty-fold reduction to be a trifle more precise.

And those 35 projects really do scrape the tun’s bum:

• a by-pass for Immingham (£6.3 million);
• up-grades on the Tyne and Wear Metro (£4 million);
• replacing a railway bridge in Derby (£6.9 million);
• a couple of park-and-ride schemes in York (£21.9 million, which seems a grotesque inflation);
• a bus station in Rochdale (£11.5 million).

But what really caught Malcolm’s eye was the item for “More Sheffield supertrams”. Malcolm has ridden the Sheffield trams, and (like those of Nottingham, but sadly not that intended to bring the Croydon trams into and across central London) they are very nice indeed. Still, can anyone imagine a previous Chancellor of the Exchequer  — a Gladstone, a Disraeli, a Lloyd George, a Churchill, even (heaven help us!) a Philip Snowden — bragging about four extra trams for Sheffield?

What’s the time, Mr Wolf?

Half past kidding time.Time to kid again.

Except this is no playground game.

Two Sundays back, Malcolm was struck by Andrew Rawnsley’s opener:

What do the following have in common? Angela Merkel, cold weather, Ed Balls, Silvio Berlusconi, the wedding of William Windsor and Kate Middleton, British civil servants, Brussels bureaucrats, people concerned about global warming, employment tribunals, trade unions, banks, bank holidays, Liberal Democrats, energy prices, Gordon Brown and the world?

The answer is that they have all been deployed as excuses by members of the government for why the economy is so dire. The proliferation of alibis offered by ministers, and their inability to stick to the same one, is a symptom of increasing desperation about the unravelling of their economic strategy.

That is now quite a meme among columnists, and here is Martin Wolf, in his blog for the FT, reprising it as a punch-line

The big facts are that the UK is set for a lost decade and a longer period of stringency than expected. The government’s position is that there is no alternative. That has now become a self-fulfilling prophecy. So blame foreigners: that always works.

Wolf’s piece is devastating, and particularly so since it is delivered from the highest financial platform in town. What Wolf was saying, far more eloquently than Malcolm’s gloss, is tomorrow’s orthodoxy:

• that Osborne was the warm-up: the main event was the OBR report down-grading “growth” predictions — we have, in effect “lost” 3.5% of 2013′s GDP between last March and now, and with it one huge whack of “structural” deficit;
• that what is on offer from Osborne is regressive (the burden falls unconscionably on the poor), and moreover
• that “credit easing” is less about boosting the economy than lowering borrowing costs — which puts into proportion that swagger about the disparity between UK and German borrowing costs,
• and that the British obsession with a “property-owning democracy” skews the economy by throwing money at domestic bricks-and-mortar when the Germans prudently put it into industrial investment;
• that any Treasury plan to restructure or, in the current argot, “rebalance” the economy has given way to gimmickry — in other words, eighteen months into this ConDem thing, the government has completely lost the plot.

In all that, Wolf manages a vicious swipe at the Thatcherite “right-to-buy”:

why should gifts be made to people fortunate enough to live in social accommodation? This is not really a “right to buy”. It is a right to loot.

Any time now Cameron will start considering his “legacy”, that specious divide between the failed politician and the venerated statesman. About the same time Osborne will be looking for his ace-trump to see off Blasted Boris in the Tory inheritance stakes. As things stand, all either will be remembered for is that massive embuggerance of Britain’s “lost decade”, of which the main beneficiary will be Alex Salmond and the SNP.

Blitzed

Any one spared the front page of today’s Times escapes this image:

Now, we all recognise that the Press has an agenda. It amounts to a demand for a constantly-changing cast of characters, like some continuing soap opera. Personalities are invented, built up, then slaughtered, that a new face might then be introduced to continue the drama.

Politics is treated like a Moebius strip. In Britain, though, the same side has been in focus for more than a decade. In David Cameron the Press have discovered one of their own, one with whom they can readily identify: the former PR smoothie of a failed television company. Here is a new leading light, a metropolitan face, to be enhanced, photoshopped and deified: only then can his feet of clay be chipped away.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Murdoch’s Morning Moan.

1946 and all that

The hyperbole of this image is breath-taking. There are no points of recognition between the Britain of 2009 and that of sixty-odd years previously.

To suggest a parallel is to belittle the intellect of a reader.

It simply overdoes the doom and gloom.

Now, let’s strike an equally relevant comparison. This is another image of London in 1946:

Malcolm has commented, at length, on this one before. It is as propagandist as that picture used by the Times. It is as positive and upbeat as the other is negative and defeatist.

What further irritates is that the Times story is predicated to the IMF forecast, published on Wednesday (yesterday). Now, IMF forecasts tick along with metronomic regularity: how many of us check their subsequent accuracy?

For example, last November the outlook for the UK was growth for 2008 at 1% (down from its earlier shot of 1.8%) and -0.1% for 2009 (down from +1.8%). Around the same time, the IMF was predicting average oil-prices for this year at $68 (down from a previous guess of $100): yesterday, oil closed at $42 or so.

This is Mystic Meg stuff, with as much value as a fortune cookie. Just because it’s got a fancy label, doesn’t make it Château Lafite. Just because it has the IMF good-housekeeping seal of approval doesn’t make it come true.

Meanwhile, in the real world, Malcolm returned from the local supermarket. Within a hundred paces of his front gate are eight — no, count them again, nine — tradesman’s vans. Garden walls are being built. Kitchens replaced. Double-glazing installed. Blockwork is being ground for paths and driveways. Here is an electrician. There a plumber. Someone is upgrading their tv reception. It was on a Thursday morning that the gas-man came to call.

The immediate neighbourhood of Redfellow Hovel is a hive of activity, and paid and productive labour.

[A version of this post will also appear on Malcolm Redfellow's World Service.]