THURSDAY evening saw (or rather heard) me on LBC, talking about Sir Mervyn King's (apparent) suggestion that the economy has turned the corner. In fact, what the outgoing Bank of England Governor said was that inflation would be slightly less gruesome than we had expected and growth ditto.
Put in perspective, even the new 'upbeat' Bank forecasts would mean a rate of inflation way above three per cent at a time when pay rises are running at about 0.8 per cent. In terms of declining living standards, go figure (as I never say). They would mean also growth at well below the annual two per cent rate deemed necessary just to stand still in terms of employment, given that technology and know-how combine to destroy jobs and a two per cent growth rate is thought to be the minimum necessary to offset this process.
So, matters will be marginally less horrendous than we'd feared. Not exactly boom-boom Britain is it?
1) Have we been here before?
LARRY Elliott and I are currently working on a book about the British and international economy from the late Sixties to the mid-Eighties. Before me, as part of our research effort, is a copy of Britain in Agony: The Growth of Political Violence, by Richard Clutterbuck (Penguin; 1980). One chapter is entitled 'Days of Hope', and covers the period immediately after September 1972: '[A]lmost imperceptibly at first...it seemed that Britain might be emerging from her agony. On almost every front things seemed to be over the worst.'
Thirteen months later, the Arab-Israeli war broke out, the oil price shot up and the 'recovery' proved to be a mirage. Sounds vaguely ominous, doesn't it?
2) Darling, you weren't marvellous!
WHEN is some major corporation or accounting firm or indeed anyone going to have the guts to tell the limelight junkies of Parliament's Public Accounts Committee to get lost? With Margaret Hodge in the chair, the committee ought to get itself a theatrical agent and arrange a scale of fees for its ritual public humiliation of assorted individuals and companies.
Watching the committee in action, you wonder what all those expensive lawyers and public relations advisers retained by the victims are doing for their enormous fees. When is one of them going to suggest, however tentatively, that the committee was never meant to function in this way and that there may be questions about the constitutional propriety of its current behaviour?
3) What you really think is...
IMAGINE, you arrive home and discover a couple you have never met is living, uninvited, in your spare room. You are informed there is, legally, nothing you can do about it. Your protests are ignored and you are told that the two people concerned will enrich immeasurably your family life.
Furthermore, the powers that be tell you that these strangers will do all sorts of jobs round the house that you would prefer not to do yourself.
After a while, the authorities unbend sufficiently to accept that you may have legitimate concerns about the pressure the new arrivals are putting on the available bathrooms, on the kitchen, on storage space in the house and on the available car parking. Indeed, key authority figures concede that they 'should have listened' to you on these matters.
One thing, however, that they seem determined never to understand is that your principle objection to the presence of these people is that it is your house and you believe that you and you alone ought to decide who lives there.
If you can imagine all this, then you have pretty much got your head round the immigration non-debate of the last 15 years.
4) All the presidents' man
DAVID Bowie, deservedly riding high after the success of this year's comeback album The Next Day spent a fair bit of time in the States in the mid-Seventies, one of the fruits of which was his wonderful 1975 album Young Americans. So I was intrigued, listening to the latest offering, to hear these lines in the title track:
First they give you everything that you want/Then they take back everything that you have
There's a funny thing, I thought. A quick check and I was able to confirm that, on August 12 1974, President Ford declared that: 'A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.'
Coincidence? Quite possibly. Except that in the same song, Bowie tells us:
They live upon their feet and they die upon their knees
Which is intriguing, because Ford's challenger for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination, Ronald Reagan, famously took to task the 'better red and dead' school of thought in October 1964, declaring: 'The English commentator [Kenneth] Tynan has put it this way: he would rather live on his knees than die on his feet...If we are to believe that nothing is worth the dying, when did this begin?'
Young Americans features a song entitled Somebody Up There Likes Me, a lushly-orchestrated slow number about the emergence of a right-wing political figure with extraordinary charm and, it is hinted, a show business background. Not a bad forecast considering few took Reagan remotely seriously in 1975,
Thanks again for reading and enjoy the weekend.
Going South: Why Britain Will Have A Third World Economy By 2014, by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson in published by Palgrave Macmillan
You can e-mail meat dan.atkinson@live.co.uk