It isn’t Brexit. It’s the austerity, stupid

There is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.

That was the American journalist H. L. Mencken in 1917. His words keep coming to mind whenever I hear some Brexiter explaining that it’s time for the debate to end, and for Britain simply to leave. ‘Out is out’ one told me recently, uninterested in the obvious truth that even to leave a room requires choosing a doorway (or possibly a window), and that it might be best to pick one that led somewhere one actually wanted to go.

An interesting new attitude has also developed on the so-called left. I say ‘so-called’ because the real left has always been internationalist, whereas this strange left, inside Britain’s Labour Party today, is dominated by Little-England thinking. Some even argue that it’s easier to bring in a socialist programme in a small country, like Britain, rather than a large collection of nations, like Europe.

Stalin argued the same for the Soviet Union. And it didn’t work for him either.

These Lexiters (left-wing Brexiters) argue that the argument about the EU is a distraction from the real questions. A recent internet piece points out that these are austerity, the NHS, benefits payments, housing, food banks and homelessness (I’m not sure how homelessness and housing are distinct issues but, hey, I didn’t compose this list).

Lexiter propaganda: they have a little list...

Within that list, the most important issue is austerity. It is at the root of the other problems. It is the policy of reducing government spending in order to stop piling up public debt.

It’s based on thinking appropriate to an ordinary household. If I were to start spending significantly less, I could build up some savings and certainly avoid debt. The same, austerity politicians believe, is true of government.

However, if I changed my spending rather than reducing it, I might do far better. If, for instance, I bought another house and rented it out, I might be out of pocket for a while but, once inflation had boosted the rent above the loan repayments for the house purchase, I would be making money. On top of that, in the long run, I would have not only the rental income, but a fully paid-for asset in the form of the house.

Governments, too, can make investments that yield returns. For instance, to take one of the other examples from the list, it could pay for a lot of new housing. That would help tackle the problem of homelessness. It would also boost employment, reducing dependence on benefits and food banks – other items on the list. It would cost money at first, but in time the tax paid by the building workers might well outstrip the cost of investment, and with rents coming in on top of those taxes (or indeed income from house sales), the public sector is more than likely to end up making money. That means it could invest in the NHS and even, in time, begin to pay down public debt.

This is a special instance of an economic phenomenon known since the eighteenth century: the paradox of thrift. Saving money reduces spending and therefore takes demand out of the economy, leading to its contraction. That means that the revenue of a government pursuing austerity falls and, if its reaction is to reduce spending further, it takes more demand out and accelerates a downward spiral.

But who’s right? Does austerity economics actually work or is it true that there’s a paradox of thrift?

When the Conservatives came to power, leading a coalition in 2010 and on their own since 2015, public debt stood at just over £1.2 trillion. Nine years on, it’s a little over £1.8 trillion.

A centrepiece of the Conservative campaign in 2010 was that it was iniquitous to burden future generations with paying so massive a debt. But, far from reducing the burden, the Tories’ austerity policies have massively increased it.

So it makes sense for Labour to campaign to reverse austerity. Simple.

Simple maybe. But it leaves out a massive element of difficulty, so obvious that it’s hard to believe its proponents have missed it. Reversing austerity would certainly improve our position in Britain, if we could do it from our present level.

But Brexit will increase unemployment and prices. The change would be relatively small if Brexit were soft, far larger following a hard Brexit. That would make the benign cycle, of investment leading to more work, leading to more revenue, far harder to launch.

As the Red Queen told Alice in Through the Looking Glass: 

... here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!

The Brexit race:
run as fast as you can and you might just stand still

Brexit will take us into a looking-glass world where we have to run very fast just to get back to where are now. And a lot faster still to improve.

That’s why combatting Brexit isn’t a distraction from the campaign against austerity. It’s an essential component of it.

Birthdays and unbirthdays

Before I start, I should warn readers that this post includes some relatively bad language. I could, of course, clear it up, but it’s the duty of the historian to record events as they truly happened. How can he do that if he applies his own moralising filter to the record he is keeping?

The immediate cause of these events was my wife Danielle’s birthday. Now Danielle is difficult to buy presents for. Ask her what she’d like, and her immediate response is always ‘nothing’. So either you surprise her or you push her and prompt her to come up with a suitable present.

‘How about something for your allotment?’ I asked.

Danielle keeps a colossal market garden with a friend, thanks to which we are kept in excellent fresh fruit and vegetables for pretty much half the year. It involves a level of effort I find it exhausting merely to contemplate, but it seems the two of them enjoy it. While I wouldn’t enjoy the work, I certainly enjoy the produce, so we’re all happy about it.

Clearing the allotment:
work has remained backbreaking ever since

‘Ah, yes,’ she said, reflectively. ‘We could do with some horseshit.’

Well, I’m a former marketing man so my specialty is bullshit, but I suppose I could, at a stretch, have fulfilled that wish. But then she astonished me.

‘Actually, what I really need is a ho.’

A ho? That wasn’t the kind of language I expected my wife to use. Nor the kind of need I expected her to have.

Then she confused me still further.

‘You know – like the one they stole from the allotment.’

Surely this would have been something I’d have read about in the papers?

‘An African ho,’ she added in what was obviously intended to be an explanation but only left things as murky as ever for me.

‘it’s the only kind,’ she continued, ‘that seems to break up the earth well. You know, the soil’s so heavy in clay. That broad blade and the long handle, they just break the clods up like a bomb had hit them.’

A hoe! I’d been missing an ‘e’. Amazing the difference a single letter can make.

An African hoe. Not to be confused with an African ho

So she got her hoe. She’s apparently delighted with it. Though to me it just looks like another source of backbreaking work. Still, one should judge other people’s tastes by one’s own.

In any case, as Lewis Carroll points out in Alice in Wonderland, unbirthday presents make much more sense that birthday ones. We have, after all, a great many more unbirthdays every year than we have birthdays. So I’m grateful to Danielle for getting me an unbirthday present at the same time as I got her the hoe. A far more expensive gift, as it happens: a pair of walking boots.

Very comfortable they are too. Or eventually became. When I put the first one on, I was surprise to feel how tight it was over the top of my foot – pressing down and even quite painful in the way it rubbed.

‘Oh, well,’ I thought, ‘perhaps if I just walk them in a bit they’ll be quite snug.’

Then I tried to put the other one on. My toes were immediately met by an obstacle preventing my foot sliding in. I took a look. There was a piece of cardboard, the shape of the front part of the upper of the shoe, jammed in the front.

I’m glad to say that it didn’t take me long to work out that if there was a card in one shoe, there might have been one in the other. That somehow I’d managed to get my foot into that shoe despite the card. And that it was its presence that was making the shoe feel tight and painful.

So it turned out. I took the first shoe off. I extracted the card. Thereafter both shoes fitted beautifully.

Result? We’re both pleased with our birthday and unbirthday presents. No bullshit. And no hos.

In praise of aimlessness

‘If a fish came to me,’ the Mock Turtle tells Alice in Alice in Wonderland, ‘and told me he was going a journey, I should say, “with what porpoise?”’

The Mock Turtle and the Gryphon with Alice

Recently I’ve begun to realise, however, that some of the best excursions in life require neither a cetacean nor any other kind of purpose. That’s not a lesson that I’ve learned on my own: it took my dog Janka to teach me.

Natural indolence makes me generally unwilling to venture out of doors unless I have a pressing reason to do so. You know, something rewarding, like going to work or buying toilet paper. Otherwise I’d be perfectly happy just to stay at home and vegetate.

Strangely enough, vegetating usually involves a screen of some kind: a computer, a Kindle, a TV. Particularly now that it’s turned cold, I’m much more inclined to glue myself to one of them than to take a chance on chilly streets and biting wind.

But we have a dog and dogs impose their own strict code. 

She’s very good at knowing when I’m getting ready to take her out. I haven’t worked out how she can tell that I’m not going out for fun, to the office or the shops, but somehow she can. I start to put my shoes on, and she comes over to watch me, expectantly. I put on my coat and she’s right next to me. I grab a handful of what I euphemistically think of as ‘doggy-bags’ and she’s barking.

And all for what? We’re not going anywhere. In fact on the face of it we’re about to do something as mindlessly unproductive as anything could be: walk a substantial distance through the cold only to end up exactly where we started from.

And yet, and yet. Luton has three parks that lead into each other, two on hills crowned with trees, the third flat and around an extended lake, or possibly just a widened stream – I'm not sure what the difference is. 

Today, all three parks were flooded with golden light which somehow made the cold less painful. Janka was darting around, clearly giving not a single thought to the futility of the exercise, merely enjoying the moment. And I was listening to Ulysses on my headphones which meant mixing two sources of pleasure at once, not something it’s always easy to do.

By the time we got back, Janka’s food was ready, which gave her a more than sufficient goal for the outing. And even I was refreshed and in good humour.

Which makes me think. Perhaps she’s the one that’s right. You don’t always have to do things with a view to achieving something else. It’s time to recognise the pleasure of the activity in itself, to let myself go with the flow and enjoy simple aimlessness.

You can learn a lot from a dog. Much more, it would appear, than you can from a Mock Turtle.

Sorry, Lewis Carroll. Happy to do things without a porpoise after all.

Janka has much to teach me.