Technology | 2009.01.10
Jackie Ashley: Brown must admit mistakes: hearing otherwise just jars
Life is full of crises - family ones, health ones and, a little further from home, economic and political ones. Gordon Brown knows it. David Cameron knows it. It would be infantile to expect a crisis-free life. The question is whether we can survive our crises and learn from them. The political challenge is whether this dark and burgeoning recession could actually make us a better country.
This year, many hardworking people will lose their jobs through no fault of their own. Many businesses, built up with care, will be destroyed. Millions of savers, often older people, will find they don\'t have the interest or dividends they\'d depended on. High streets will have more boarded-up windows. People will look at the higher taxes to come, shiver, and shove their hands back in their pockets.
But after all that, bit by bit, confidence will come back. Markets go up as well as down. In a few favoured areas, house prices will stabilise. Good news, like bad, will ripple outwards. The unemployment figures will begin to fall. We will stagger out of this a little poorer but more cautious. We don\'t know exactly when, but we know a recovery will come.
The great question for politicians, particularly those on the left, is whether we can do better than that - whether we can emerge from the hard times as a greener, fairer, more caring country, which positively rejects a return to the "life equals shopping" culture of the boom years. And one reason for staying interested in politics through 2009, election or no election, is that the political leaders are so visibly struggling about which direction to take.
Reading and watching Brown\'s thoughts over the weekend suggests that he both does and doesn\'t accept that something major needs to shift. On one hand, he\'s been talking up the importance of state action and the death of simplistic free-market ideology - while he\'s been spending and nationalising too. He wants public spending projects, offering jobs by modernising schools and railways, putting in more fibre-optic cables, investing in green technologies. He\'s approved higher taxes for top earners and promised further help to pensioners and the poorest. In all this, we see the return of Labour values, which seemed at times over the last 10 years to have vanished into history. Nobody wants a state-run economy or 97% marginal taxes, but the notion of a slightly fairer, less materialistic and longer-term polity is not an ugly one, and is now sellable.
Yet on the other hand Brown also seems to blame the recession on a few unnamed bankers, or some toxic Americans. Challenged about the church leaders\' recent comments on the moral corruption of a high-debt consumer society he presided over as chancellor, he protests that he was brought up as a Presbyterian - which may be true, but is no kind of answer.
If we stand back from the confusing messages being sent out, his government has a decent story to tell about recent months. Business people I\'ve talked to over the holiday say that, actually, the Labour rescue package may well have saved us from a succession of further collapses and was pretty well thought out. Has it worked? Too early to say, but if the government had sat on its hands, some banks and many more businesses would surely have gone to the wall.
I don\'t buy the fashionable Tory-led hysteria about levels of government debt. They are high in comparative and historical terms, but not ludicrously so, given the challenge of the economy. Debt will have to be repaid in due course, with higher taxes, but this is not the end of the world - we managed perfectly well after earlier recessions. Among many, more taxation will even be popular. In a Fabian-YouGov poll, published at the weekend, 70% agreed that "those at the top are failing to pay their fair share towards investment in public services".
The same poll suggests there is now a fat-cat backlash, directed at City bosses and others who have forfeited their right to high salaries by their incompetence. Some 55% of those polled blamed reckless lending by the banks for the credit crunch, against less than a quarter thinking the government was mainly responsible. Put it all together and you have the possibility of a political sea change, away from some of the beliefs which had seemed unchallengeable from the late 80s onwards. We really do live in a world ready to accept bigger government and fairer taxes.
Yet to properly exploit that, Brown and his ministers have to change their tune about the past. To hear him claim he made no mistakes, and that everything about the Blair-Brown handling of the boom culture was well judged, jars horribly. If he believes we need to think again about what kind of society we want to be, he has to start by being a bit more reflective. It would give him more authority, more credibility - and make him more interesting to listen to.
It would also rob the Cameron Conservatives of their best gambit, which is simply to point, like the child at the naked emperor, and state the bleeding obvious about past mistakes. As a commentator, Cameron has been rather good lately. He says interesting things about moral failures, vacuums and values - rather like a clean-shaven pink-cheeked archbishop. It\'s just when he gets round to his own prescription for the future that he begins to falter.
Harsh? Well, we still have the Tory plan, which begins by saying they would rather not start from here. They too forget inconvenient parts of history, notably their enthusiasm for less regulated financial markets, and their more guarded acceptance of many of Brown\'s now "profligate" spending increases on health, law and order, and education. But their biggest problem is the littleness of their own solutions now: a bit less spending, but without specifying the cuts; and a few alternative mechanisms to help business. Further down the line they\'d like more localism, please. The harder the recession has bitten, the less they\'ve sounded their optimistic and greener notes. If we do get a hung parliament, they will have some hard bargaining with Lib Dems before being able to form a government - and I can\'t see any clear vision of a better country emerging from that.
No, the best bet for the year ahead is a rather more honest, self-critical Labour government responding to a changed public mood. We don\'t only want them to "see us through" the worst of the recession but for Britain to emerge as a fairer and more stable place. Call it the higher opportunism - that\'s the chance of a lifetime this crisis has brought.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/05/gordon-brown-economy
