It’s the economy, stupid” said Bill Clinton, and up to a point he was right. But it is not “growth” – rather an abstract concept – that most of us want but a reasonable amount of comfort. That comes from being able to afford the basic things at the lower tiers of Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs” and occasionally things higher in the triangle. A holiday. A bottle of wine. A trip to the theatre or the seaside.

Most of us can’t explain the much peddled link between growth in GDP and personal/family welfare. That is because it is at best technically complex, at worst cultishly spurious. Macroeconomics is not just the science of growing the economy but of how its product is distributed.

More than fifty years ago E.J.Mishan in his seminal “The Costs of Economic Growth” clearly described the downsides of untrammelled growth. Environmental damage was a key, but not the only one. The more we grow the more we pollute. There are legions of examples of this, not just in the Industrial Revolution but today.

If a country is like Norway, rich in valuable hydrocarbon resources, it can run a generous welfare state. Britain did this for a while as well but the resources have dwindled. So where’s the Growth and wealth creation and redistribution to come from? Our industrial base is reduced and where our economy is strong, in London in particular, the distribution of wealth is patchy at best.

The economic debate needs to be about more than a simplistic attachment to “growth”. We could benefit from revisiting Keynes and studying the successes of the “New Deal” in Roosevelt’s America. Yes public works underpin growth but a full employment society shouldn’t need foodbanks.

“Tax and Spend” gets a bad press but actually what modern economies have to do it to offer adequate welfare and investment . Austerity and spending cuts affects those who can least afford it. Unemployment may be low but zero hours contracts (etc.) mean that the quality of employment can be poor for many. Cancellling desirable public investment, like HS2 north of Birmingham, damaged our future transport infrastructure and employment.

The panacea of “Growth” is something of a myth. When in his first speech as Prime Minister Keir Starmer said “…we will rebuild Britain with wealth created in every community,” he was understandably vague about how that wealth could be created. And indeed about what “wealth” actually is. He should read Keynes, and Mishan !

An uncharacteristically binary pro Conservative view of politics from Matthew Parris in The Times today, which ignores the reality that over his lifetime Britain has been a mixed economy. With one exception that I’ll come on to. That mixed economy was created by the, in retrospect, astonishing achievements of Clement Attlee’s post war government. True that administration had a mild Clause 4 mindset which led to one or two inappropriate nationalisations. But the Welfare State they created has just about remained intact.

The mixed economy, the efficient working of both the public and the private sectors, was largely a British creation though it became ubiquitous across Europe. It is absolutely mutually dependent – public services need private companies to support them and private companies need efficient public services. In short some things are better publicly owned and run and some things demand the competition that private enterprise brings.

The interruption to the continuity of the mixed economy was in the 1980s when an ideologically driven Margaret Thatcher took an axe to public ownership. Some of her actions were necessary but grotesquely insensitively handled (the mines obviously). Some were scandalously corrupt – the railways and water for example – culpable errors from which we are still suffering.

Rishi Sunak, who Parris’s Conservative vote will help, is by his own admission an unreformed Thatcherite. Others around him are not supporters of the mixed economy at all. Does he really want these Tufton Street terrors to stay?

Kemi Badenoch, who is expected to run for the Conservative leadership if her party loses the election, has said, as reported in the Financial Times :

“Labour’s proposals divide the country into black/white, rich/poor, old/young — because they see people as target groups, not as individuals.

I think classifying your workforce by race and having this influence their salaries is morally repellent. It’s what they did in apartheid South Africa and what they do now in China and Myanmar,”

We are used to refuting nonsense in today’s irrational political world but this reaches new lows of stupidity. If we are to right wrongs and help those in need we have to identify who the people are and treat them as a cohort. In other words put people together – create target groups.

The comparison with “apartheid South Africa” is as offensive as it is absurd. There racial divisions were a tool of repression. Here if you want to help minorities you have to know who they are and what they need in order to assist them. Colour, Race, Age etc. are social characteristics that we need to understand and classify. It’s ignorant nonsense to suggest otherwise.

Musical theatre had a good track record of taking liberal positions. Rodgers and Hammerstein, especially, were courageous in their themes and characters. Take this plea for tolerance from “South Pacific” back in 1949:

“You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear

You’ve got to be taught from year to year

It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear

You’ve got to be carefully taught

You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late

Before you are six or seven or eight

To hate all the people your relatives hate

You’ve got to be carefully taught”

“Hamilton” stands out today partly because all too many new musicals are shallow “juke box” confections. Blame the puffery of those dancing in the aisles to Mamma Mia for that. But they do get bums on seats.

Musicals, at their best, are proper theatre with stories that matter and thought-provoking themes. R&H did it, as did Sondheim and Lerner and Loewe. And many others. “Caberet”, “Guys and Dolls”, “Les Miserables”…. So “Hamilton” is far from unique, good though it is.

“ The liberal who is rationally committed is more reliable than the liberal who is emotionally committed.” 

Ted Sorensen, who said this, was despite the eloquence of the language in the speeches he wrote for John Kennedy, something of a pragmatist. “Fine words” he might have written for JFK, “butter no parsnips”.

Walter Mondale, an unsuccessful candidate for the Presidency in 1984 challenged a rival by borrowing (from Wendy’s hamburgers) the question “Where’s the beef ?” Again it was a call for solid facts rather than emotion.

There is an underlying truth here that is disconnected from ideology. You could, I think, substitute the word “conservative” for “liberal” in Sorensen’s remark without damaging that truth.

Which brings me to the British General Election campaign in which, so far, reason has lost out to emotion – proper plans to uncosted and ill-thought-through promises. On both sides Sunak versus Starmer has become a battle of insults and unsubstantiated allegations (raw emotion) rather than rational argument.

And now we are told that Tories are being encouraged to make “Personal attacks” on Keir Starmer – in other words to turn Sorensen’s maxim on its head and resort to the rawest of emotion rather than rational argument.

It’s not a golden era is it ?

It is now thirty years since Steven Spielberg’s extraordinary “Schindler’s List” was released – I watch it every few years and see something new every time. The film is not an overtly campaigning or political movie and nor was Thomas Keneally’s non fiction novel, “Schindler’s Ark” on which it was based. They both tell a fundamentally true story.

One of the challenges of artistic creation is to be subtle even in the face of history that is horrific. War films rarely achieve this. “All Quiet on the Western Front” was an exception and there have been a few others but all too often they have been blood and guts hero stories rather than giving genuine insights into the human condition. “Schindler’s List” isn’t really a “war film” at all – in essence it symbolises the depths to which citizens of “civilised” countries can plunge.

The myth is that The Holocaust was an aberration flowing from the genocidal madness of Germany’s leaders. It was that, but never forget how many thousands were complicit in implementing “Sonderbehandlung” (“special treatment”) as it was euphemistically called. In the film a group of officers discuss this in a matter of fact way as if the gas chambers were perfectly normal. It is a morality free zone at Auschwitz.

Oskar Schindler is the contrasting phenomenon to the norm of time and place. He succeeded because he left no evidence that the Nazis could use to prosecute him – he was once locked up by them but was cunning enough to get out. He established a pragmatic “friendship” with the grotesque Austrian Amon Göth who was Commandant of the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp. The Light and Dark contrast of Schindler and Göth is a key theme of the film.

The messages of “Schindler’s List” are , I think, personal rather than being overt. For me “challenge the norms” is one. Mind you to be effective in that challenge in Kraków in the 1940s took a special type of cleverness and courage which Schindler had.

There is no hierarchy of horror in history. The family murdered in Auschwitz is the same as one slain in Gaza. The quantum makes The Holocaust exceptional but at a personal level it’s the same. Otto Frank lost his daughter Anne and his wife Edith in Bergen-Belsen. Over the past eighty years from Stalin’s Gulags to Mai Lai to Tiannamen Square to Netanyahu’s attacks in Palestine families have continued to be bereaved. Not “collateral damage” but as targets.

“Where have all the graveyards gone, long time passing?
Where have all the graveyards gone, long time ago?
Where have all the graveyards gone?
Gone to flower, every one!
When will they ever learn, oh when will they ever learn?”

A Labour leader embracing the benefits of Growth is all very well. But you cannot decouple wealth creation from wealth distribution. Obviously a growing economy is better than a stagnant one. But the product of growth generated mainly in the private sector can only be redistributed via corporate and personal taxation.

Growth is measured in “Gross Domestic Product “ (GDP). Key word here is “Product” , this includes tangibles (manufactured goods) and intangibles (services, especially financial services).

In a mixed economy the private sector is the primary driver of growth – they, in classic terms, use the factors of production (Land, Labour, Capital and Enterprise) to make goods and services.

But along with these goods and services the economy needs public services most of which are, or should be, provided under the control of national and local government. We have seen that “control” absent or ineffective in recent decades. Look no further than the Water sector to see overwhelming evidence of this. Water and other private sector monopolies have, scandalously, been run with shareholders and board directors as the primary beneficiaries not the public.

Healthcare is a key “public service” – the benefits of having a healthy population go beyond moral ones. The economy will grow better and be more productive is people are healthy. How often do we forget or even fail to measure these pragmatic benefits of the NHS?

Certain public services like public transportation are, and mostly should be, paid for by users. But again proper Cost/Benefit Analysis would show that some public subvention is beneficial and justified.

There is no “Magic Money Tree” in that rather hackneyed phrase. Investment in infrastructure and employment in the essential public services sector has to be paid for either by taxation or borrowings, or by instituting payment in relation to use. Road pricing can generate income from motorists but is unpopular (eg ULEZ). Charging for some healthcare is also unpopular and extending that is unlikely to be politically viable.

No potential government can truthfully rule out increased taxation if public services are to be maintained or improved. What Labour should be doing is arguing for a shift from regressive to progressive taxation. It’s not Marxist to argue that a wealthy modern state should follow the “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” principle . That means taxing , mainly, wealth and income not consumption.

I think that political labels are losing their meaning, if they ever had one. If forced to label myself I would choose “liberal” because, shallow though it is, it probably comes closest as a single word descriptor to describing my personal politics. And yet the Tony Crosland Gaitskellite version of “socialist” isn’t far away either. “Social Democrat” and “Liberal” aren’t that far away from one another. The LibDems in their very name embrace this truth.

The post war pre Brexit Conservative Party, the Thatcher years aside, was not extremist. Heath removed Powell. Nor were successive Labour governments and shadow governments (Michael Foot aside) extremist before the insanity of Corbyn. Britain was governed from the centre ground. “Butskellite” was more than just a handy descriptor. Both main participate had their lunatic fringes. But Harold Wilson was Bevan when campaigning and Gaitskell in office. Edward Heath talked “Neoliberal” but had to govern a mixed economy. Blair undid little that Thatcher/Major had introduced

But Brexit hasn’t gone away and One Nation Conservatives are a threatened species. My liberalism is strongly underpinned by my internationalism, the two go together. But internationalist Tories like Clarke, Patten, Heseltine and before them Heath weren’t exactly liberals! And yet they and thousands of other internationalist Conservatives were cast aside as the Party became not Thatcherite (their delusion) but Powellite (the truth). Remember the most vocal Conservative opponent of the Common Market was the nakedly nationalist and imperialist Enoch Powell.

The centre didn’t hold and we can analyse the reasons. Brexit is, of course, the primary one. Whilst Cameron must take most of the blame for launching the referendum and then mismanaging the 2016 campaign Corbyn was almost as much to blame giving lacklustre support to continued EU membership which had been central to his party’s manifesto only a year earlier.

Brexit turned the Tories hard Right, and Labour hard Left. The Conservatives are still there. Starmer is the heir to the centrist policies of the past whether they be of Blair or Macmillan. Sunak emphatically is not.

In. 2014 @IainDale chose Nigel Farage as his “Most influential person on the Right”, ahead of David Cameron. Ten years on this looks a perceptive choice. The EU Referendum designed to marginalise Farage had the reverse effect because he played a major part in Leave’s victory

Does anyone doubt that the Conservative Party has been irreversibly changed by Farage’s external threat? It’s happened because of Brexit, his single issue proposition. His predicable anti Asylum seeker and anti Immigration stance today is part of his National Conservative stance. A stance that is virtually identical to the “Popular Conservatives” actually in the Party.

The One Nation Tories of yore have become a distant memory – in part a consequence of the Farage threat. Post Brexit the likes of Ken Clarke, Dominic Grieve, Michael Heseltine and more have sought new homes. And those Tories who stayed active (or returned in David Cameron’s case) have had to swallow the Brexit Kool-Aid. Cameron, who led the “Remain” campaign, is now a Brexiteer !

Nigel Farage is a shallow, narrow and bigoted man. I have described the time I spent with him elsewhere – suffice to say that to have suggested then that he could be a serious political influence would have been preposterous. But beware. He will be elected in Clacton. All bets are off

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The Trump story is a sort of malignant Alice in Wonderland. Nothing is but what is not. Donald Trump’s all too visible deficiencies should have prevented him being elected in 2016. But it was the year of the world’s two largest English-speaking nations taking leave of their senses in elections. I reflected at the time that at least Trump would only be in office for four years – we Brits wouid be stuck with the consequences of Brexit for a decade or more. I was right. At least so I thought.

Trump’s failed Presidency and its hideous coda on January 6th 2021 should have seen the end of this repulsive man. That it didn’t is attributable to three main factors. Firstly a movement grew in America, much larger than a cult, which totally irrationally, sanctified Trump and even saw him as the representation of their simplistic religious beliefs. Second the Republican Party adopted Trump despite the fact that his history, performance and behaviour had nothing in common with the party of Lincoln, Reagan and Bush. And third commentators actually made the case for Trump – a case based on the bizarre notion that the Conservative Right had no one better.

I would add that some people who should know better made the case for Trump because they personally benefited from his presidency, or thought they did. An American senior ex colleague of mine, a rich man, supported Trump because the stock market did well during his time in the White House. Self interest before decency and logic.

There is no precedent for the Trump phenomenon, certainly in modern times. Richard Nixon was a crook but a brilliant though deeply flawed one. Many of his successors had their moments of fallibility but in the main they all earned respect from opponents and the public alike. Now after his conviction nobody, even surely his most fanatical supporters, can respect Donald Trump.

It’s too easy to blame American culture and society. True a totally rational nation would have had checks and balances that would have prevented the “Donald” from being in any way near power. But there was a gut anti-establishment appeal in Trump that led many deprived and deluded electors to vote for him. The “It can’t get any worse” syndrome.

Well it did get worse and the very fact that despite everything people are today, post the New York verdicts, promoting Trump for President puts us firmly in Mad Hatter territory. Oh my fur and whiskers!