Uncategorized – Page 2 – thinking liberal

The political consequences of Covid-19 depend on what the government does afterwards

There has been an understandable rallying round by the public during the Covid-19 crisis. Here in Britain, as in most places, the governing party has seen its popularity rise (the main exception is the USA). Will this last?

As with so much else in this crisis the answer seems to depend on which party you supported in the first place. Conservatives think they will keep the opposition parties on the back foot for the long term. The obvious precedent is the Falklands War in 1982. In spite of the initial calamity, which could be blamed on a careless government, people rallied to the flag. Mrs Thatcher’s Conservatives had been doing very badly in public opinion polls beforehand, but they won a landslide in the next two elections.

Opposition supporters, on the other hand, think there will be a reckoning as the dust starts to settle, and the government’s handling will be judged as inept. We are starting to see signs of a concerted assault on the government this weekend. The Sunday Times is running a story claiming that the government failed to follow scientific advice at the start and lost five weeks in its initial response. Kier Starmer, the new Labour leader, has joined in, after being reticent beforehand. Will the charges stick?

I certainly think the government made a false start. Contrary to what is repeatedly being said, though, this was not because they were ignoring scientific advice. That advice was muddled and contradictory; there were plenty of senior science types who backed the government up, though others were urging an earlier lockdown. There was a disastrous dalliance with the idea that the country should allow the virus to spread and build herd immunity; this was following one of the many strands of scientific advice. What was lacking was political nous. Politicians, not scientists, should be the experts on what the public will accept, and how best to communicate what the government wants it to do. The reason why so many governments went fast and hard for a lockdown in other countries was mainly political. It was a very simple message to communicate and it made them look decisive. Boris Johnson, the prime minister, showed poor judgement and has nobody else to blame.

But once the government grasped that the critical issue was not to overload hospitals, they started to do much better. The NHS built up capacity in intensive care with impressive speed, and, unlike in Italy, they have not been overloaded. The whole chain from reporting symptoms to admission to the ICU has been thought through and works (unless you live in a care home, unfortunately). Two issues nag, apart from neglect of care home residents: the slow rate of testing and the lack of personal protective equipment (PPE). Both partly go back to the government’s slow start, as other countries got ahead of the UK in stressed global markets. There has also been organisational ineptitude, especially in the case of testing. Public Health England, in charge of the testing (not actually part of the formal NHS) seems to have been using methods copied from Soviet Russia. They have been slow to take up available capacity, and getting the tests to the people that need them has been not been given much thought. Most people are expected to drive themselves to facilities set up in car parks, and even this is badly managed – I was caught in a 20 minute traffic jam outside the facility set up in Chessington World of Adventures, which I just wanted to drive past, and which would ordinarily handle much higher volumes with no disruption at all.

Still, the public probably don’t think anybody else would have done better – it doesn’t bear thinking about what would have happened if Labour had won the election last December and Jeremy Corbyn had been prime minister. I suspect the attacks on the government will resonate with the usual suspects and change few minds.

Much more important is what happens as the crisis subsides. There are some tricky decisions ahead about how and when to release people from the lockdown, but I don’t think the government is going to get this badly wrong. For all the criticism, it is managing the issue quite sensibly. The real risks are when life starts to return to normal, and the government works out what to do next.

Top of the agenda is our old friend Brexit. The government insists that it will not ask for an extension to the transition period, which ends on 31 December. It evokes too many bad memories of how Theresa May’s government lost control; there is also a powerful myth in the government’s inner elite that delaying deadlines weakens the government’s negotiating position. This is risky; the country is likely to plunge head first into a hard Brexit that could be very disruptive. On one view it would be throwing salt onto the woulds left by the pandemic; on another the pandemic will have dome so much damage already that few people will notice. We’ll have to see.

Next comes the economy. This deserves a separate post. The signs are that damage to the pre-crisis economy will be severe and there will be no quick bounce back. Also government finances will be in tatters. The challenge will be to make sure that panic about the latter does not prevent action about the former. With ultra-low interest rates, government finances are not nearly as scary as they will look. The early signs are that the Treasury has learnt from its mistakes after the Great Financial Crisis, and ministers are not ideologically averse to throwing government cash around. That should prevent catastrophe; the public will forgive a degree of recession.

But the big issue will be catching the zeitgeist of how to change things after the crisis. In my last post I said that people will want to get back to where we were before. But there will still be some shock and reevaluation; the public will expect more than a shrug. What to do about the working-class heroes of the crisis, the nurses, hospital workers and care home workers, will be central. There is a public perception that these groups are undervalued by society. But what to do? Paying them more will be very expensive on public finances and almost certainly need more taxes to balance it. If the government picks up and runs with this idea they could prove unstoppable at the next election. It would mean trashing 40 years of Conservative ideology. But that doesn’t mean it won’t happen.

Alas other issues thrown up by the crisis, such as the precarious nature of so many jobs, and the poor housing conditions of so many of the less well-off, will be rapidly forgotten by most people, and the government will take little or no action. A more interesting question is whether people will feel more sensitive to environmental issues, forcing the government to take these more seriously. Previous crises would suggest not, but this is a different crisis in a different time.

Politically all crises represent both threat and opportunity. There is plenty of both this time. It will be a real test of political mettle. We haven’t seen anything yet.

Why I have been offline

It’s been one of my longer periods of silence on the blog, and I’m still not ready to post at my old rate. I owe my readers an explanation.

Covid-19 is today’s excuse for everything. It has been an important part of what has been happening to me, but it isn’t the reason that I haven’t had time to devote to my blog. That is because in the New Year my wife and I finally took the plunge to move out of London. We’ve been plotting it for years, to the mounting boredom of our friends and relations. We are frustrated with our life in the big city. We love the countryside and feel trapped in London. We also want more space and less jostling with our neighbours. We weren’t looking for the full rural experience, but to take a big step towards it, to live somewhere with more space and with better access to the countryside: preferably a very short walk.

So in January we took steps to put our terraced house near Clapham Common on the market. I was hoping for a bit of a “Boris bubble”, before relief at the breaking of the political deadlock was overwhelmed by the contradictions in what the new government was trying to do, and an overdue global recession struck. Our plan was to achieve a quick sale if possible, so we promised “no chain”. In other words we were happy to move out to temporary accommodation in the probable event that we were unable to synchronise a purchase.

This proved well-timed. The local property market had been dead, but with quite a few potential buyers. Very few properties were coming onto the market. In a week the house had 40 viewings and we had five offers, though none for the asking price. We picked one of these, with our objective of a quick but secure sale in mind, negotiated a slightly higher offer, and we had exchanged contracts before Valentine’s Day.

This left the other half of our plans to move a bit adrift. We had been doing a bit of surreptitious looking over the previous two years. We initially focused on West Sussex and the Chichester area. But we were unimpressed with what was on the market there, and it was relatively expensive. So we started to investigate East Sussex, in the Battle and Rye area, and lined up several viewings. There were some near misses, but none quite hit the mark. We did find the area just as beautiful as further west, so we made a second visit, just as we were about to exchange contracts.

This time we combined the east of East Sussex with the region where the two parts of Sussex meet, in the area around Lewes and Eastbourne. This part of the world quickly grew on us. Lewes is a lovely and interesting place. The South Downs are nearby. And it is within easier reach of both central London and the west of the country, where most of our relatives live, than Rye. We found two properties we really liked there, and offered on one of them. After a bit to and fro our offer was accepted before my birthday on 21 February, though it was clear that there would be a gap between moving out and completing on the new property.

And so started the process of preparing to move out. We had been living in our house for nearly 24 years, and our entire married life. Although we had done a lot of sorting out last year, the amount that still needed to be done was massive. We set a completion date of 27 March, a bit later than our buyers wanted, but about as quickly as we thought we could manage. As usual I was more optimistic than my wife, but on this occasion she proved correct. Getting ready became overwhelming. Sorting things into boxes to take, or into various categories of throwing out. We made regular trips to the dump and local charity shops. We also needed to work out what we would need for our temporary accommodation and what was to be put into storage, without having any clear idea of how long the temporary interlude was going to be.

And then came Covid-19. Like most people I didn’t see the seriousness of the impact until quite late. It was something happening in China. But as it took hold in Italy it slowly dawned that it could affect our plans to move. So our feelings differed from most people. We were willing the government to slow down on imposing restrictions, while most people thought the government was dithering (and most people were surely right). And while most people were stocking up for the crisis ahead, we were doing the opposite to minimise what we had at movement day. Slowly restrictions started to get in the way. The charity shops stopped taking donations and then closed altogether. Some quite usable things went to the tip instead. And then the tip closed, and more stuff had to go into regular bin collections. And the question nagged: would we be able to move at all on 25 March, when we had booked our removal company?

On Monday 23 March, I honestly thought we’d lost the race. Boris Johnson announced lockdown, and the four reasons that we could go out of the house, and completing a house move wasn’t listed. At this stage a high proportion of our stuff was packed; only the bedroom wasn’t taken over by boxes. Normal life had become impossible: we were camping in our own home. It was worse for the people moving in. The wife was six months pregnant and they had a young child. Their rental contract expired at the end of March. The emergency might be able to stave off eviction; it would not delay a new arrival.

On Tuesday we contacted our removers. They were keen to proceed, though they wanted to telescope a two day move into one. Government restrictions on work were vague, it turned out, and ministers talked of keeping the economy going. That gave our removers the wiggle-room, and we were asking no questions. Our relief was immense. It was only slightly marred by Premier Inn calling us in the evening to tell us that our booking for Wednesday to Friday was cancelled. We realised that staying at home after the removal had started was not a practical proposition and had planned to stay there. We managed to find a local apartment instead, though this proved not nearly as comfortable.

On Wednesday our removers turned up. A first there were five of them, and then eight. They worked hard and cheerfully, and got the job done. They marvelled how just the two of us had managed to accumulate so much stuff; we lamely said that a lot of it was inherited. That gave us Thursday and Friday morning to pack up the stuff we weren’t putting into storage, and to clean the place up a bit. On Friday completion happened and we became technically homeless.

We are now in Broadstairs, Kent, in a holiday apartment. We are then moving into a house nearby that a friend owns as a holiday hone and very generously offered to us for as long as we needed it. Our purchase is frozen, without us being able to exchange contracts. We are one end of a four property chain; nothing can move until restrictions are eased. On the Friday that we completed the government published explicit rules on the property market, effectively freezing it. We had only just made it. The landlady of our current apartment now says that she can let only to key workers; we would not have qualified. While our position is certainly not what we had been hoping for, it could have been a lot worse. Compared to the stresses that so many are now enduring our problems are small beer.

Up to the 27 March we had been focusing on completion to the exclusion of everything else. Since then, we have been recovering from the whole exhausting experience. I have actually been quite busy. There was a backlog of work on my various voluntary duties, and two online meetings last week. That has kept me pretty busy; there will be not let up for another week or two, with an ongoing audit and two important compliance deadlines to meet. And then the lockdown will finally catch up and I will have for reading, thinking and blogging (though most of the backlog of reading is in storage!). Service will resume.

The Brexit chaos offers Labour an opportunity

Most people who follow British politics are in despair, as neither government nor parliament are able to plot a way forward with sufficient backing to succeed. But perhaps the small band of advisers to Jeremy Corbyn, Labour’s leader, who famously think that Brexit is a subsidiary issue, are sensing opportunity.

When Mr Corbyn was elected as Labour leader in 2015, Conservatives were gleeful, foreseeing a generation of permanent Tory rule. But Brexit and a blinkered leader have undone them. In 2017 they threw away a massive poll lead and lost their parliamentary majority. In recent months they have retained a consistent poll lead over Labour. This is not enough to break the deadlock, but enough to keep Labour out. But that could change.

Consider the possible outcomes of the current impasse over Brexit. A strong possibility is that the country will crash out of the EU on 11 April without a deal. Neither government nor parliament wants this, but neither can they agree on a deal, nor do they have the courage to revoke the Article 50 withdrawal process altogether. So what are the likely consequences?

It is hard to know just how bad things will be in the event of a no-deal Brexit, as most commentators are either pumping up the dangers or dismissing them. But some of the more thoughtful Brexiteers, like Michael Gove, the Environment Secretary, are clearly rattled. Agricultural tariffs seem to be what is spooking him. Agriculture is not a major part of the economy by monetary value, but politicians the world over know that it packs a big political punch. There will be other problems, not all entirely attributable to Brexit, that will add to the misery. The British car industry is flat on its back. This is partly to do with Brexit, and the effect of planning blight on an industry that has to investment for years ahead. But also it is almost entirely foreign-owned and the underlying economics has changed to make repatriation of manufacturing to home countries more advantageous. A no-deal will accelerate its decline and the massive loss of prestige that will go with it. And there will be a hundred other smaller humiliations, that will be felt keenly by the better-educated and more worldly third of the population who never wanted it in the first place.

It gets worse. Britain will still have to deal with the EU and work out new agreements to allow a thousand things that we take for granted to keep going. This will not be easy as Brexiteers promise, and further humiliating climb-downs are in store. The only place where the hard Brexiteers may be proved right is Ireland. The Irish Republic is only now facing up to the consequences of its hard line on the Withdrawal Agreement and finds itself in a very sticky spot, just as the DUP and the Tory supporters predicted.

In the chaos Labour should be able to force a General Election, even if the government tries to struggle on. The Conservatives don’t have a majority, and have been struggling with a stream of defections. The DUP may well decide that the fun of propping it up is over and withdraw its support. The Tory position will be desperate. If Labour are able to launch their strike quickly, they may not even be able to change leader. In that event they stand no chance of presenting a coherent and convincing case to electors. More likely they will manage to find somebody new, but though he (or much less likely, she) might experience a honeymoon, there will not be enough time for them to get a strong grip on the organisation. Meanwhile Labour, and everybody else, will throw back at the Brexiteers that will then be in charge of the party, all their false prospectuses about Brexit and the no-deal.

What happens if Britain manages to avoid a no-deal? One scenario only gives the Tories a chance: if they are able to get Theresa May’s deal through parliament at the fourth attempt, and then leave in a relatively orderly fashion on 23 May. But to do that they will need a substantial block of Labour MPs, and if the Labour leadership resists, that surely will not happen. Ruling that out, what could happen is some sort of long stay of execution to renegotiate the deal and organise a General Election.

What does Labour do then? It needs to promise a new exit deal to be confirmed by a further referendum. To win, Labour must rally the Remain voters who will no longer be able to support the Tories: that means promising a referendum. But they also need to rally at least some Leave supporters. The importance of these to Labour has been exaggerated, but the party will still need all the votes it can get. But the leadership can still say that it is in favour of Brexit, and will campaign in favour of its new deal when that referendum comes. If that looks a little weak, the Tories will be struggling to come up with a coherent alternative. With decent execution (never a given in British politics after Tony Blair) this could be a winner for Labour.

But are still problems for them. The first is Scotland. Labour has always struggled to win without a substantial bank of Scottish seats. But they have been outflanked on Brexit there by the SNP, who remain organisationally strong. It is hard to see what killer arguments they can use against them.

A second problem for Labour is that it still lacks traction in rural and suburban England. Mr Blair conquered these areas by promising neoliberalism. Labour can’t do that this time. Also they are broadly pro Brexit, so any referendum promise will get in the way. Some form of “progressive” alliance with the Lib Dems, the Greens and even with TIG might help to unlock these seats. But Labour’s strategy for dealing with these parties is to crush them, not lend them a hand.

Which is related to the third problem: the Tories will try to change the subject, as Labour so successfully did in the last election. They will not talk about Brexit any more than they really have to. Instead they will paint Labour as loopy lefties, who can’t be trusted to run the nation’s finances, the forces of law and order, or to control the borders. Labour might think that the country is fed up with “austerity”, but the voters they need to win over think that being careful with public spending is a good thing.

That makes it hard for Labour, but not impossible. Their shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, understands the need for a disciplined message on economic management, and the party’s campaign managers surely realise that abstract ideas like austerity cut little ice compared to concrete messages on impacts of cuts to education and police funding, for example.

The Labour leadership is reaching its moment of truth. Their strategy of sticking to a narrow, leftist agenda (unlike Mr Blair’s broad centrist one) is inherently risky. But the Tories may be gifting them their chance. Will they be up to the task?

The ERG and Labour are the authors of Britain’s Brexit chaos

Britain’s Brexit drama rolls on to wards a destination that nobody knows. Anything from a dropping out without a deal (notwithstanding MPs trying to vote away the possibility) to a further referendum looks feasible, none of the many options looks probable.

Earlier this week I visited a small food manufacturing business that exports about half of its products around the world, but mainly to EU countries. While orders remain healthy the business’s managers are utterly perplexed by the state the country has got itself into. They cannot plan for Brexit because they don’t know what form it will take. Exit itself is not such a big deal for them. There will be more paperwork for exports to EU countries, but that doesn’t stop them from exports to non-EU countries. The problem is that they don’t know what form the paperwork will take, and what arrangements to make for VAT, etc. Doubtless this doesn’t just affect exports to EU countries either, but also those to countries with which the Union has trade agreements. What they’re angry about is not the decision to leave (though they are exasperated by how ignorant people were at the time of the vote, and largely still are), but how we have backed ourselves into such a corner about our arrangements for international trade. They think that there is a real prospect of supermarket shelves going empty for a while after exit.

This has helped put things in perspective. If the scare stories about no-deal look overdone, the denials that problems will amount to anything much by hard Brexiteers look even less credible. Why would anybody take Ian Duncan Smith seriously after the Universal Credit fiasco after all? The whole thing is a horrible mess. Who amongst our politicians comes out of it well?

Few people seem to have a good word for the Prime Minister, Theresa May. This is mostly unfair. She lacks emotional intelligence and should surely have done a better job of consolidating support before she negotiated the “final” deal last year. If we are going to leave the EU without economic chaos, and exacerbated political problems in Northern Ireland, this is as good as it gets. Mrs May’s claim that it is as close as we can get to the zeitgeist of the 2016 referendum result is perfectly defensible. The deal takes the country out of the union. It gives the government a much freer hand to regulate immigration, and we are out of the agriculture and fisheries regimes. The Northern Ireland backstop is undoubtedly awkward, but it is a tackles a hard problem. I don’t think that most people in Britain or Northern Ireland mind it that much. So what if we are stuck in a Customs Union? That doesn’t seem to bother the Turks very much. People who rubbish the deal haven’t presented convincing alternatives. The “Canada plus” idea doesn’t deal with the Irish problem, and messes up trade with the EU, which by sheer geography is our most important trading partner, never mind 40 years of historical integration. The “Norway Plus” option, which would put the country in Efta, like Norway and Iceland, does not deal with immigration, which most people agree was the biggest issue in the 2016 referendum.

So I don’t think that Mrs May and the Conservatives who have stood by her come out of the picture too badly. I also have some admiration for ardent Remainers in that party, like Kenneth Clarke, who have reluctantly backed her. This is grown-up politics.

But lest you think I am letting off the Tories on this, by far the most mendacious politicians in Britain are the Conservatives in the European Research Group, led by Jacob Rees-Mogg, which seems to have enormous power in the wider Conservative movement, and is poised to take over its leadership. Mr Rees-Mogg’s claim that the deal is “Brexit in name only” is nonsensical, as is the claim that parliament is trying to subvert the will of the people. It is not clear what people actually voted for in 2016, and the result was close anyway. Leave campaigners did their best to muddy the waters as to what people were voting for, in order to assemble the widest possible voting coalition. If they want a more extreme version of Brexit then there are clear political processes that need to be followed to achieve that. You can’t hang it on the referendum result. Norway and Switzerland similarly rejected EU membership by popular vote, but are quite happy with intermediate arrangements that are closer to EU integration than Mrs May’s deal. Even on the Irish backstop, which is more of a legal obstacle than I thought, it wouldn’t be a problem if they really believed what they claim about the possibilities of alternative arrangements. And the terms of their opposition will only convince people in the Republic of Ireland that such a legal device is necessary.

The DUP I have a bit more sympathy with. They do not represent the opinions of a majority of the province, but they do seem true to their party values. However when their spokesmen offer the government negotiating advice, specifically to keep the no-deal option “on the table”, it makes me choke. This is the party whose obstinacy in their negotiations with Sinn Fein has left the province without a devolved government for over a year.

After the ERG, I think the most dishonest British politicians are the Labour leadership. They have no clear plan at all, and have been opposing the government simply for short term political advantage. Either they should back Mrs May’s deal, or they should clearly advocate putting it to a public vote against a Remain option. Instead they maintain a dishonest fiction that they can do a better Brexit deal. This has helped prolong the uncertainty that is slowly but surely undermining Britain’s commercial infrastructure. and it could well lead the country into a no-deal situation that most people accept will be catastrophic at least in the short-term. If they really wanted an exit with a customs union they should let the deal through, and then change things afterwards, once they have won a majority in parliament. The party did not advocate outright opposition to Brexit in their manifesto, and neither a further referendum. Given the national situation supporting the deal, or at least abstaining, but be perfectly consistent with the position they were elected on.

There are competent and reasonable Labour MPs, but they are mainly on the back benches. To hear Yvette Cooper on the radio is to wonder how much better life would be if she had won the party leadership in 2015, as I had hoped. She is engaging with reality rather than political slogans.

What of the others? My own Lib Dems are engaged in a risky strategy of total opposition until a new referendum is agreed. Whether or not that is responsible adult politics is one thing, but it least it is consistent with what they have been telling the public since 2016. The party has tried responsible adult politics in the coalition years of 2010-2015, and were slaughtered for it. My instinct is to be similarly understanding of the SNP. Given the way the Scots voted in the referendum it would be hard for them to roll over.

Personally I do hope that a delay and a new referendum emerges from the wreckage. This is only appropriate for a decision on this scale. But the government’s proposed deal is an honest attempt to square the circle. It is a pity that so few of the country’s politicians are interested in honest solutions.

Knife crime requires local action and resources, not national grandstanding

England is suffering a serious epidemic of knife crime, with a high proportion of teenagers amongst both the victims and perpetrators. A few months ago a teenager was a murder outside my local Tube station; some fresh flowers marked the spot as I walked past it this morning. Many others are similarly finding the epidemic is coming uncomfortably close to home. Two further murders over the weekend have provoked a national political kerfuffle. But much of it misses the point.

The biggest problem in English politics is that too many decisions are taken by the UK government in London, with a weak regional layer (comprising a few city regions based on large conurbations such as London and Manchester), and local government that lacks powers by comparison with any other large country. A striking aspect of this is that different public agencies, such as police, health services, schools, social workers and so on, do not cooperate as much as they should. Each of these agencies reports up to a politician in Westminster, who grandstands to national media agencies according to a news agenda that is set nationally. Leaders of local agencies don’t have the power or incentive to make local cooperation work, and they are liable to have their funding squeezed anyway to make way for for headline-making projects. Any yet so many problems are complex, and require just such local coordination.

It isn’t so bad in Scotland, which has devolved government and Scots-level media, though there are issues there with local government being hollowed out. Wales, which also has devolved government, doesn’t seem to be any better run than England. I don’t know enough about that country to know why, but my impression is that Welsh politicians are quite conservative, and have used their powers to resist reforms that have been taking place elsewhere in the country. But I think the Welsh are slowly learning the implications and responsibilities of devolution the hard way.

Knife crime has complex roots. A lot of it is related to youth gangs, many of which feed on the trade of illegal drugs. Too many teenagers are drawn into these gangs, apparently to make up for the lack of any other community to belong. Gangs find the use of knives is the most cost-effective way of asserting themselves. Many young people feel that they need to arm themselves for their own protection, as well as status. What lies behind this, and has led to the rise youth crime, after a long period when it fell, is, to my mind, the hollowing out of local public services. The Labour government of 1997 to 2010 pumped quite a lot of resources into local institutions, especially after its early austerity years. They did not really believe in local empowerment, and their efforts were clumsy and inefficient. Many of the resources went into the pockets of expensive but superficial management consultants; many agency managers spent time in interminable inter-agency meetings that were slow to take responsibility; anybody involved in public services had to wade through reams of waffle worth nothing more than an education in buzz words. Some reforms, such as those to the probation service, suffered hugely from political grandstanding. There was a tendency to nanny and lecture people rather than empower them.

But for all that a lot of good work was done, which, in some areas at least, achieved a lot. Schooling improved and its scope widened to early years and providing beyond the school day and term time; they were encouraged to work with other agencies. The police established neighbourhood policing teams, which gathered local intelligence, and had the time to deal with antisocial behaviour and work with other agencies. Youth crime fell sharply.

Then came the financial crisis and the push to make cuts to government resources. This went up a few gears with the Conservative Liberal Democrat coalition government of 2010 to 2015. Incoming ministers rightly bridled against the inefficiency of Labour’s public services, and felt that they could do better with less. They drove through drastic cuts. At first this seemed to go quite well. There was indeed a lot of waste to be stripped out, and statistics, including those for crime, appeared sho little if any damage. But they too followed an over-centralised modus operandi. The Lib Dems did try to moderate this – and they helped the creation of city regions to better coordinate agencies in the bigger cities – but it hard not to be overwhelmed by the Westminster way. The cuts were driven from the top by the Treasury on national departmental ministers. Furthermore many ministers followed a flawed model of outsourcing to save money, which fragmented services further and focused them on inward looking performance targets. The big idea for many of the outsourcing agencies was to de-skill services, reducing their ability to deal with complex problems. Experienced, problem-solving professionals were replaced by junior box-tickers. They became unable to facilitate solutions by working with other agencies, so problems were passed on rather than solved. This became even worse after 2015 when the Conservatives governed on their own, and drove the fiscal squeeze though even further. Childrens Centres and youth facilities were closed down; neighbourhood policing was eviscerated; probation and prison services engaged in a battle for survival with little time to help solve society’s wider problems. The epidemic of youth crime followed.

At last England’s political class realises that there is a problem, and is starting to panic. But once again they are reaching for national solutions, or using the crisis to advance national beefs, like police powers. A popular solution is to create a knife-crime “czar”. Others call for a national strategy driven forward by the Prime Minister. All these are tried and tested approaches which rarely acheive more than short term gains on narrow criteria. What is depressing is that it isn’t just politicians that are calling for this sort of approach. One of the leading advocates is Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, the former head of police in both London and Manchester. But people like Sir Bernard are part of the problem, not the solution. He was one of the leading advocates of the hollowing out of neighbourhood policing to make way for headline-grabbing specialised regional and national squads.

A few more perceptive commentators point to a more successful approach. Glasgow used to have a huge knife-crime problem – but a coordinated and devolved multi-agency approach reversed it. This is referred to a “public health” approach, to which some politicians are paying lip service. Whether or not this nomenclature is helpful I am not sure. But what needs to be done is to push resources into regional and local multi-agency teams, with the power to rebuild the local institutions that have been so callously swept away and make them work properly. Unfortunately this will not be quick, though it would help with a lot more than knife-crime. The problem was many years in the making and it will take many years to solve.

That is not to say that there are not national aspects to the problem that could do with a bit of a national shove. One of the developments are the “county lines” developed by city gangs going into small towns and rural areas, and connecting the problems in both. But even here we should note that it is in such small towns and rural areas that local institutions are at their weakest, where austerity and economic trends have combined to suck wealth out of local economies. The city gangs are pushing at an open door.

But our over-centralised way runs too deep. Even those who advocate a more decentralised approach rarely seem to understand its full implications. It will take more than this panic for people to understand just how dysfunctional our governing institutions have become.

Is Labour crumbling on Brexit?

What are we to make of last night’s votes on Brexit in the British parliament? Are we edging closer to a deal in time for 29 March? Or towards a crash out on the same date? Or towards a postponement? You can find advocates of each of these in this morning’s media coverage.

The official Conservative line is this: the victory of the Graham Brady amendment shows that there is majority for the government’s deal if only the Irish backstop can be made to go away. So the prime minister Theresa May will go back to Brussels, and the EU side will crack, in spite of all their protestations to the contrary, because they fear a no-deal, which will disrupt commerce, to say nothing of an advantageous legal settlement, and, not least, leave the Irish border in fog. Parliament will then endorse the revised deal, and scramble to enact the necessary legislation to ensure a smooth formal exit on 29 March.

This is straight out of the backseat driver’s guide to negotiations, beloved of the Tory Brexiteers, who have shown little skill at front seat driving, but remain experts in the backseat variety. I am very sceptical that the EU side is going to give anything like enough ground. The optimists are looking in the wrong place for potential progress. The key is not the EU officials based in Brussels, but the Irish ones in Dublin. If British Brexiteers show little understanding of EU politics, they are experts in it compared to their comprehension of Irish politics. I’m no expert in either brand of politics, and I had been expecting, even hoping for, signs of flexibility in Dublin, given the terrible impact a no-deal would have there. But there is absolutely no sign of it. I suspect that there is a deep-seated mistrust of British (and Northern Irish Unionist) politicians. The Irish seem to like the EU (in spite of the rough treatment meted out to them in the Euro crisis) because it is their best hope of reducing their dependence on their high-handed neighbour. What we are learning in the whole sorry Brexit business is that politics trumps economics. This is as true of Brexit supporters as it is of anybody else – but their leaders seem to think that what is true of them is not true of their Irish and other EU counterparts. But then again, they aren’t worried about a no-deal outcome either. They calculate that if there is severe disruption, public anger will turn on the EU institutions, which will consolidate the grip of hard Brexiteers on the British political system. They might be right.

So is Mrs May’s plan doomed to failure? Actually no. The deeper significance of last night’s votes is that, as the deadline advances, nerves are starting to fray. That is evident in the uncharacteristic unity of Conservative MPs. Only 8 voted against the Brady amendment, and nine abstained. But I think much more significantly there are signs of nerves amongst Labour MPs. Seven voted for Brady and six abstained. That is about double the size of previous Labour support for the government backed approach. Still not big numbers, but is it the growing trickle that suddenly turns to a flood? Furthermore the Labour leader appeared to offer an olive branch to Mrs May by suggesting a meeting, though we shouldn’t expect anything from this.

So Mrs May has reason to hope that, when she comes back from her renegotiation with no more than token concessions, enough Tory and Labour MPs who had previously voted against her deal will either change sides or abstain. There will need to be quite a few, though, as there is little chance of pleasing the Ulster Unionists.

If that doesn’t work, the only hope to avoid a no-deal is for the government to work with Labour on a new deal, moving to a softer Brexit, with a postponement of the leaving date until the summer. This doesn’t look very likely. Even less likely, based on last night, is that a cross-party group of backbenchers will be able to force a postponement of the evil day.

So my interpretation of last night’s votes is that both a deal, close to the existing one, and a no-deal crash, have become more likely, with an exit on 29 March. A postponement, either leading to a softer Brexit or to a referendum are both less likely. And the tension just ratchets up.

What would a new Brexit referendum look like?

As we face another day of parliamentary chaos over Brexit, talk of a further referendum has subsided. Without Labour throwing its full weight behind it, there are nowhere near enough MPs to give the idea traction. And yet parliament is so split it offers one of the few ways forward if the country is to avoid a no-deal Brexit. So it is still worth giving the idea a bit more thought.

The first question is what should be put to voters? Never mind the exact wording for now, but what would voters be asked to choose between? Referendums are almost always binary affairs (indeed I can’t think of an example of a three way one). Official Lib Dem policy is for the choice to be between the government’s deal, and calling Brexit off altogether. It is hard to see that getting through. Many Brexit supporters won’t vote for the government’s deal because they want a stronger break with the union (i.e. a hard Brexit), and this may well be the view of most of those that voted for Brexit first time round. Excluding this way forward from proceedings would seem like a denial of democracy and make the idea even more poisonous amongst the public than it already is. However a two way referendum between a hard and a soft Brexit would not get the support of Remainers- which would be needed to get the proposal through. A three way referendum between hard, soft and no Brexit looks the best compromise. A more complex set of choices could be devised, but Parliament is more broken than even I think it is if it cannot limit the options to three.

But what would the hard Brexit option be? The obvious one is leaving without a deal. This idea is gaining traction amongst the public at large, but many people think it is completely irresponsible to present it as a serious option. Even hard Brexit MPs like Boris Johnson advocate it as a negotiating tactic rather than as a coherent policy in itself. But these MPs also see the Irish backstop as an insuperable obstacle, and there looks little chance of the EU side taking it off the table – so no deal may be the only practical way of achieving hard Brexit in the shorter term. I find it very strange that hard Brexiteers on the one hand say that there are viable solutions to the Irish border issue outside the Single Market and/or customs union, and yet fear that the Irish backstop could make a customs union permanent. Still, they are calling the shots on this.

And what of what the of the soft Brexit option? If no-deal is to be put on the ballot paper, then the obvious candidate is the current deal on offer. Both options would then be capable of being implemented quickly (if implementation is the right word for a no-deal crash), and so we could resolve the whole thing by the summer, after which any delays cause a mounting political mess. Otherwise two yet to be finally negotiated options might be presented. Hard Brexit could be based on a Canada type long-term arrangement or no-deal if an acceptable deal could not be negotiated. Soft Brexit could be Norway plus or the current deal as fall back. This would clearly take time to sort out. It is exactly this sort of difficulty that has made many baulk at a referendum in the first place. But the easier ways out have no parliamentary majority.

So after that has been decided the next question is how to resolve a three-way choice. The first option, used to choose our MPs, is misleadingly referred to as first past the post (FPTP) (there is in fact no winning post: it is all relative). Voters have a single vote, plump for one of the three choices and the one with most votes wins. But that means the winning option may command barely a third of voters, and may be thoroughly disliked by a large majority. It would probably favour the Remain option, as the Brexit vote would be split. So Remain could win while a substantial majority, say over 60%, picked one of the Brexits. The problem with that is obvious, though the British public seems quite happy with it as a way of choosing MPs.

The obvious alternative is some variant of the Alternative Vote (AV). Voters would rank the options one, two and three (or actually one or two would be fine). If one option did not get 50% of first preferences, the votes of the third placed alternative would be redistributed to second preference. The problem with this method is that it disadvantages the compromise options that might be the least divisive. The compromise option, in this case Soft Brexit, is likely to come third. These voters would be forced to choose between two options each unpalatable to a majority. This method would give Hard Brexit its best chance.

There is another way forward, which is known as the Condorcet method. Voters have to make three choices between the three pairs of options: Remain/Hard Brexit; Remain/Soft Brexit; Soft Brexit/Hard Brexit. The option picking up the most cumulative votes wins. In this case a form of weighted preferential voting would amount nearly the same thing. Voters choose first and second preferences, as per AV, but the first preference would get 2 votes and the second 1. If voters refuse to make a second preference then their choice only gets a single vote. This isn’t quite the same as Condorcet, where you can vote once for each of the three options, but surely much more accessible. This approach gives compromise options, which attract lots of second preference votes, a much better chance than AV or FPTP. I’m not aware of it ever being used in referendums or elections, though it is familiar in other contexts. It is especially useful for ranking several options in order of preference.

To get an idea of the effects of the different methods, consider the case of an electorate of 100 voters. 45 want Remain, with Soft Brexit as second preference. 40 want Hard Brexit with Soft Brexit as second preference. And 15 want Soft Brexit with Hard Brexit as second choice. Under FPTP, Remain wins with 45 votes compared to Hard Brexit’s 40 and Soft’s 15. Under AV Soft Brexit’s 15 votes are redistributed to Hard Brexit, bringing them up to be winners with 55 votes. With the Condorcet/weighted preference system Remain gets 90 votes (2 from each of the Remainers, and none from elsewhere). Hard Brexit gets 80 votes from first preferences and another 15 from seconds: making 95. Soft Brexit gets just 30 from first preferences, but 45 second preference votes from Remainers and 40 from Hard Brexiteers, giving it a winning total of 115. Everybody has voted for it as first or second preference, making it a good compromise proposal.

Given the divisive nature of the Brexit debate, the weighted preference system looks the most appropriate. Alas AV would be much more likely. Traditionalists who might favour FPTP tend to be Brexiteers and they will not agree to anything that might favour Remain. Remainers tend to dislike FPTP anyway, and recognise that a victory would look illegitimate if it failed to secure 50%. The weighted preference system, on the other hand, looks way too innovative for us Brits.

The closer you look at the referendum idea, the messier it gets. But the strongest case for it is that it is a last resort, with parliament rejecting a no-deal, but not even close to agreeing any alternative. What a mess we are in!

Britain’s political parties are stronger than MPs: that’s why no-deal is still likely

I remain one of the few who predict that, following parliament’s spectacular rejection of the government’s deal to leave the EU, Britain will crash out on 29 March. Most MPs oppose such a no-deal, but until they can coalesce around an alternative, no-deal it is. And would the EU agree to an open-ended postponement of the Article 50 date? And as long as Theresa May leads the Conservatives and Jeremy Corbyn leads Labour, no such convergence will take place. Britain’s politics has become dysfunctional. How did we get into this mess?

This week’s Bagehot column in The Economist suggests that Britain might be about to undergo a great realignment, equivalent to that in the 1850s, following the Corn Laws, a free trade measure. Such great figures as William Gladstone changed sides, as believers in free trade were no longer welcome amongst the Tories. And yet people have been talking about realignment since 2015, when Mr Corbyn became Labour leader against the wishes of most Labour MPs. But since then not a single MP has changed allegiance. Instead MPs who can bear their party no longer quietly retire from politics. A new “centre” party has been plotted by MPs for a year at least. I was told by an insider that it would emerge last Autumn. But nothing. MPs feel strongly about Brexit but the chance of this leading to a serious realignment is negligible. At most a couple of dozen will resign from their parties and stand down at the next election.

The parallel with the 1850s is misleading. The Bagehot columnist suggests that before the realignment politics was split between the Conservatives and the Liberals. And yet neither party was established until after the realignment, partly to consolidate it and partly to bring in more of the public as the electoral franchise was being progressively widened. Instead there were two loose tribes: the Tories and the Whigs. That is a critical difference. In those days party organisations mattered little. Now they matter more than anything.

Parties bring many advantages. The first is organisation: the foot soldiers and donor networks that are the raw materials of political action. These days this includes data on voters gathered by canvassers and protected by ever stricter data protection laws. This is often critical. When Zac Goldsmith resigned temporarily from the Conservatives to fight a by-election (over Heathrow airport expansion), he was at a decisive disadvantage against the Liberal Democrats, even though he had the not so tacit support of the local Conservatives and was defending a huge majority. He was not allowed to have the Conservative data and he lost, only to regain his seat at the following general election when he had rejoined the party. A second advantage is a national brand, which reduces the need to explain to voters who you are and why they should vote for you. In modern politics this is even more important as the spending limits on national propaganda are much looser than those for individual candidates: even when this propaganda consists of individually addressed mailings just delivered to marginal seats. A further advantage is tribal loyalty. Political parties, especially those that are close to power, are fractious affairs, riven by bitter rivalries. And yet come an election, differences are sunk and all pull together. The far left Labour group Momentum sent its members to sympathetic and unsympathetic candidates alike in the 2017 election, judged solely by how close the contest was with the other parties.

All these things are very hard to build from scratch. In my part of London a new “centre” party was formed last year to capitalise on disillusionment with the established parties. Not only did it perform dismally in the local elections that year, but afterwards it collapsed into rival factions. The most successful new party has been Ukip, and yet the more successful it was, the more fractious it became; it has now collapsed into farce.

Add to this picture something else. Political parties are by nature voluntary organisations. For them to work you have to offer members and supporters something. Gone are the days when the simple honour and excitement of working alongside senior politicians was enough. So modern parties offer participation rights: a say in policy and, especially, the selection of candidates. Misleadingly the parties call this participation “democracy”; the form may be democratic but there is nothing democratic about decisions taken by a self-selected group of the more or less like-minded. Political parties were once controlled by their MPs and other senior elected representatives. That is no longer true, though the Conservatives have not gone as far down this route as far as the others – but then they have a membership crisis.

So realignments led by MPs are very hard to do. You either go through the long hard and uncertain process of setting up a new party, or you join another one. But those tribal loyalties make the latter difficult too.

And that is why it is very hard for MPs to take control of Brexit. Mrs May and Mr Corbyn are about as unstatesmanlike as you can get, but they both place a very high priority on keeping their respective parties together. That is why neither will make a decisive move towards either a referendum or a soft Brexit, the two most viable ways of avoiding a no-deal, though Mrs May got as close to the latter as she thought she could.

Mrs May feels she has to stick to a series of “red lines” that her party has unified around. These preclude any viable resolution to the crisis. Mr Corbyn fears (not without reason) that any decisive move in any direction would weaken his party, so he simply wants to get through the process and blame the mess on the Tories. To make matters worse, this focus on party rather than the interests of the country is not just a British thing. It affects how Irish leaders are dealing, or not, with the risk of a no-deal. Other European leaders are also showing inflexibility.

Party leaders take the view that what is good for their party is good for their country. For them a catastrophe is not the worst outcome – provided somebody else can be blamed, and that their own party isn’t split asunder. That is no basis for working though a crisis that splits the big parties so badly. Don’t expect our MPs to get us out of this mess.

Britain is heading for a no-deal Brexit on 29 March

If Britain shares a characteristic with the EU it is the capacity to muddle through with a fudged compromise. So I, like most people, expected Brexit to go that way. But after last night’s vote in the House of Commons against the government’s negotiated deal with the EU, I now don’t think that is likely. Like many English people I have underestimated the capacity of Irish politics to impinge on those of Britain.

Why? Let’s think of the possible ways forward. Apart from a no-deal these might be a referendum, a new deal based on a full customs union, or a new deal without the so-called Irish backstop. Last night’s vote showed how none of these are viable.

So why did the government’s deal fail so badly? Firstly the official opposition united against it. The SNP, the Lib Dems and the Green MP all hope for a referendum to end Brexit entirely. They voted the deal down to clear space for that. Labour voted against it so as to keep its options open: the leadership’s main aim is to take power, and to do so it would rather not take up a firm view on Brexit which could alienate a large chunk of its supporters. To the official opposition were added more than 100 MPs from the Conservatives and the DUP. A small number of these (no more than a dozen) are holding out for a referendum. The rest are hard Brexiteers who either do not want any kind of a deal, or who took exception to the Irish backstop.

The Irish backstop is key. The deal as a whole is the combination of a hard legal withdrawal agreement, and a soft political statement of intent about future relations. Alas the backstop, designed to ensure that the border between the north and south of Ireland remains open, is part of the former. Hard Brexiteers seem to think it is a Trojan horse which will allow the EU to impose a customs union on the UK against its wishes indefinitely. Personally I think that’s nonsense: the only way that the UK can stay in the customs union indefinitely is if that is what Parliament wants. Political reality trumps international law. But reason has never had much to do with politics.

What kind of new deal could be negotiated to replace the current one? Not that the EU side will admit that any kind of new deal will be allowed. One option is to build a commitment to the customs union (and single market) into the political part of the agreement, an option referred to Norway plus, because of its similarity to the Norway’s current status (though Norway is not part of the customs union, as it happens, and there are border checks on the Swedish frontier). That would render the backstop harmless or redundant. There are some Conservatives who favour this, but most dislike this approach even more than the current deal, because it would mean no independent trade policy, and freedom of movement for EU citizens. To be viable such an approach would need Labour to get behind it, and even then it would struggle. In fact this approach seems close to the sort of deal that the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, says he wants. But there is no chance that Labour will play ball. The party is in fact very divided and any move to favour any particular solution would open up those divisions and prop up the hated Tory government at the same time. It is hard to see that such a deal could command many more votes in parliament than the 202 that the current deal got.

Hard Brexiteers, like the DUP spokesman and Boris Johnson, the former Foreign Secretary, that I saw being interviewed last night, have another idea. The EU will blink at the prospect of a no-deal and make the Irish backstop go away. That raises two questions: could the EU do this? And if they did, would there be a parliamentary majority for it? The answer to the first question hinges on the Irish government. If they were prepared to retreat on the issue, the rest of the EU would take their lead. But if they didn’t want to, then I don’t think the other EU governments couldn’t or wouldn’t force them too. And this is where I may have got things wrong in the past. The impact of a no-deal could be even worse for the Irish Republic than for the UK; and it would not help keep its border with the north open – so I assumed the Irish would prove flexible in the end. But the Irish prime minister, Leo Varadkar, seems prepared to endure a no-deal rather than cave in to the British. English Brexiteers affect a strange combination of idealistic fervour for national sovereignty with an easy-going realpolitik that assumes that other governments will fall in line because that is in their economic interests. But there are red lines in Irish politics that are not susceptible to realpolitik. The DUP is demonstrating this for the northern Unionist community. For the Irish republic caving into the British interests is another such red line. They will blame the mess on both the British government and the DUP.

But even if the Irish did back down, would that be enough to save the deal? It might add about 70 votes to the government tally when it needs 115. It would not be enough to satisfy a core of no-dealers, and neither the referendum supporters. It would need a number these, together with some opposition MPs, to shift out of desperation. This is such a long shot that Mr Varadkar is unlikely to budge, lest he gets the worst of both worlds: a retreat that fails.

And what about a further referendum? If parliament is as stuck as it is, it might seem logical to put it back to the people. Leaving aside the difficulty of what question to ask, and how many options to offer, I don’t think it will be possible to get a parliamentary majority for it. For all the smooth logic put by the idea’s supporters, a further referendum would be seen as a betrayal by most Leave voters. The repercussions would be terrible for both main parties. The leadership of neither will throw their weight behind it, which means that it would struggle to get many more than 200 votes in parliament.

Could the withdrawal date of 29 March be deferred? The EU is getting ready to do this, but why would they if there is no resolution in sight. And very soon elections to the European Parliament would be upon us, and Britain’s status needs to be resolved by then. The only good reason for a deferral is if there is a referendum – and I don’t think that has enough parliamentary support. If Theresa May came back with substantially the same deal as last night just before the deadline, and got it through, then doubtless the EU would extend the deadline to allow the necessary UK (and EU) legislation to be enacted. But can parliament conduct such a U-turn? The various factions would prefer to blame each other for the impending disaster instead.

Which leaves the prospect of a crash out on 29 March. Could this be Mrs May’s plan (as suggested by a friend on Facebook)? Once the UK crashes out, the Remainers are defeated, as there is no easy way back in. That means that the government can try rallying these towards reinventing the deal to rescue the country from the chaos that is likely to be overwhelming it. And some hard Brexiteers, and their many supporters in the public at large, might be less sanguine about the no-deal environment too. That latter is unlikely though: people do not admit they are wrong in politics, and always prefer to find others to blame instead. Attitudes against the EU may actually harden.

Gloomy stuff, but my optimism has deserted me. Britain’s weak political leadership is mainly to blame – not helped an inflexible EU negotiating approach. And above all the entrenched attitudes of people and politicians on both sides of the Irish border.

Postscript

Interestingly my view that the vote makes a no-deal Brexit more likely seems to be the exact opposite of the conventional wisdom, including from the FT’s lead political commentator and some financial market advice I have been sent. The betting odds of an exit on 29 March dropped to 6 to 1 against. For the first time I have made a political bet, that the UK will leave on that date!

Today’s confidence vote changes nothing. Mrs May’s attempt to engage with opposition MPs is both narrow (no party leaders) and shallow (with a restricted scope). It is not serious. I don’t think either major party leader will contemplate a referendum, which is the only thing that would stop an exit on 29 March, as far as I can see.

The Econocracy – is something rotten with the state of economics?

The Econocracy is a book written by three recent British economics graduates. It had quite a big initial impact, especially about the teaching of economics in universities. But although it rated a chapter in John McDonell’s recent book Economics for the Many, it looks as if not much is actually changing. Does that matter?

The scope of the book (which is quite short) is broad, combining specific complaints about university tuition with more fundamental issues for public policy. That is both a strength and a weakness. It helps draw people in, but it ends up being rather lightweight as a result. I have identified five main claims, and two main proposals. I will consider each in turn.

Claim 1: Public policy is controlled by a class of economic experts who shape policy choices in a way that is obscure to non-experts. This is the “Econocracy”. These experts try to frame political choices as a technical exercise which only they are capable of engaging in.

This is undoubtedly true. It is one reason that I decided to take an economics degree in 2005 after I left the City. If I was going to make headway in the field of public policy, as I hoped, then I had to master the internal language, and that was based on economics. All experts try to accrue power to themselves by making their field appear technical and mysterious, and this is what economists have succeeded in doing with public policy. But the public largely accepts this. The importance of jobs, pay and tax to our daily lives naturally gives space for experts who understand how these things fit together, or think they do. Making economics more transparent to the public, however, is easier said than done.

Claim 2: Economists operate according to a set of ideas, which should be open to challenge but are in fact a protected orthodoxy. The core of these ideas is what the authors call “neoclassical” economics, based on a holy trinity of individualism (people treated as independent economic agents), optimisation (these individuals act to maximise their welfare, or “utility”) and equilibrium (the interactions between agents settle down to a steady state which remains stable until external conditions change).

This is too shallow for me. The holy trinity of classical economics (and I don’t think the prefix “neo-” adds anything useful) leads to the use of relatively straightforward mathematical tools which can be used in a wide variety of contexts. Orthodox economists use these techniques far too much without question. In spite of what some claim to be a “physics envy”, theoretical economics are stuck in the economics equivalent of Newtonian mechanics, the first law of thermodynamics and Boyle’s law of gases for physics – what used to be O-level in my day. True physics envy would mean that they would be trying to push the boundaries out from this, by looking at non-equilibrium systems, for example. This looks much more realistic for financial markets and monetary policy, for example. Thus far I agree with the authors.

But orthodox economists are more open to challenge than the authors do not allow for. The most important way is through empirical studies of evidence, which takes up much, or even most, of the energies of modern economists. This has its own flaws. Classical economics underpins the theoretical predictions that are tested, and the assumption of IID (independent and identically distributed variables) is not challenged enough. But it does mean that modern orthodox economics is subject to a constant process of challenge that will eventually shift the theory and tackle awkward issues. For example there is now much study of inequality and the “left-behind” – areas that orthodox theoretical models tend to glass over. New approaches grounded on evidence do gain traction – like Thomas Piketty’s ideas on wealth distribution.

Meanwhile the authors seem to be too taken with what they consider to be alternatives to “neoclassical” theory. They list a series of rival theoretical approaches: three flavours of classical economics, Post-Keynesian, Marxist, Austrian, Feminist, and so on. This is a dangerous break from the idea of dialectical process, where new ideas should lead to challenge and synthesis, rather than a series of academics ploughing their own furrows. I can well understand the suspicion of mainstream economists that a lot of these schools are either obsolete (i.e. having been rolled into the modern synthesis) or attempts to bypass proper critical challenge. In the former case a bit like the first law of thermodynamics, and in the latter like climate change denial.

Claim 3: The economic conventional wisdom is rigidly enforced by universities who reject and suppress unorthodox approaches.

I find this very hard to offer a view on. There is a very strong system bias towards the mainstream, and in particular for research ratings and publication data. But how much are fresh ideas being suppressed, rather than flaky approaches (by which I mean people who are not open to their own ideas being challenged robustly) being denied oxygen? Every heterodox economist thinks they are being persecuted, but that by itself does not prove things one way or the other. Some social sciences have gone down the route a fluffy inclusiveness, where academics are allowed to publish their wacky ideas, but others don’t properly challenge them. Researchers submitting spoof papers can make a surprising amount of headway. It would be disastrous if economics went down that route.

Claim 4: Economics tuition is based on a narrow, hollowed out version of the orthodoxy, reduced to mathematical formulae and multiple choice questions. Students are not encouraged to think about their subject in a broader perspective. The current system of university finance encourages this narrow approach. Institutions must both protect their research status, which discourages heterodox approaches, and maximise student numbers while limiting costs, which pushes them towards the hollowed out approach to tuition.

Here the authors are on stronger ground, as they are able to draw on their direct experience as students. This criticism would not be fair of my course at UCL in 2005-2008. Lecturers were careful to relate the ideas they were teaching to the world outside, which was going through the early stages of the great financial crisis. And they did include a certain amount about rival ideas. There were gratuitous mathematics and graphs, especially in development economics, which I found irritating, however. (That may have cost me my first, as I struggled to play the game in my last year). But that was then: before the new university finance system was introduced. The authors paint a credible picture of how pressures on universities are reducing the quality of tuition. Beyond that I find it hard to comment.

Proposal 1: The authors want universities to adopt a more liberal approach to both the ideas and the way in which they are taught, and allow the “neoclassical” foundations to be challenged.

It is surely right on the face of things to support a more liberal approach. The problem is that the universities have responded to complaints with a new curriculum, which the authors reject, asthey still do not embrace heterodox theory. The universities’ reform efforts are being led by Professor Wendy Carlin from UCL. She was both my tutor when I was doing my degree, and the lecturer that I found the most valuable. She kept very close to the conventional theoretical models, but was very skilled, and rigorous, in applying them to the real world. Her criticisms of the Euro proved very apt. I naturally tend to sympathise with her side of the argument on this. I think that the authors are pointing to a fluffy inclusiveness rather than a proper liberal education which includes robust challenge. That may be unfair, but their list of alternatives to “neoclassical” theory does not inspire confidence. Still I think economics should push their curriculums to more essay type discussions, even if they are much harder to teach and mark.

Proposal 2: The authors also want to open up the public policy making process so that it is more accessible to the public and not dominated by obscure technical analysis.

In principle I agree with this, but it will be very, very hard. A lot of economics ideas are counter-intuitive. This is evidenced by a lot popular fallacies which economists rightly see through, such as the fallacy of composition (e.g. a national economy can be run like a household economy), the lump of labour (immigrants take away jobs…), and trade as a zero-sum game. Even trained economists can be led by their intuition into traps, as I think they are doing in most of their analysis of productivity, for example, though another version of the fallacy of composition. It is exactly these counter-intuitive insights that make the discipline so powerful. But they also make the analysis very hard to make accessible. Improving economics education will only make the economically literate a slightly less tiny minority.

It should be easier, however, to expose economic analysis to more widespread challenge from the experts themselves. And their needs to be a broader debate on how impacts of human wellbeing and the environment are accounted for when examining proposals. But much analysis is doomed to be both technical and obscure.

Conclusion

I find that this book disappoints, even as it makes a number of valuable points. Readers of this blog will know that I think there is much that is wrong with conventional economic analysis. But the authors fail to put their finger on where the problems really are, and what needs to be done.