thinking liberal – Page 31 – Matthew Green's blog

Brexit: is Mrs May winning the end game?

There are less than nine months to go before the United Kingdom is scheduled to leave the European Union on 29 March 2019. For many Britons this is a welcome step in the fight back against liberal elites. Others, like me, feel sick at the thought of it. In the middle of all this is the UK Conservative government led by Theresa May. How is she coping? Better than most people give her credit for.

Mrs May is not the ablest among our political leaders, who are not an especially able bunch. The so-called Windrush scandal shows this, when perfectly legal and established residents of this country were harassed and even deported because of gaps in their paperwork. This has her fingerprints all over it, from her time as Home Secretary. She failed to see that this was where her policy of a “hostile environment” for illegal immigrants would lead, in spite of being warned. Without an established system for proving identity, rejected as an intrusion of Anglo-Saxon traditions, proving that you are legally here, and thus whether or not the authorities should be hostile to you, was always going to be the problem.

So for something of the complexity of Brexit, Mrs May does not look well equipped. Her start showed the same sort of lack of imagination that led to the Windrush scandal. She set three clear parameters, “red lines”, for Brexit. Control of immigration; no payments into the EU budget; no jurisdiction of the European court. That seemed quite common-sense, given that all three issues played a prominent part in the referendum campaign. But the whole system of seamless trading with the EU depends on arbitration by the European Court; the EU (as do many countries, in particular India) sees immigration and trade as being closely linked; and the lubrication to make complex deals work is money. Mrs May’s red lines were leading to a very hard Brexit, whereby the UK’s relationship with its main trading partners would be put on the same level as, for example, the United States.

For many supporters of Brexit, especially among the political and business elite, that was the whole point of it. For them the EU is a completely misconceived exercise, and by placing it at arms length it would give the country greater freedom to engage with the rest of the world. But there are at least two major problems. The first is just how disruptive such a change would be. There is not just the question of tariffs being imposed on goods that passed over the border, but regulatory compliance, country of origin rules, and value added tax would all have to be administered there, until some sort of alternative infrastructure, not subject to the European Court, was devised. Without it a massive snarl-up would develop at borders, with motorways clogged by waiting traffic, quickly leading to supply shortages, empty shop shelves and job lay-offs. Of course this would all resolve itself in time. But the disruption could go on for a long time and wreak damage that would take years to fix. And, a bit like the financial crash of 2008, it could be very hard to get back to where the country was before.

The second major problem is Northern Ireland. The Good Friday agreement that established relations between the province’s two main communities depended on quite a bit of fudge based on the fact that both the UK and Ireland are EU members. The most powerful symbol of this is an open border. The Irish government, and the Catholic community in the North, insist that this open border should continue after the break. How on Earth is that compatible with a hard Brexit? That this should be such a big issue drives Brexiteers mad: it looks completely disproportionate. But that Ireland should loom so large in British politics, and cause such inconvenient disruption, will surprise nobody familiar with the last five centuries of British history. After deeply flawed attempts by the British to control and colonise Ireland, the island has repeatedly come back to haunt British politics. If the Irish Brexit problem isn’t solved properly there is a big risk of communal violence of some sort. Much as most Britons would like to abandon Northern Ireland, that just can’t be done.

Mrs May takes both problems seriously. They are, of course, being used by Remainers to undermine confidence in the whole project. But that doesn’t stop them being real. Her strategy has been to keep talking hard Brexit, while gradually softening her stance. That means some form of regulatory alignment and coordination of customs arrangements, adding up to some form of customs union, together with compromises on the European Court and the mutual rights of citizens. It is easy to despise this as “kicking the can down the road”, but she is slowly outmanoeuvring both advocates of a hard Brexit, and closet Remainers who want to collapse the whole project.

The latter group, the Remainers, are now pretty much beaten. Though the idea of a further referendum (not a repeat one, you understand) is gaining hold among the public at large, together with doubts about Brexit itself, it is in Parliament that things matter. But the Remain side need enough Conservative rebels to stand their ground. They haven’t. The government scored a decisive victory in recent votes which attempted to give parliament more of a say over the process. One problem is that most of these rebels need to stay in the closet, and not admit that they want to destroy Brexit. A second is that they do not wish to force a chaotic election which might let the Labour Party into power. Meanwhile, the Labour leadership will not press the government to the point of a further referendum, still less breaking off Brexit.

Mrs May’s next problem will be to face down hardline Brexiteers who reject her compromises. There are at least fifty Conservative MPs who fall into this camp. But this group is being steadily outmanoeuvred. Passionate as they are, they have been unable to offer any practical solutions to the issues of transitional disruption of the economy, nor of Ireland. This group has always been backseat drivers, full of lots of clever theories about why things will be all OK, or somebody else’s fault, and who think you negotiate complex intergovernmental deals in the same way that you negotiate a house purchase. There is no convincing rival plan. They seem to want to storm out of negotiations with the EU, daring them to let a “no-deal” happen, but without a viable alternative deal in mind. This lack of practicality means that they are becoming politically isolated. Dare Mrs May face them down?

What can the Conservative hardliners do? The have enough MPs to force a confidence vote in Mrs May, which would then trigger a leadership election. But surely Mrs May has the grudging support of enough MPs to win any such vote if it was called – which would then protect her from further challenges for 12 months. They could resign the Conservative whip, depriving the government of its majority. But if Labour then put forward a vote of no confidence in the government, would the rebels let Mrs May’s government fall? That would either provoke a chaotic General Election, or some kind of transitional accommodation between Labour and the Conservatives to get through the last months of the Brexit negotiations. It is hard to see how either would be to the hardliners’ advantage.

So, a bit like the closet Remainers, I think the attempted rebellion by the hardline Brexiteers will fizzle. That will leave Mrs May to strike the sort of fudged and muddled deal with the EU, arrived at in the last minute, which is what most international negotiation usually ends up with. There will surely be some nasty disruption as Britain’s exit comes about, but not as bad as it might have been. Which would be quite a result for Theresa May.

Adair Turner: the advance of robotics changes economics

Expounding my views on economics can be a lonely business. Though they are based on nothing more than conventional economic theory, few commentators even acknowledge the line of thought. Not long ago the FT columnist Martin Wolf wrote an article on a favourite topic of mine, the productivity “puzzle”, which went through a series of potential explanations without mentioning the Baumol effect at all. I pointed this out in the comments, but this was doubtless futile. Then the cavalry came. Adair Turner gave a lecture in Washington DC last April, which only recently seems to have been published, and which picked up many of the themes that I have been banging on about, not least about productivity and Baumol. This time Mr Wolf had to take notice, and he published a column on it without venturing to disagree. Perhaps the view will start to break out into the mainstream.

The lecture was entitled Capitalism in the age of robots: work, income and wealth in the 21st Century. It goes much further than I have, explains the logic more rigorously, and follows through more thoroughly on important implications. Though I have long known that Mr Turner has being saying similar things, I feel vindicated.

He starts with the possibility that robotics could replace pretty much all of what we now consider to be work, and asks what the implications of this are. This is a clever angle, since the rapid advance of robotics and artificial intelligence, following the development of machine learning, is giving a lot of people pause. In reality the phenomena he describes first become important more than 40 years ago, when such ideas on robotics were just science fiction (notably Arthur C Clarke’s 2001: a Space Odyssey). This was when what I have called the Age of Light Industry started to run out of steam, even as it has continued to dominate the way people thought about economics. It’s worth describing the five sections of the lecture.

When, not if

In this Mr Turner makes the case that the complete automation of work is really just a matter of time. This is a popular view amongst techie types, though I am sceptical. The advance of intelligent machines runs in spurts of incredible speed, between periods of very little progress. In 2001 Clarke expected what is sometimes called “general AI” to be developed by, well, 2001. It remains a distant dream. The trouble is that developers persist in thinking that the human brain is analogous to a computer, programmed by an intelligent mind. That’s a bit ironic, since they are mostly ardent atheists, but they haven’t grasped the difference between evolution and design. The advance of machine learning only came when that understanding was modified; but machine learning has limits. It may take a long time before technologists make the next breakthrough.

But any disagreement I have with Mr Turner is of little importance because I with him agree about three things. Firstly that robotics will transform the world of work in the next generation and more. Secondly that it will affect some areas of work more, or more quickly, than others. And thirdly even if robots are able to do things, we may not want them to.

Explaining the Solow paradox

The Solow paradox arises from the great economist Robert Solow’s comment that “you can see the computer age everywhere but the productivity statistics”. That was in 1987, but it’s even truer now – it is the productivity puzzle. Why is it that, with the pace technology development as fast as ever, increases in average productivity are slowing down? Mr Turner points to three things.

The first is my old friend the Baumol effect, from a paper by William Baumol in 1967. Workers released from areas of high productivity tend to move into jobs with lower productivity, or a lower rate of productivity improvement, which will neutralise the effect of the original productivity advance on average statistics. So if a farmer doubles productivity, he might sack half his farm workers and employ domestic servants instead. This is a well-trodden trail for readers of this blog, but Mr Turner explains it in more detail than I have ever attempted. It is clearly true in the area of robotics which of itself it creates few jobs.

The second thing is something that I have only hinted at, and which I find interesting. As we get wealthier, we spend more on “zero-sum” activities – activities that may advance individual interests, but not society overall. Cyber crime and the security industry that counters it is an example. The search for status goods, such as high fashion is another. These activities drive arms races between rival players, including the literal arms race of deadly weapons. Not mentioned by Mr Turner you could add extracting and burning fossil fuels to the list.

The expansion of zero-sum activities creates a couple of problems. First is how do you measure measure productivity of something where the output is often negative? The answer, for statisticians, comes from the monetary income generated – which is circular: you can’t tell the difference between inflation and productivity. A second problem is that it means measured economic income, such as GDP, becomes increasingly detached from human wellbeing. What is the point of getting a higher monetary income if it simply disappears in higher property costs (land is a classic zero-sum game), security and badges of status? This is not far from the point I have made that the most dynamic bits of the British economy before the financial crash were in finance and professional services, which are (mainly) classic zero-sum activities. Discounting this and you find that “real” growth was lacklustre long before austerity kicked in.

The third reason for the Solow paradox is that a lot of the benefit to new technology is non-monetary, and doesn’t reach the economic statistics. We are living longer, for example. This is an argument often used by people on the right to suggest that things are much better than they look, and that we should not worry about stagnant or reducing incomes among the majority. This is not a debate that I have ever got into. Mr Turner acknowledges its validity, but not the conclusion that those on the right draw from it.

Meaningless measures in the hi-tech hi-touch economy

This is an attack on standard economic measures, notably GDP and productivity. Economists have always acknowledged the weaknesses of GDP as a general measure of whether an economy is delivering what people need – but those weaknesses are growing to the point of absurdity. Well, not quite. GDP (and especially the nominal measure which doesn’t try to adjust for inflation) is a useful measure for the management of money in the economy. But we cannot assume that if GDP per head is growing that so are people’s wellbeing. Likewise wellbeing may advance while GDP is stagnant.

This is an old idea. Mr Turner develops it by following through the thought experiment of what happens when most work is automated. Measured economic activity then most arises from what economists call “rents” – returns on asset such as land and intellectual property.

Developed economies: average is over

Where this is leading is to an increased gap between a lucky minority of people who are well off, and a growing body of people stuck on very low incomes. The middle ground is disappearing. Notwithstanding some on the right who shrug this off, this is a major problem. And mostly we are looking for solutions in the wrong places.

The problem will not be solved by educating everybody to a high standard so that they all have the skills to programme robots, though improving education is surely a good idea anyway. Inequality does not have its root in a skills gap, but in the nature of work. Education will simply turn into another arms race for the small number of well-paid jobs. Neither is a focus on improving productivity going to help. This simply replaces middle income jobs with lower paid ones. Meanwhile we worry about things, like the increasing proportion of elderly people, that probably won’t be such a problem after all.

But in developed countries, and many middle income ones, like China, the problem should be soluble. The economy will have the capacity to produce a good standard of living for everybody. Mr Turner suggests a number of policy responses:

Income support such as universal basic income. He sees the logic but is sceptical.
Offsetting the concentration of income, wealth and rents. Assets and higher incomes need to be taxed more. Intellectual property rights need to moderated, rather than strengthened, as now.
High quality urban development. To enhance areas that would otherwise be left behind.
Adequate wages and status for caring services. This will require some form of political intervention.
Celebrating craft skills.
Increased leisure.
Education for life and citizenship – breaking free from the idea of education for productivity.

Developing economies – the old ladder destroyed

The prospect for low-income countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, does not look good, though. The development ladder used by Asian economies from Japan to China to join the ranks of the better off, is being knocked away. There will be no demand for cheap manufactured exports, as richer countries will do more for themselves. This is a serious global problem which will require a change in development thinking. It will be important to slow population growth.

Implications for economic theory

Mr Turner concludes by pointing out that all this makes much conventional economic theory obsolete. It is too focused on maximising income to improve wellbeing. It is based on a series of idealised assumptions, such as the non-existence of zero-sum activities, whose usefulness is vanishing. Higher levels of income do not necessarily mean that wellbeing is improving.

This is easily said, but few have taken on the implications. In Britain Conservatives still talk of the virtues of an open market economy to produce a better standard of living for all. Meanwhile Labour focuses on capital investment and productivity. This is yesterday’s economics.

But more people are calling for a rethink. What Adair Turner does so well is to use conventional economic logic to show why conventional economics doesn’t work any more, and that we need fresh approaches. That’s what this blogger is trying to do in his own, much smaller way.

Tax or efficiency: making sense of the politics of the NHS

Radio 4’s Moral Maze on the NHS yesterday didn’t start well. The first witness raged at the institution’s inefficiency and how people were using its supposed moral integrity to justify it. Tens of thousands were dying as a result, he said. His interlocutors provided no real challenge. I switched off. This is symptomatic of the very poor quality of political debate about the NHS here in Britain. I don’t suppose debate in other countries about healthcare is any better.

There are two things that are not well understood about the NHS. People on the right fail to appreciate that the NHS’s inefficiency is a function of the complexity of healthcare, and not its “socialised” funding model. People on the left fail appreciate that the effective state monopoly of healthcare means that we get less of it than people really want.

It was the first point that the Moral Maze‘s witness was running foul of. The only evidence he quoted was that private hospitals in the UK spend much less on administration and management than NHS ones. But these private hospitals only offer a narrow range of services to a select few clients, and so are much simpler to run. International surveys consistently show that the NHS is less wasteful of funding than pretty much any other nations’ system. These systems have the complexity of operating insurance records and administering claims; they do not prevent expenditure on ineffective treatments or wasteful breakdowns of communication between different parts of the system.

I know something about how this happens. Apart from being an accountant, the core of my professional career has been as a general manager whose mission was been to manage systems as efficiently as possible. In that role I have been responsible for some pretty dramatic improvements in productivity. At one point I even looked for a career in the NHS, though nobody in the service was prepared to take the risk of taking on somebody without a track record in health services, or at any rate not without the kind of hard-nosed bullying persona that many in the NHS seem to think is what effective management is about. I have thought quite a bit about how you might make the service more efficient.

That there is monstrous waste is not in doubt. As a patient you spend a lot of your time waiting around, and then repeating yourself to the myriad different people you are handed on to. A lot of the NHS is in fact very efficient; the problem is fitting the various bits together so that the right treatment is delivered to the patient at the right time. And that’s before the question of how to ensure that less people need healthcare services in the first place.

This failure to get things to fit together is a familiar problem. Understanding this was at the very heart of what I tried to do as a manager. My technique was quite simple in principle: to make processes as simple as possible, and focus them on what the customer needs. A simple idea that was quite revolutionary in the 1990s, when it was usually labelled as “business process re-engineering” (or BPR). It went against a production line approach borrowed from manufacturing, where workers would specialise in a single task. The technique required fewer specialists and more generalists. Or, to put it another way, it required workers to specialise on the customer that they were serving, and not in a particular functional skill.This usually entailed not just the retraining of workers, but a redesign of information technology.

BPR is now largely played out in the world of commercial services, with automation and artificial intelligence taking over. But the BPR revolution never really got going in healthcare. No doubt this was partly down to the vested interests of those that worked there. But I have to realise that there is a much deeper reason. The complexity of health services requires the use of specialists to a much greater degree than in pretty much any other activity that I can think of (another notoriously inefficient sector, defence systems, is comparable). Healthcare is crying out for patient-centred treatments, and yet this is very hard to do efficiently because you need to involve so many specialists. The field is riddled with what economists call “information asymmetries” which undermine all attempts to put consumers in charge using market mechanisms.

Which is why nobody does it well. And why trying to restructure the NHS to make it more efficient is always likely to fail. The Coalition government’s attempt to do so by putting general practitioners in charge is generally regarded as a costly failure. The current trend in the NHS towards “integration” is a bit more promising, but pitfalls abound. Trying to bring market mechanisms into play helps solve some problems but creates others.

But if this line of criticism of the NHS – that it is inefficient because it lacks market mechanisms – is misplaced, it obscures a more valid critique. It is that the NHS restrains the level of health spending, meaning that people get less healthcare than they want. If you could wave away the information asymmetries with a magic wand, and find a way of allowing poorer people to meet their basic needs, how much healthcare would we buy in a market ststem? Lots. Healthcare promises longer life and less pain. It is an unmatched consumer proposition. Everybody wants more of it. Britain tends to spend less on healthcare as a proportion of its income than other high income countries. And much less than the most unrestrained healthcare market: the United States.

One example gives a good illustration. A number of very expensive tailored cancer treatments have been developed by pharmaceutical companies. These don’t prolong life by very much, or at any rate there is no convincing base of evidence base of this. So the NHS often bans them; the money will secure greater benefits if it is spent on other people. But if you are the cancer sufferer that could benefit, and you have the money, you might want to have it anyway. The NHS does not allow you to pay extra (co-payments in the jargon), because it is deemed morally wrong that a patient “in the next bed” with the same condition does not have the same treatment. In principle you could transfer to a non-NHS facility in the UK or elsewhere. But this is usually impractical, and brings with it additional costs. This is such a difficult problem that politicians try to camouflage it with special slush funds. But this is just an extreme example of a more general problem. Lots of us would happily pay a bit extra to get better treatment.

The obvious solution is to ramp up overall spending on the NHS to the sort of level that a perfect market system would lead to. But that means much higher taxes, and the evidence that people are willing to pay that much is weak, to say the least. Most people say they are happy to pay a bit more tax for a better NHS, but this willingness melts away when you start raising the amount. The problem is that there is no personal link between the taxes you pay and what you get. It always seems as if the money is benefiting somebody else.

This, of course, is precisely the dilemma that the current government is stuck in. It has announced plans to increase NHS funding but it is unclear about how it is to be paid for. The Labour Party are little better. They hope a lot more tax revenue will be available from rich companies and businesses; but they also want to end “austerity” in many other parts of public services, limiting the amount available for health.

What’s the solution? I think taxes should go up. I also think we need to find acceptable ways of allowing people to spend more of their own money on healthcare within the NHS system. And we shouldn’t just give up on the idea that healthcare should be delivered much more efficiently. As regular readers of this blog will know, I think that means more localised management and more integration with other public services, and a stronger focus on the needs of users. Alas I hear very little of such ideas in the cacophony that is the political debate on the NHS.

Italian populists will find it easier to complain than to govern

Well one of my 2018 New Year predictions is bearing fruit. I predicted that the big issue in 2018 for the EU would be Italy, and its push back on how the Euro is run. Just how this will play out is very hard to judge, but it is now centre stage. Most of the coverage centres on threats by Italy’s Five Star Movement (M5S) and the Northern League to take Italy out of the Euro. But the politics of that is much trickier than many give credit for.

It is, of course, too easy for liberals like me to sneer as the disparate group of politicians we refer to as “populists”. The popular frustration they play on is real enough, and liberals are very reluctant to engage with it. We seek for ways round it and dismiss it. But for all the weakness of established political movements, populism does represent a threat to European (and American) society. What populists aim to do is stoke up a sense of grievance and victimhood to secure power for themselves, which they then proceed to use to for the purposes of self-enrichment and cronyism. Nobody should be surprised that a movement built on resentment at elitism and cronyism should, in practice, be much worse than the system it is replacing. Donald Trump made hay from Hillary Clinton’s minor lapses in data security, and talked of “draining the swamp” in Washington. And yet the new governing elite plays fast and loose with security and thinks nothing of placing its own friends and relatives in positions of influence. Its supporters don’t seem to mind.

The populist system in Europe is most advanced in Hungary, where under Victor Orban’s Fidesz a crony state is becoming deeply entrenched. It is worth noting that when Fidesz first emerged from the post-Communist gloom it seemed fresh, modern and innovative. It has been corrupted by power. But Hungary does have some advantages. First it can claim subsidies from the European Union because of its relative lack of development. Second it has its own currency, so it is not beholden to the system of Euro governance. But note a key element of the system: it requires EU subsidies to keep going, and anti-EU resentment is one of its key themes. Staying within the system while complaining about it ever more loudly is Fidesz’s central political strategy.

The Italian populists are embarking on a similar strategy. I am perhaps being a little harsh on M5S. Its hatred of the old establishment cronyism is genuine and it does seem to want to move to something better. It refused to deal with Silvio Berlusconi, one of the pioneers of populist cronyism, for example – though its more cynical Northern League allies had long been associated with him. And yet Italy’s economic predicament makes something like the classic populist trajectory almost inevitable.

The central issue for Italy is the Euro. Both M5S and the League make this a central complaint. They complain that the Euro’s budget rules are too tight and prevent sensible fiscal policies from being implemented that might help lift Italy’s dismal economic growth rate. Plenty of economists from across the world agree with them. How much substance there is to these complaints is a complex topic for another time (my answer: yes some, but nearly as much as many make out). The real question for populists is just how serious about this do they want to be. Do they want to make genuine, credible threats to leave the Euro? The answer is surely not.

It is, in fact, institutionally and practically very hard to leave the Euro once you are in it. For all its extreme problems, Greece never seriously contemplated it. But there is a political problem too, which, for example, cost Marine Le Pen in France dear when she seemed to be on the threshold of power. That problem revolves around two things: interest rates and savings. One of the main reasons Italy joined the Euro was to reduce interest rates, especially on government debt. It should be remembered that, contrary to the populist narrative, Italy was not bullied and cajoled into joining the Euro by the Germans. The Germans never wanted them in, but Italy made it in thanks to both some fairly hefty austerity economics and diplomatic skill. This proved very successful. If Italy left the Euro, the country would surely have to raise interest rates on its debts and government finance, including a looser fiscal policy, would in fact be much harder. That is exactly why Italy joined the Euro and the basic dynamics haven’t changed. And this would not be some future prospect (like the dire predictions made about the British economy after Brexit), but would be immediately apparent should the prospect of Italy leaving the Euro look real. The rise in Italian government bond prices after the populist victory at the polls shows this.

The economics may not be quite as simple as I have made it sound. The Italian economy, for all its weakness, is roughly in balance on trade, which makes looser fiscal policy and monetary policy much easier – but that was true before. The real problem is that successive Italian governments have been unwilling to take on the economic reforms that might make the economy more productive, and a looser fiscal policy more sustainable. It is a popular misconception on the left that “Keynesian” loose fiscal policy can drive growth and pay for itself. That is only true of there is spare productive capacity, such as in a recession, or if productivity reforms form part of the government programme. In fact the left usually see “Keynesian” policy as an alternative to “neoliberal” reforms rather than a complement to them. I have written often that neoliberal reforms are played out – but that is not true of Italy, which used the gains made from joining the Euro to put off the evil day. The populist movement draws much of its strength from resistance to such reforms when they were belatedly embarked on by the Socialist government of Matteo Renzi – so embarking on a reform programme looks out of the question.

Still, politically, the interest rate problem is not the most serious. That is that leaving the euro would be seen as a threat to many Italians to the value of their savings. Economists talk about currency as a means to an end – a sort lubricant to help achieve real economic gains through higher levels of investment and consumption. Money means nothing in itself. But most people outside the elites have a different view. To them money is a sacred promise made by the government to the people that they can save now to spend later. Politicians forget that at their peril. If Italian savers start to think that threats to leave the Euro are serious, they will see a threat to their savings and support will drain away from M5S and the League faster than most people think is possible.

And so the populists need to maintain that balance: whinging about victimisation within the Euro straitjacket, while making no serious attempt to leave the system. This sort of have-your-cake-and-eat-it politics is, as it were, bread and butter to populist politicians. But it will surely be harder inside the Euro than out.

This is doubtless behind the Italian President Sergio Matterella’s rejection of the coalition’s proposed finance minister. What looked like a clumsy denial of democracy could in the longer term be part of a challenge to the populist parties to put up or shut up about the Euro. That could pay dividends if only the established political parties to put up a credible alternative government.

Secular stagnation: the curse that still haunts developed economies

The financial crash of ten years ago was something of a paradox for conventional economists. It took most of them by surprise, and dented their reputation. And yet economists became more important than ever to the running of our world. But now, to listen to most of them, the equivocation is over. We’re back to normal, as the global economy looks in much better shape. This looks complacent.

The crash was a double shock to economists. The first was how it happened at all, when most economies seemed to be purring on at a relatively steady rate of growth (often referred to as the trend rate), which seemed to relate to growing productivity, and which most economists, driving through the rear-view mirror, assumed to be a law of nature. The second shock was that developed world economies, especially the British one, were so slow to recover. Economists simply assumed that with a bit of stimulus, economies would not just return to trend growth, but make up for lost ground too. I don’t think any advanced economy has done this – and in Britain we lag far behind. In the years after the crash an expression was coined, or rather resurrected, to describe this second problem: secular stagnation.

The person whose name is most attached to this is Lawrence Summers, who had been prominent in the Clinton administration. By it he meant that economies could only achieve growth by extraordinary and unsustainable efforts to stimulate it. And, as Mr Summers recently pointed out in the FT, you cannot say that it has disappeared. Growth has returned, but the measures required to produce it are unsustainable. What he is referring to is the extraordinarily low interest rates prevailing in the developed world.

This has been going on for so long that we have become accustomed to it. But what do negative real interest rates mean? They mean that in order to use up available savings we have to create investments that have little or no financial return. Now that is at the margin, not on average, but even so it does not suggest an economy that is at all healthy. If investments don’t produce a return, productivity will not advance, and growth will not be sustained. And in particular we will accumulate debt that cannot be paid off. Or not without inflation which destroys the accumulated wealth of the middle classes. And sure enough, many economists are warning us about mounting debt levels. In due course this will lead to a financial crisis.

Why are we in this situation? And what can we do? There are many speculations as to why, and most commentators, including me, tend to gravitate towards the one that suits their overarching narrative. Many blame a skewed distribution of income for creating a surplus of savings that cannot be used properly. Others say that modern businesses don’t need so much traditional capital (Google doesn’t need to issue debt or share capital to keep its investments going). Then there is the gradual ageing of the population reducing the size of the workforce. Others blame the wrong sort of stimulus – if only government spending hadn’t been cut back (“austerity”), we’d have bounced back in no time. My favourite is the Baumol effect which suggests that we are in a transition towards industries, like healthcare, that are less financially productive, though still improve human wellbeing. Whatever it is (and it could be all at once) it’s a problem because it is dragging down the potential growth rate.

And what can we do? People often talk of unconventional policies, but what are they? The most interesting idea is to run up bigger government budget deficits. Piling up government debt is much safer than piling up private debt, as we are doing now. Why? Because governments can finance that debt by a process that is usually referred to as creating money, and the burden can be shared more equitably.

But piling up debt and creating money often ends in tears. The best current example of that is Argentina, with rampant inflation and impatient foreign creditors. The problem for Argentina is that its monetary system has been mismanaged for so long that much borrowing, public and private, has to be in foreign currency, which the central bank cannot create. But there is an opposite example. Japan has been piling up public debt for decades, and the central bank has been buying up debt, with few apparent ill-effects.

So how do you know whether you are Japan or Argentina (and no doubt Argentina looked like Japan once)? The first, obvious, difference is that Argentina has had a current account deficit for some time, while Japan has generally been in surplus. That means that Argentina is importing more than it exports and requires financing by foreigners – who are less likely to be happy to take payment in domestic currency. Current account deficits usually flow from budget deficits – though not always, as the recent crisis in Spain showed. That would be a bad sign for countries like Britain that also have a current account deficit. But Britain’s standing in international markets looks a lot more like Japan’s than Argentina’s. The government has no trouble in borrowing in sterling, and the same goes for most British businesses.

So why are we in Britain so worried about budget deficits and debt? One explanation is that we have been persuaded into this view by malign political forces who use the analogy of household financial management to make their case. But there are deeper worries. The first is how do you tell when you have gone far enough with budget deficits and need to stop? The traditional economists’ answer is when inflation starts to take hold. But it might be too late by then, and anyway it is not so clear that in a modern, globalised economy inflation works in quite the way economists think. You know it is too latewhen there is a rush of people trying to change domestic currency into foreign, creating a panic and to people, including the government, having to borrow in foreign currency. That can happen without inflation.

The problem behind that is the politics of it. Opening up the possibility of more government spending is a huge boost to the power of central government politicians, who do not have strong incentives to apply the brakes when they need to – any more than those bankers did before the crash of 2008. It is too easy to believe your own hubris. I think this happened to the Labour government in the mid 2000s when the government should have started to tighten spending but decided not to. This didn’t cause the financial crisis, but made it harder than it should have been to manage. Even now, though, it is impossible to get anybody on the political left to accept that. It’s the one thing that unites Jeremy Corbyn with Tony Blair.

Still, we should be able to find ways increasing government borrowing that helps stimulate demand more sustainably. Building public housing is one idea. Other infrastructure policies should help (but not all of them). There’s also a case for taking a longer view on some public spending, like education , community policing, mental health services and public health that heads off future trouble. But not building more navy frigates or, even, hospitals. We might need these, but they need to be securely funded by current taxes. The trick politically is to create a system of checks and balances that lets you invest productively and not let central government managers run away unchecked.

Behind this lies an important but rarely acknowledged idea. It is that, in the 2010s and onwards, public investment is often more productive than private investment. And that, I think, is one of the causes of secular stagnation. So in the developed world we need more public investment, and that we can afford to borrow much more to pay for it than most people think. And we need less private investment, much of which is wasted on asset recycling schemes that will end in tears. It may well take another financial crisis before we start to realise this.

Life in the tunnel. Being a Liberal Democrat

I just want to ask: when will the party face up to the fact that whatever it is doing isn’t working even in the slightest?

This was from Lib Dem blogger Nick Tyrone before the recent local elections, after a London opinion poll showed weak figures for the Liberal Democrats. The party’s appeal to Remain voters had pretty much failed, he thought, with the party lagging even the Conservatives in this group, never mind Labour.

Then came last week’s local election results. If you are going to take a cold, hard look at them in the round, they were nothing to shout about. They were perfectly consistent with that poll. In equivalent vote share they even marked a slight fall from the rather dismal 2017. And yet. Look at the London results (as a Londoner, I have an excuse for being London-centred – though my story works just as well outside it). The two most spectacular results for any party on the night were the Lib Dem gain of 25 seats from in Richmond, and 21 seats in Kingston, mostly at the expense of a Tory party that collapsed to a rump in both boroughs. And at last the party started to win seats from Labour, gaining seven in Haringey, for example. And the party had its Wandsworth moment too, fending off a sustained and confident campaign by Conservatives in the one borough it controlled in Sutton. Minds aren’t swayed by dry statistics but by stories – stories that show what is possible. In London, and across the country, the Lib Dems had plenty of good stories to encourage them. That made them a much better set of results than the party has had for a long time, even in 2017 when the equivalent poll share was higher.

Not that you would have guessed this from the media coverage. Even in its later coverage (when the Kingston result was known, giving resonance to the Richmond story) the BBC chose to highlight the relative failure of Labour in Wandsworth to the spectacular écrasement of the Conservatives in two neighbouring boroughs, which went unmentioned. Why were the non-events in Wandsworth and Westminster more important? Because, apparently, they are a “flagship” boroughs. Actually I think the Wandsworth result is an important story, but this prioritisation is an interesting window into the current journalist mindset, even at the politically balanced BBC. This may not be bias; it may just be a bid to cover up the humiliation of the editorial team of not getting the story right in advance, and sending its big guns to the wrong places. News is made on expectations, not real events.

Which, I think, is the issue at the heart of Nick Tyrone’s critique. Whatever the party does, nobody in the media, mainstream or otherwise, is listening. The only stories that are of interest are the sorts of stories that Ukip still manages to pick up: ones that point to the parties final, humiliating death spiral. I don’t think it is fair to blame that on the party’s leadership or messaging.

Life as a Liberal Democrat supporter is like being in a long, dark tunnel. Things are miserable; nobody can see you; and too often any small flickers of light vanish, rather than grow into that light at the end. But last week’s small chink of light just could be what we hope it is.

The point is this: the problem isn’t the message, it is getting people to listen to it in the first place. It is nearly hopeless achieving this through the media. It is just possible that a moment of genius or massive good luck suddenly does the job. But waiting for such a moment does not amount to a strategy. The other way to get noticed is to go out and talk to people directly – through door-to-door canvassing and attractive literature pushed through letterboxes, and with videos promoted through paid-for advertising. This is inevitably very localised, and it tends to happen in the run-up to elections, when people have a good reason to take notice. The good news is that when the party was able to do this, it, by and large, raised its share of the vote. And sometime spectacularly – in Remain-voting Richmond and South Cambs, in Leave-voting Kingston-upon-Hull, and in the somewhere-in-between Kingston-upon-Thames. That suggests that Nick Tyrone is wrong. What the party is doing is working at least a bit more than the slightest.

And the hope is that if the party keeps going, the general public, and the media that follows it, will start to notice. Even now, the BBC must start to question its policy of giving the party so little coverage compared to Ukip, which has now virtually ceased to exist.

But why soldier on in the cold, dark place, where hope is but fleeting? Because we believe in our liberal message. That humanity is more important than the nations and religions that divide it. That all humankind benefits when we listen to different points of view with respect. And that we should look at facts and evidence rather than let our prejudices run riot. No other party is doing that as much as the Liberal Democrats in British politics. It is worth pushing on through the tunnel.

Complacency undoes Labour in Wandsworth

The Conservatives in Wandsworth know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

That isn’t a quote from this year’s council elections in Wandsworth, where Labour gained 7 seats, but fell 5 short of what they needed to take control of the council. It comes from Labour’s final week literature in their campaign in 1990, when they also expected to take control. To me it sums up Labour’s complacency in both failed campaigns. Elections are won with grit, no waffly ideals.

Labour’s spin machine are desperately back-peddling, to say that they never really expected to win control this time, and that the advance shows that things are slowly moving their way. That is nonsense. They had the Conservatives on the ropes and, to mix metaphors, they threw them a lifeline. The results were very close in a number of wards. A more effective campaign would have secured control for Labour. And what a victory that would have been! The Tories, weakened by Brexit in a strong Remain borough, could have imploded without the business of running the council to hold them together. Resourceful and resilient, they may well punish Labour, who have their own internal issues, when the next meeting with the voters happens.

This year I often thought back to 1990, which was a few years after I moved back into the borough of my birth. Then Labour only needed a net gain of one seat after making gains in the previous elections in 1986. The Conservatives were doing badly in national polls. It should have been easy. But reading that leaflet I immediately understood that Labour wasn’t up to the job. And so it proved: the result was a catastrophic loss of 17 seats, including that of their leader. This was a massive propaganda victory for the Conservatives, who used it to deflect attention from bad results elsewhere in the country. Old Labour hands have not forgotten this; winning back the council this year would have been a powerful signal of Labour’s rise.

And there was every reason to think that it was possible. Labour did very well in the borough in last year’s general election, without even trying very hard. They picked up Battersea, and came close to picking up Putney too, to add to Tooting which they already held. Recent council by-elections, in which Labour did well, confirmed this trend. In 2014, the previous elections, Labour had shocked the Conservatives by making strong advances. The EU referendum then dealt a body-blow to the local Conservatives which give Labour the chance to do something special.

What made the Tories so resilient in 1990 and able to hold off the challenge this time? In 1990 the party was in peak form, with a number of very capable and clever leaders, who had seized control of the borough from Labour in 1978. They adopted strong financial management, when most local Labour politicians didn’t think this mattered, while being remarkably alive to middle class sensitivities on things like recycling. They oozed competence where Labour resorted to waffle. An efficient, but low profile, local propaganda machine got this gritty message out to voters, many of whom had benefited under the then Conservative government’s right-to-buy legislation for council housing. This year things were much more propitious for Labour. The Conservatives have lost their shine; they are often complacent and out of touch; their new leaders are not of the calibre of the old ones. They have lost a lot of members. Meanwhile Labour (thanks to Gordon Brown) have addressed some of their reputation for financial incompetence, and they had more help from members than they knew what to do with.

So what happened? The Tories stuck to the same old gritty message about competence. No matter that this is less true than it has ever been – local Labour are firmly in the Sadiq Khan, centrist, competent wing of the party. And the council’s once-vaunted efficiency is now nothing special. Changes to the law under which council tax operates means that differences between boroughs are completely down to decades-old historical legacy, and tell you nothing about how things are likely to change in the future. But the Tories were able to plant doubts about Labour to which Labour had no convincing answer.

But Labour could surely have won. After their success in 2014, I remember thinking that the party needed to focus hard on what it needed to do to take control in 2018. The five wards they already held looked secure. They needed to win the five seats they didn’t have in the three split wards, and seven more seats from other wards. That meant a minimum of three more wards, four to be on the safe side. That was a big ask, but the reward was surely big enough to warrant a serious effort, starting in 2014. This should have meant identifying which four wards they needed to target straightaway.

But there was nothing. Residents of wards which the party eventually targeted heard practically nothing from the party until this year. Candidates weren’t in place before this. When it came, the campaign was almost completely generic, with nothing more than a few photos geared to the locality in which they fighting. Candidates did not have time to meet enough of the electorate and build trust – and didn’t really try. To them it seemed that controlling the council as a whole was what mattered, not looking after their ward. A personal vote of one or two hundred built up over two years or more would have made all the difference. and it would have been the best possible counter to the doubts that the Conservatives were trying to spread.

A lot of the same criticisms can be levelled at my own party, the Liberal Democrats. The party was too late to put in place its candidates and get out and about meeting the electorate. Too much of the literature was generic, making too much of issues like Brexit which, in the end, did not motivate voters much. We had an excuse. Though the party was in quite good shape in 2010, the coalition trough nearly destroyed it. The party made a dramatic recovery following the 2015 election and especially after the 2016 referendum, but trying to turn this new energy into an effective political force proved too much. The party made a lot of progress in the campaign, but too late have much impact.

All of which points to a disturbing aspect of modern politics. The parties are too interested in talking to themselves about their own political concerns, and not enough in meeting voters and solving their problems. There seems to be an idea that politics is about condemning abstract nouns like “austerity”, and putting “radical” ideas in front of the electorate and being swept to power in a tide of enthusiasm. Labour has succumbed to this. The Lib Dems are not immune.

But the Wandsworth election contained one shining rebuke to this politics of the abstract. The highest number of votes won by any candidate was by the independent Malcolm Grimston. Back in the 1980s I remember Mr Grimston as an obnoxious, fat young Tory (though the fatness should not be held against him, it was very much part of his persona). I have watched as he turned into somebody else entirely. He lost weight and became a gracious, polite politician who listened to people. We worked hard for his local electors, who came to know and respect him. After the 2014 elections he became so fed up with the arrogant Tory regime in Wandsworth that he defected. And he triumphed. Meanwhile another Tory councillor defected at about the same time. But he was much more of an abstract modern politician; he chose to adopt the label of the new Renew Party. But vacuous promises were no substitute for the graft of getting to know and help your local area. He had the ignominy of being beaten by a Lib Dem who did not campaign at all in the ward.

There is a lesson there that I hope local Lib Dems can learn. I suspect the current Labour Party would find it all too difficult. I wouldn’t have minded if Labour had won in Wandsworth, but they did not deserve to.

The method in Donald Trump’s madness

It is two months since my last post. This may be the longest period of silence since I started this blog in 2011. This is mainly because I have been consumed with the process of getting 39 local election candidates nominated for council elections here in Wandsworth, and all the attendent duties of being agent and local party Treasurer, officer and volunteer. Along with other duties as school governor and party officer at regional and, now, even Federal Party level. Plus the occasional bit of time off and some family care issues.

Meanwhile the newsletter section of the blog was subject to over 1,000 fake subscriptions consisting of Russian web addresses. This was only stopped by implementing Captcha, which was somewhat trickier (and more costly) than I expected. In any case, the oncoming election, and my senior role in one borough, has constrained my ability to comment as freely as I like this blog to be. And it isn’t over. The election itself happens in a week’s time. After that I have to prepare and submit 39 expense returns. All I will say on these elections for now is that I have been involved in local elections in Wandsworth for 32 years, and in that time they have proved a graveyard of predictions. I will comment when it is all over.

Meanwhile there has been plenty else going on. In Britain we have had a kerfuffle in Labour over antisemitism. And there has been the so-called “Windrush Scandal” in which the Home Office has hounded legal immigrants with incomplete paperwork. I want to comment on both in due course. And politics in America continues its sinister course, with the Trump administration subverting institutions of the Republican Party, the US Federal state, and the world’s trading and diplomatic architecture.

Which draws me to today’s topic. Looking back over the last two years it is striking how liberals and established politicians have consistently underestimated Donald Trump. It has been easy to dismiss him as stupid and immature. And yet he has proved wily and dogged and he has always ended up on top. His critics need to understand him better if they are to devise an effective counter.

The first thing to say about Mr Trump is that his intelligence is of a different type from that we are used to in our leaders. It is very right-brained. We have traditionally adored and respected the left-brained virtues of logic, computation, complicated language and rules. But the right brain handles values, emotions, context and seeing thing as a whole. A healthy mind keeps the two in constant dialogue. We see Mr Trump’s left-brain deficiencies as fatal flaws; and yet neglect of right-brained virtues by liberal intellectuals is just as serious a deficiency.

Now let’s be more specific. Mr Trump’s world consists of competing individuals and groups who win, or lose or strike bargains with each other. It’s a world divided between adversaries and trusted insiders. To the former you must be merciless; to the latter you must show and expect unquestioning loyalty. In this way of looking at the world, the liberal system of collaboration and shifting coalitions with its infinite shades of grey is simply weakness. There is an acute sense of victimhood: that honest Americans have been made monkeys of by outsiders who have outmanoeuvred the country’s establishment.

Another aspect of the Trump view is that rules are a means to an end, and should not be elevated to an end in themselves, as liberal intellectuals do when they set the rule of law on a pedestal. Liberals say that the rule of law protects the weak; but does it really? The Trump alternative is for people to be part of a group with strong mutual loyalty and leadership that focuses on results.

The problem for liberals is that the Trump view is very widely shared, especially amongst less-educated people, but, clearly, not just them. Liberals tend to worship institutions that favour educated people through an unseeing meritocracy. They then try to compensate for this by offering handouts to the less fortunate, which creates a patron-supplicant relationship that undermines human dignity. Many on the left, who rail against “austerity”, just don’t understand why so many poorer people hate state benefits.

A further problem for liberals is that Mr Trump’s methods will produce enough results to justify the faith his supporters are putting in him. The tax reforms in 2017 were a huge coup, whatever we my think of them objectively. The pressure he is putting on China, North Korea and Iran may well yield some short-term results. His approval ratings may not be good in comparison to other presidents a year into office, but they are not particularly bad in absolute terms; they may not suffer the sort of middle-term decay that those predecessors were subject to. And he knows how to rally the sceptical floating voters when he needs them, not least by casting doubt on his opponents.

So what could stop him? The pundits predict that the Republicans could lose their control of the House of Representatives in November, though the Senate looks more secure. That would limit his ability to pass legislation. And yet it will also give Mr Trump a scapegoat on which to blame his failures. Nobody knows how to milk victimhood like Mr Trump. It may even give him a chance to reshape the Republican Party into his instrument in time for the next round of elections in 2020.

A further problem for Mr Trump is a declining base. This base is core to the Trump phenomenon: it is the loyalty group that is central to his identity. It is white, working class and ageing. It will be impossible for Mr Trump to form such a strong bond with other voter groups, and these are growing faster than his base. But in the medium term Mr Trump can keep this threat at bay by suppressing it, through promoting scepticism and apathy, plus changing electoral rules through things such as voter ID. In the longer term Mr Trump bumps into term limits and old age. But he can do a lot of damage before then.

I think there are two more important threats to Mr Trump, because these concern his base. The first is trade policy. Mr Trump’s narrative on trade is very appealing, but if he follows through by starting trade wars it will threaten the working class jobs of exporters. In the Trump narrative, of course, many more workers will benefit. But in the short term these benefits will be much harder to see. Midwestern farmers, who have been strong supporters, are already starting to wonder. Still, Mr Trump loves brinkmanship, and he may well feel he can strike bargains and claim victories before any serious damage is done.

The second problem is health insurance. One of the driving themes of Mr Trump’s presidency is to dismantle anything his predecessor, Barack Obama, put in place. Mr Obama’s crowning achievement was his health insurance system, and Mr Trump is desperate to dismantle it. And yet Obamacare tackles a genuine working-class problem of basic healthcare becoming unaffordable. Abolishing it would cause anger and hardship. Replacing it is the sort of massively complex enterprise that the Trump White House is incapable of. And, unlike tax reform, there is nothing like a Republican consensus on what any replacement regime should look like. Mr Trump will try to blame the Democrats as Obamacare gradually breaks down through neglect – but for once this line of attack will be hard to sustain.

So Mr Trump’s revolution may fail. But liberals, and not just in the US, would do well to ponder how to broaden their appeal so that they are not so vulnerable to right-brained populists like Mr Trump.

Don’t let the BBC and Brexiteers confuse you: Norway and Turkey aren’t the same

This blog’s track record on Brexit remains solid. A while ago I predicted that the UK would opt to stay in the (or a) customs union with the EU. That hasn’t happened yet, but the tectonic plates are slowly but surely moving that way. Meanwhile opponents of the idea are trying to undermine it by confusing people about what it amounts to, and the media, even the BBC, aren’t helping.

First: what is the difference between soft and hard Brexit? A hard Brexit means a complete break with EU institutions and trading with the EU either on World Trade Organisation (WTO) terms or through a tailored trade deal, such as the one the EU has negotiated with Canada. You might call these the Japan and Canada options respectively. A soft Brexit means remaining part of some EU institutions, without being a full member. It boils down to two main options: the Norway option or the Turkey option. There is technically a third: the Swiss option, but EU officials regard this approach as a failure, and are likely to prefer a hard Brexit.

The Norway option is given support by this week’s Economist. It means being part of the the Single Market, but not the customs union. This Norway does though membership of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), which includes Iceland and Lichtenstein as well. This excludes agriculture and fisheries. It means accepting EU directives as far as most trade goes, and the “four freedoms” – goods, services, capital and labour. It has been given a bad press by both sides of the EU debate. Brexiteers say that it turns the country into a vassal state because it has to accept regulations without a right of veto, and only limited consultation. Remainers say much to the same thing, so why leave? The Economist valiantly makes the case nevertheless. It would be the least disruptive approach for British business, while giving the country significant new rights not available to EU members. Apart from agriculture and fisheries policy, this includes doing trade deals with other countries; Iceland has made a deal with China, for example.

Norway does pay significant sums into the EU budget, though – a bit of a flash-point for Britons. But this is not as bad as it looks: it is mostly aid to Eastern European countries, which is separate from other EU aid, and Norway has a lot of say over where it goes. So it is actually politically quite useful.

So might this be the elegant compromise that brings the two sides together without entirely satisfying them? There are two big problems. The first is border controls. Not being in the EU customs union means that goods have to be checked as they cross the border, as happens between Norway and Sweden. Since one of the UK’s aims is a frictionless border in Ireland in particular (helpful in Gibraltar too), the Norway option would fail. This is one of the toughest issues emerging in the whole process (as predicted from the start by this blog). Brexiteers, who tend to deal in broad visions and not detail, can’t stand this instance of the tail wagging the dog. They hope that if Britain says that there will be no checks on goods coming into Northern Ireland, it will force the EU to reciprocate. But that turns out to be more difficult than it sounds – unilaterally waiving tariffs creates issue under WTO rules – as well as being reckless with the Irish peace process.

But there is an even bigger problem with the Norway option: the four freedoms. Or rather one of them: labour. Claims by Brexiteers that more than a minority of their voters wanted a total break with the EU are hard to sustain: the Leave campaign deliberately obfuscated the issue by using Norway as an example of what Brexit might mean. But a claim that those voters wanted complete control over the movement of labour into the country is perfectly credible. The Economist argues that there is more Britain can do to manage incoming EU workers more strictly within the Single Market. I don’t think that washes.

The Turkey option addresses both these problems. There are no customs checks at the border, and there is no free movement of labour. The lack of customs checks means that most of those complex supply chains that cross the border between the UK and the rest of the EU should suffer reduced, and manageable, disruption. Agriculture and fisheries can be excluded (as are services, most likely – but this is where the Single Market works less well anyway). What’s not to like? It means that doing trade deals with non EU countries can only happen for those goods excluded from the customs union (agriculture and services most likely). The more extreme, neoliberal branch of the Brexit movement, well represented in the Conservative Party, has set great store by doing such deals. And yet to most critics of Brexit this has always looked to be the weakest part of the Brexit case. These other countries are far away, drive hard bargains, and Britain’s negotiating position is weak. There is little evidence that the voters are that bothered. Nobody could accuse Turkey of being a vassal state to the EU, so why should they be?

And so the Turkey option looks the most viable form of soft Brexit. In a speech today the Labour leader is taking a step towards it by advocating a customs union with the EU. However he is blurring the issue by suggesting that he wants to be part of the Single Market too. And yet he wants exemptions to suit his agenda, especially on state aid and free movement. The EU will never wear that because of the political difficulties it would create within the union. I would go as far as to say that it is dishonest of Mr Corbyn even to suggest it. It would be much clearer to go straight for a variation of the Turkey option. Still it has served to put the customs union idea on the agenda, and presents the possibility of linking up Tory soft-Brexit advocates, who have a much clearer grip of the key issues.

And what of the government? It has rejected the idea of a customs union out of hand. But this is just words, meant to placate hard-Brexit advocates within Tory ranks. What the government says it wants is what it has called “Canada plus plus plus”. That is almost as dishonest as Mr Corbyn’s Single Market minus. The government wants to stay integrated in some sectors but not others. This looks like the sort of cherry-picking the EU so dislikes. But it could be an intermediate negotiating step towards a Turkey-like solution, even if they try to avoid the words “customs union”. I believe this may be the game plan of Theresa May, the prime minster, and David Davis, her pragmatic Brexit Secretary. Whether they have the political skills to pull that off is open to question, though.

Meanwhile supporters of hard Brexit are trying to turn the public against the Turkey solution by conflating it with the Norway one. This includes Australia’s undiplomatic ambassador, Alexander Downer, to his great discredit, on the radio last night. This allows them to suggest it means accepting free movement of labour, for example. They also suggest that it means that the UK cannot do trade deals with other countries: that is not true either, though the scope of those deals would be restrained. Britain could import US chlorinated chicken and Australian wheat tariff-free if it wants to, as agriculture is not in scope.

For now the politicians are exercised about a potential vote in parliament over the customs union. Expect the government to defer this until the actual shape of its deal with the EU becomes clear. Something like a customs union with the EU is on its way. It is exactly the sort of compromise the country should be aiming at.

Do not underestimate the Labour Party

Britain’s Labour Party is neck-and-neck with the Conservatives in opinion polls. Surely, many claim, this means that Labour are in trouble, and its leadership is woefully complacent? The Tories are in an utter mess, the argument goes, so if Labour aren’t streets ahead now they never will be. I’m not so sure.

The first part of that argument is surely correct. The Conservatives are caught in a conflict between Brexit fundamentalism and reality. Such conflicts, when you are the governing party, bode ill. Government pronouncements are almost comic. Today, for example, David Davis, the Brexit Secretary, raised the prospect of a Mad Max dystopia after Brexit, which we can happily avoid, he suggests, by staying in the EU in all but name. Well that’s how it sounds. But worse, Theresa May is a lacklustre leader, neither able to present an inspiring vision, nor to handle the everyday give and take of networking and negotiation the role requires. The party is shrinking, and it is failing to capture the interest of younger voters, by which I mean under-50s. Its chosen core support base is literally dying. The party is being hollowed out in a way reminiscent of the not dissimilar situation it faced in the mid-1990s under John Major.

But then a relaunched Labour Party under Tony Blair established a massive poll lead and then crushed the Conservatives in the election of 1997. So why isn’t today’s Labour Party doing much better than it is? It is reported that the Labour leadership feel confident that they can repeat their performance in last year’s election of a poll surge during the campaign itself. And yet surely the Tories will not run such a dire campaign? They may be running out of activists but they have no shortage of donors. A halfway decent manifesto should mobilise the oldies better, and in a second attempt they can surely create doubts about Labour under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. And the voting system is tilted in their favour.

What the Conservatives have to play with is Labour’s lurch to the left under Mr Corbyn, and the rapidly growing hold of his supporters, organised by the Momentum movement, over the party. This has awoken traditional fears of Labour – and this seems to be propping up the party’s poll rating, as well as motivating wealthy donors. In the 1990s Mr Blair tacked his party to the centre and wooed Tory backers. He left his opponents with no oxygen; how different is Labour’s strategy now.

But I have underestimated Labour’s leadership once (last year), and I don’t want to do it again. Labour retains some key strengths, and the Tories some concealed weaknesses. This will not guarantee Labour victory in the next election, but it will give them a base from which to make a serious challenge.

Labour’s first strength is that they are building a solid political coalition of core support. Last week I described an idea that I called “Brixton liberalism”, and how it gave me hope about the future of liberal values. Labour has a stranglehold on Brixton liberals, notwithstanding the party’s distinctly un-liberal instincts. They have seen off two challenges: from the Liberal Democrats, following the period of coalition in 2010 to 2015, and the Greens. The Lib Dems, my party, seem to have retreated to the professional middle classes; they are hoping to win liberal voters from Labour through anti-Brexit feeling. This shows no sign of making headway. The Greens have been almost completely crushed; Labour’s intent to maintain their stranglehold was recently shown by their airing of policies on animal welfare. They are presenting themselves as the Green Party by other means.

The Brixton liberal coalition comprises many younger professionals, especially those linked to the public sector, and the new working classes, who are often members of ethnic minorities. A common theme is that these people have been priced out of owning their own property, and have no prospect of secure social housing. It is particularly strong in London. To these can be added trade unionists, who see real hope of extending their influence, through job protection, nationalisation and subsidies for declining industries. How will Labour fare amongst traditional, white working classes, especially outside the cities? These are the Labour heartlands that Mrs May hoped to capture last year, and came closer than many credit to succeeding. But the Tory appeal to this group may have peaked. It is very conservative, and Mrs May was a good standard bearer for that type of conservatism – she might have succeeded if she had offered more to older voters. But her reputation for competence has taken a knock, and any successor is likely to a sharper, more liberal type who will be distrusted by working class voters. We can expect Labour to continue their studied ambiguity on Brexit and immigration, so as not to scare off this group.

The second thing going for Labour is that they are doing careful work on their policies. Their critics dismiss Labour’s policies as a throwback to the failed policies of the 1970s. Public ownership of utilities, the roll-back of public-private partnerships of all kinds, free university education, and so on all seem to play to that narrative. But Labour are quietly giving a modern gloss to these policies. They will argue that they developing new models of managing the public sector, and not going back to the bad old days. No doubt they plan to have it both ways – invoking nostalgia for the old days alongside enthusing newer voters. Besides, some of those old ideas don’t look that bad in hindsight: council housing for example. By contrast any new ideas the Conservatives come up with are likely to be more neoliberal fare that will themselves look dated. While South America shows that we should not write off neoliberalsim, it is only likely to make a comeback after voters have experienced a long period of badly implemented socialist policy.

And the third thing in Labour’s favour is the diminishing hold of traditional media, which have acted as the Conservatives’ attack dogs for generations. Last year’s election was something of a watershed there. Jeremy Corbyn was their dream target, but they could make no traction. Their current campaign that Mr Corbyn was a cold war spy show that they still haven’t got it. Who cares?

And the Conservatives hidden weakness? They are not preparing for the next election in the way that Labour is, or the way that David Cameron did before 2015. Last year’s snap election showed how important such preparation is. Mrs May turned out to be flying blind, without any of the usual preparatory groundwork. Two things are spoiling the outlook for the Conservatives. First is Brexit – it so hard to see how it will play out over the next few years, and therefore what message will work best for the government. Could it be a big anticlimax, defying the Remoaner critics? Could there even be some quick wins, allowing a pro-Brexit counterattack?Or will there be early victims, forcing the Tories to find appropriate scapegoats? And an even bigger problem is the leadership. Mrs May showed herself up as inept in national campaigning, and if anything she has deteriorated since. And yet her party dare not replace her, as each of her rivals shows even deeper flaws. If a new, more dynamic leader should emerge later in the parliament, as many Tories hope, he or she will not have long to pull together an effective campaign, which can take years.

And so if the Labour leadership look quietly confident, they have every right to be.