The plan is working?

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There is an old joke which says that Marxism is like looking for a black cat in a dark room; Marxism-Leninism is like looking for a black cat in a dark room, only there is no cat; and Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism is like looking for a black cat in a dark room, only there is no cat, but every now and then you shout “I’ve got it, I’ve got it”. It made me wonder whether, deep down, Rishi Sunak is some kind of Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist. He’s following a plan, only there is no plan, but every now and then he shouts, “It’s working, it’s working”.

He recently managed to accuse Labour not only of having no plan, but of voting against everything which his government did to reduce inflation. Given that his government took precisely no action to reduce inflation – in fairness, there was no action it could have taken, since inflation caused by outside shock is outside the control of the government and it was always going to come down again in the end anyway – the idea that Labour could have voted against that action is another of those post-factual elements of modern politics largely imported from the US.

Indeed, most things that happen in the US eventually seem to get repeated here, and that made me wonder if Sunak isn’t missing a trick. To date, Trump has been charged with 91 crimes, and it only seems to send his poll ratings up. And they’re proper crimes too – insurrection, improper retention of top secret documents, fraud and so on. The best poor Rishi has been able to manage is a fine for attending a birthday party and another for undoing his seatbelt in a moving car. The man’s a rank amateur compared to Trump. If he really wants to win, he should start committing some serious crimes. Or maybe he (through an anonymous intermediary known only to the BBC, Sky News and half of Fleet Street, of course) should just encourage the Met to take a closer look at those which might already have been committed, such as the PPE contract awards, or the way in which his wife’s companies seem able to benefit from government policies. Even if he is acquitted, merely being charged with doing something might help his poll ratings, if US experience is anything to go by. ‘Promoting Great British Crime’ – now there’s a catchy slogan to stand on. Much better than repeating ‘The Plan is working’ ad nauseam.

A high wage economy needs more than wage increases

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To the surprise of many – and especially himself in all probability – Boris Johnson was pushed into coming close to telling the truth in an interview yesterday, when he more-or-less accepted that the disruption caused by the multiple crises affecting fuel, food, and energy was the inevitable result of his approach to Brexit. It wasn’t something that they put on the side of any buses at the time, and when those arguing against Brexit warned against such an outcome, he and his gang simply denied that it would be so, but it now seems that he claims to have known all along that the adjustments following Brexit would be difficult and disruptive. Who’d have thought it?

Later in the day, he told us that part of the problem with a shortage of lorry drivers is that the career is unattractive to women because women don’t want to urinate in the bushes or sleep in their cabins. As opposed, one can only assume, to men, who are happy to do so, and foreigners, who are so excited about the prospect that they will be queuing up for short term visas to enable them to partake of such delights. It’s all the fault, apparently, of the haulage companies who haven’t invested in proper facilities, although whether he’s referring to built-in toilets in the cab or better facilities at motorway service stations is left unsaid.

There was one thing he said, though, which will strike a chord with many, and that is his desire to move away from a low-wage economy dependant on foreign labour and build a high wage economy using native talent. The problem is that it’s just a slogan; there is no plan for achieving it. As interpreted by Johnson, it assumes that the myth of EU labour depressing wages is true – or, more likely, it assumes that the population at large believe the myth. But there is little or no evidence to back it up, and experience is daily exposing the extent to which it is, and always was, fallacy.

He understands enough economics to conclude that if there is a shortage of one type of skill, then the law of supply and demand will increase the price that employers must pay to get that skill, but nowhere near enough economics to understand the knock-on effect of that. Increasing wages without increasing productivity merely increases business costs, and that in turn feeds through into the prices we pay for things. Whether wages are ‘high’ or not depends not on their absolute level (nor even on their rate of growth, an indicator which he crassly suggested a few days ago to be more important than increasing life expectancy or improving cancer treatment) but on their relationship to prices; increasing both wages and prices does not lead to a high wage economy. Skills shortages in one area may lead to wage increases in that area, but the mathematical nature of percentiles is that 1% will always be in the lowest. Changing who is in that lowest percentile isn’t the same thing as levelling up, it’s just moving people between categories. Any serious attempt at ‘levelling up’ necessarily involves reducing the gap between the top percentile and the bottom percentile, but it’s clear that doing that figures nowhere in his thoughts.

Moving to a high wage economy is a worthy aspiration, but he is clearly clueless about how to achieve that. One of the things that the pandemic has taught most of us, albeit not Johnson, is that the economy works as an integrated whole; it depends on the efforts of many people, many of whom work in jobs which are grossly undervalued. Valuing that work, and the people who perform it, properly would be a start. Placing rather less value on the activities of speculators and rent-seekers is a necessary concomitant of that. But as long as it is those latter categories which largely fund the Tories, ‘levelling up’ and ‘high wage economy’ are destined to remain exactly what they are today – meaningless slogans.

Mirror, mirror on the wall...

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… who is the blandest of them all?

When the scriptwriters of VEEP coined the phrase ‘Continuity with Change’, they were actually seeking the most meaningless political phrase they could come up with.  Little did they imagine that any politician would ever use anything similar for real.  Never overestimate a politician.

As the Welsh general election campaign struggles into some semblance of life, no doubt we can expect to hear many other meaningless slogans bandied around.  But who can be the blandest of them all?

The Lib Dems have bolted into an early lead this week with “Our priorities are your priorities” and “Putting People First” (as if any political party would ever come forward and say that they were going to put people last).  I really wish that I could say that I was not expecting keen competition from the others to trump the Lib Dems in the coming weeks…