Decision time

After examining the alternatives with, I believe, a more open mind than I have ever done before, I have decided to revert to type and vote Conservative next Thursday.

If you are interested (and I quite forgive you if you are not), here are my reasons:

During the past decade the Labour government has achieved some notable things. It has abolished the hereditary principle in the House of Lords (Two hundred years late, but at least it has happened now), it has given a large degree of autonomy to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and, in the latter case, has succeeded in ending bloodshed that had blighted these islands for generations. All this is excellent. Personally, I would go further and include the Queen in my reforms (thank you, ma’am, you can retire now – we’ll take it from here democratically) but that is not going to happen in my lifetime as most of my fellow citizens still adore the idea of a Monarch. Labour has also taken us into more wars than any recent government. Sierra Leone is generally considered a success, as is Kosovo and all those Balkan bits I don’t really understand. Iraq was predicated on a lie. We (the British Public) were told as absolute fact that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction that could reach our bases in Cyprus and be deployed within forty five minutes. I believed that and supported the invasion. We now know that there was never any convincing evidence of this and that Tony Blair had made up his mind on personal grounds to commit British lives and treasure with absolutely no foundation in fact or Law. And we have Afghanistan, on which the jury is still out. At the time we all felt huge sympathy for the USA after 9/11 and wanted to do whatever we could to help. I certainly supported our intervention. As the bodies continue to pour back in ever greater numbers I find my resolve wavering. It is no longer clear to me why we are there.

But the big issue for me is the economy. Labour claims, rightly, to have lifted large numbers of people out of poverty and to have raised spending on healthcare, education and many other laudable things. But there is one problem. They never paid for it. They never had the guts to impose the tax increases necessary to cover this spending or to increase the productive capacity of the economy so that tax revenues rose sufficiently. They borrowed the difference because it was easier and less unpopular. So they created the illusion of rapidly rising living standards. But that illusion is now shattered. We now see that the Labour Decade has been the lowest growth decade since the War. (The War here is wwII – everything else is just a war.) It looked good for a while but now it has all reversed.

Here is my (depressing) analysis of where we are and what needs to be done. Britain has been living beyond its means. We have been borrowing huge sums from the International Markets and spending these on public services that might make us feel good but that are not tradable with other countries. So we have been borrowing huge sums to spend on people who have been using their wages to buy Panasonic from Japan, BMW from Germany and, dare I say it, software from America. Public spending now accounts for close to half of our economy, which means that roughly half our people are working in ways that may or may not be useful (and in many cases will not be useful) but that do not produce anything that either can be sold abroad or used locally in place of things that are made abroad. To me, it seems that we must rebalance the economy. We must move people out of public service and into the private sector where they can make things or offer services that the rest of the world wants to buy or that reduce our dependence on the rest of the world. And I don’t see how this can be done painlessly. The analogy in my mind is that of the Heroin addict. At first, the Heroin makes the addict feel good. But after a while the addict discovers the terrible price: his/her health and wellbeing are collapsing but to get off the drug is more terrible than to stay on it. Eventually the addict dies or goes through hell to recover. In our economy, because of our historic creditworthiness (we are, even today, Triple A rated) the Labour Government found it easy to borrow. The things they spent money on made us feel good and got them re elected three times. But now there is a terrible price to pay. The only way, it seems to me, that we can rebalance the economy is to make draconian cuts in public expenditure. These WILL throw large numbers of public employees out of work. Furthermore, the reduction in government spending generally will hurt millions of small businesses, including mine, causing further unemployment. So the price to pay for Labour’s glory years will be massive, possibly unprecedented, unemployment and a grotesque increase in poverty and hardship. This will last for several years. Eventually the Private Sector, less encumbered by high taxes and heavy regulation, will start to recover. The weak demand at home will force it to look overseas, probably to the East for markets and we will, very slowly, start to rebalance ourselves as a productive, export orientated country, rather as Germany did after its near-total destruction in 1945. This period will be the equivalent of the withdrawal symptoms experienced by our poor addict. It will be terrible. But eventually we will emerge as a strong trading nation again and then we can once again start to spend on “good” things but please, let’s use our own money this time.

Labour today are in total denial about all of this. They are still talking about maintaining public spending in order “not to threaten the recovery” If they are returned on Thursday then we are heading for Greece. The Tories may understand what is happening but are pretending they don’t. They are talking about saving on paperclips and government buildings when they should be admitting that carnage lies ahead. However, they are the only party that might, just might, grasp the nettle. Oh, Mrs Thatcher, where are you now that we REALLY need you?

So, like a turkey voting for Christmas, I shall put my cross next to the Tory candidate next Thursday.


Hugh