Why do we put ourselves through the annual – recently bi-annual
- ordeal of suspending our natural inclination to pragmatism for a day in which
everybody has to pretend to believe in A) what the Chancellor of the Exchequer says,
or B) the opposite of what the Chancellor of the Exchequer says? The big guns
of the Office for Budget Responsibility is wheeled in to present grandiose projections
of what might happen in the future, always supposing the world doesn’t end
tomorrow, after which everybody gets up and A) agrees with the OBR’s
projections, or B) flatly refutes the OBRs outrageous assumptions.
The economy, one might paraphrase, is an ass. It is an
ass, donkey-wise, in that it is driven by simple desires and it is an ass,
sphincter-wise, in that it has the propensity to shit on anybody at any time,
unless you have taken the wise precaution to stock up on economic Imodium®. Of
course the notion of saving for a rainy day has taken many knocks of late given
the ultra-low interest rates and the dangerously uncertain nature of investment
in shares, whose value is determined not by reality but by perception.
For a start, there is the sheer generalisation of all the
forecasts, assuming that everybody will behave in the same way and not seek to
act independently of groupthink. Actually, that’s not so bad an assumption -
proportion of people who do actually manage to go off-grid is vanishingly
small. But you don’t need to decouple from the economy altogether in order to exert
some control over it. There is talk of falling consumer demand; surely a large part
of that is down to simple caution. The numbers don’t need to be very large for
the cumulative effect to be noticeable.
If every family – say 30 million households – spends £2 a
week less, (less than a stupidly-named coffee in Starbucks) that’s £100 per
year and thus, at a stroke, £3billion fewer pounds-Sterling per year circulating
in the economy. And if an outcome is that Starbucks branches close down,
consumers have lost nothing but the spurious notion of choice. Oh, but wait, they
have exercised choice in quitting the daft habit of queuing with hipsters to collect
an overpriced cup of brown liquid to then wander the streets with. (I never did
understand the attraction of portable coffee as a status-signalling fashion
accessory.)
But, you object, what of the employees of those now empty
cafes? Well, tough, but it may just have the knock-on effect of making those
now ex-employees seek more fruitful and useful employment. It might cause more
parents to encourage more kids to work harder at more useful subjects than ‘Being
Everybody’s Soulmate Studies’ and in a few years Chancellor Hammond’s longed-for
increased productivity might actually come about. As gently as you might want to
be with others it is my experience that a kick up the arse is often a far
better way of focusing the productive mind than groups hugs and clearing-the-air
meetings; everyone’s input is not of equal value.
How the budget works...
Of course, everything bad is blamed on Brexit and everything
good is just – phew – lucky happenstance. In reality the budget is never either
good or bad, it is a simple fucking about with numbers, a political prestidigitation
to make believe that somebody, somewhere has their hairy mitts on the levers of
economic power. If the media gloom over ‘the cost of Brexit’ manages to achieve
one thing – the big kick up the arse that persuades more people to take responsibility
for their own budgets, rather than imagining government can do it for them – it
will have been worth every penny.
