This is not a long
book,190 pages plus the usual footnote proof of due diligence, but it’s very
repetitive and could be summarised in 60 or 70 pages. Even then I ask myself,
how many Members of the UKs House of Commons could tear themselves away from
their smartphones for long enough to read it and, then, how many could
understand it? For all their university degrees, real and invented, I’m not
convinced that they are, on average, very well informed. You can catch some of them by
simply getting them to confuse the government’s annual budget deficit with the
National Debt. Or by getting them to confuse total product with productivity. My own protection against such mistakes is a sixty year old second-rate degree course, Oxford PPE. Education is supposed to have improved since then.
In many ways the book is an uncontroversial
presentation of how large and socially damaging economic, educational, health
and political inequalities are created – deliberately (as by Mrs Thatcher) or
unintentionally (as by everyone else) – and how they are interconnected. Many and probably most of the arguments are not new but there are new emphases. Most important, I
thought, is their criticism of redistributive policies which take the form of
cash handouts which are easy for computers to distribute but which may bring few
of the hoped for benefits. Give poor parents cash according to the number of
children they have and it’s far from certain (I suspect, unlikely) that the money
will benefit the children. Give pensioners a Winter Fuel allowance paid in cash
just before Christmas, no strings attached, and you can be certain it won’t be
spent on fuel or home insulation. It buys Christmas presents and booze. In
contrast, this book emphasises the merits of what it calls pre-distribution.
Instead of cash to parents according to the number of children they have you
invest seriously in local Head Start / Sure Start community centres which offer
child care, advice, social facilities, talks, quite possibly vaccination and other health services, and nearly all free at point of use in
communities where pre-school child deprivation is high. There is a side bonus
that you bring people together which for stay at home mothers may be an
important aspect of such provision and improve mental health. Likewise, to help
keep pensioners warm, a pre-distributive appoach would offer financial help for double glazing, insulation,
economical central heating except to those who have above (something like) median incomes and should be spending money on keeping themselves warm anyway. Gordon Brown’s invention of the
vote-winning Winter Fuel Allowance must be the standout example of the triumph
of short-term political calculation over joined-up thinking about aims and
consequences. We are living with the consequences of decades of such policies, notably Mrs Thatcher's bonfire sale of council housing and the subsequent and linked failure to build enough new affordable homes where they are needed..
It’s not just Chancellors
who settle for the easy way out of cash handouts; the Treasury is entirely complicit. It
allows everyone to avoid joined-up-thinking. In many ways the arguments of this
book are painfully obvious; what is not discussed is the inability or
unwillingness of MPs and government ministers - regardless of party - to formulate and implement
joined-up policies which have due regard to knock on consequences down the
road. Everything connects, a realisation never present in the Chancellor’s
Budgets: this goes UP that goes DOWN is about the sum total of it.
The voters are now a
problem because they have become habituated to think in terms of what THEY will
give US and MPs elected by constituencies present themselves as pork barrel
politicians who will bring home the pork to their constituency and damn the
rest.
I’m not optimistic about
the future of the UK, mainly because of the failure of the political class to reform their own political institutions - the House of Commons debating chamber is a place where Whitehall farces are played weekly and very little serious work is done; the House of Lords is rotten with corruption. My advice to a young person would be, Get on your bike
and leave. But they don’t need my advice; instead of voting they are already
leaving or planning to do so.
