The Lucky Chancellor

No, I don’t mean Alastair Darling. I doubt he’s enough of his own man to be described as either ‘lucky’ or, to be brutally honest, ‘the Chancellor’.

Rather, I was thinking of the other one. A certain Mr Brown. The man who, for all practical purposes, still is the Chancellor.

All throughout the boom years, the papers seemed to be full of paeans to the ‘prudent chancellor’. I always found this stuck in my craw a bit. First off, if Gordon Brown was so perfectly wonderful and everything was rosy, where were all the jobs? My experience of the period 2004 to 2007 was one of poorly-paid, unstable employment, intermixed with uncomfortably-long periods of no employment whatsoever. And I wasn’t the only person I knew who was in that situation – the supposed boom seems a bit theoretical when it’s been several weeks since your last job went ‘poof’, after all. (Significantly, since becoming a full-time postgraduate, I feel far more comfortable financially than I ever did whilst working full-time.)

The other thing, of course, was the number of ticking timebombs that the Government simply ignored. Although I wouldn’t blame the Credit Crunch on Gordie personally, nonetheless the house-price thing has been a disaster waiting to happen for years. We even had a dry run with it in the form of the endowments crisis a few years back.

No, seriously. In many respects, the endowment mortgage crisis was the Credit Crunch’s dress rehearsal. Look closely and you see most of the same basic problems. Poorly-thought through mortgage products. People who couldn’t afford them being pushed into buying. Greedy advisors pocketing commissions. Remuneration packages that encourage finance ‘professionals’ (whatever that actually means) not to look too closely at the downsides of what they’re doing. Regulators looking the other way at the right moments. And a total absence of either vision or leadership by the supposed Government.

The basic problem with all of this is quite simple: psychology. The whole home-owning mythology has been hopelessly over-hyped in this country. In most workplaces, your success or failure as an individual seems to be pegged on how often you get your bathroom done, and whether or not you’ve managed to get into buy-to-let. (BTL is a whole can of worms all by itself; what is wrong with a country’s people when passive rent-seeking is one of the most socially-respectable activities?) Anything else you may do in your life is just dust in the wind. And as a result, people carry on feeling driven into more and more expensive mortgages and higher and higher payments, none of which they could ever afford in the first place. (Evidence: the housing market is creeping back up again, when it should still be in the toilet by any rational standard. Houses still cost rather more than they did in the late ’90s, even after the so-called ‘crash’ the other year.)

And no minister in the past decade has shown any hint even of awareness of this stupidity, let alone a willingness to challenge it.

The Labourites can try and blame some of that on the Tories but it still happened on their watch. And their response wasn’t exactly dazzling then, either. No, to be honest, I don’t personally believe that Gordon was ever a very good chancellor. He was simply lucky for a few years. And that luck’s run out, to the country’s cost.

Of course, this shouldn’t be taken as any endorsement of the Conservatives. Sadly, the current main opposition party is, quite simply, unfit for power. A Cameron landslide (heaven forbid) would be as much of a disaster for Britain as another Labour one. Cameron’s front bench are a dismal lot. It’s hard to have any real confidence in, say, George Osborne, who appears to be trying to be his own satire. And as every days goes by, Cameron seems more and more like the Empty Man from PR to me. And as for their ideas, well, I’d discuss them if there seemed to be any. At the moment, the Conservative Party appears to be Labour’s greatest electoral asset – perhaps the last gasp of Gordon’s luck, maybe? And as for this business about paying the deficit down using these mythical ‘efficiency savings’ – well, good luck with that, Davey Boy.

No, we desperately need a breath of fresh air in this country. Labour won’t supply it and the Tories very probably can’t. So I guess I shall have to wait and see what happens on May the 6th…