Was Colonel Jessep Right?
Brilliant final-furlong analysis of the election in the Financial Times this weekend. In summary: it has been a campaign devoid of content.
Faced with a huge fiscal problem, whoever gets in will need to sack public sector workers, cut pay, reduce pensions and axe services. No party has deigned to explain how it would do that.
By way of example, the paper shows that in all of David Cameron’s speeches since the election was declared (all 24,129 words) he has not uttered ‘spending cuts’ or ‘austerity’ once.
ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM
To illustrate the duplicity of all three main parties, the FT’s the ever-pithy cartoonist Pinn captioned his picture “Election Platform” and showed three tiny figures at lecterns on the back of a huge elephant labelled ‘Debt’.
Even the Lib Dems, praised this week by the Institute for Fiscal Studies for being the most forthcoming, have revealed only 25% of the cuts they would need to impose.
Opinion polls show that the Great British public believes that efficiency savings will be enough to solve the £163bn fiscal debt. Small wonder; that has been the message from all parties. All we need to do is cut out waste.
Which is like saying to an addicted gambler, ‘cut out the bar nuts and we won’t need to send Ronnie the Knife to visit’.
When Cameron did mention some parts of the country that have become over-dependent on government support, there was a sharp intake of breath from his spin-meisters, and the issue disappeared.
‘YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH‘
In A Few Good Men Jack Nicholson has one of his finest screen moments. As Colonel Nathan Jessep, he bawls at Tom Cruise (and all of us) an uncomfortable fact: We really don’t want to know what’s going on. It’s too big, too painful. If we’re lucky, it’ll go away.
None of the political parties has wanted to be the first to show its hand because it would immediately be pilloried as the harbingers of doom. Brown tried to paint the Tories with the cost-cutting brush, and was in turn labelled negative and defeatist.
And yet this does no-one – elected or electorate – any favours. When the cuts come (as they will) the public will be as angry as an Icelandic volcano. And whoever is in government will find that they have no popular mandate to make the tough calls.
As Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King reportedly said that the party that implements the reductions will find itself unelectable for a decade afterwards, if not longer.
All sides have lacked the courage to tell it as it is, believing that we have lacked the courage to hear it.
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And so it goes. In politics, business or life, it’s better to deal with bad news as quickly as possible. Because the longer you’re in denial, the more difficult the medicine becomes to administer.
