In the first of a two-part series, MICHAEL HANRATTY considers what the left’s reaction to the budget says about the state of Labour thinking.
Budget Day being an ordinary working day, I don’t normally get to digest the nuts and bolts of policy until it’s all become more widely discussed and less opaque. But this year I caught some local news coverage from the BBC interviewing employees and employers at a Tyneside firm making submersibles about their expectations.
Perhaps the most lamentable aspect of Westminster politics is the assertion that economics is something deeply specialised, mystified and prohibitive to pursuing political imperatives. Specifically socially democratic ones, which involve public investment. Our politicians take the view that the only way the general public can understand economics is through simple allegory. Roll on the myth that the Economy is a household like our own, living beyond its means. If not this gross simplification, we get another: assessing individuals’ current living standards – important to people of course, but fairly short-termist in the bigger picture.