Just a trim?

Happy 100 Days day everyone! With the media currently using the lapse in Parliamentary business to indulge in a double helping of analysis and examination of the Coalition’s every move since its inception back in May (The Times “100 things you may not know about the first 100 days” was a particularly enlightening example), it is perhaps time Plain Thinking took a glance at the one issue that, in a period crammed with policies, has gained more coverage than anything else. Cuts.

Up until 2010 swingeing was, I thought, something done by bored couples in dark car-parks. Despite some evidence that the public are more or less onboard with the Coalition’s relatively aggressive programme of spending cuts, the proliferation of column inches devoted to the opposite opinion is striking. It is possible to find someone writing in the national press almost every day fretting over the potential double-dip recession.

It is certainly not my intention to attack their opinions; indeed I have a great deal of respect for my colleague at Demos who wrote in the Daily Mail detailing the threat Osborne’s retrenchment poses to small businesses, the very firms he is depending on to hire all those ex-QUANGO staff who are going to lose out from his bonfire.

Rather, what is intriguing is the attitude it implies. Putting aside for a moment what level of cuts these columnists do approve of, something they tend not to mention (and fair enough, they are not policy makers), the point is that their simplification of national macro-economics lowers the level of the debate.

So if Britain does re-enter recession, they will claim their opinions vindicated. If only, poor misled Coalition fans, we had cut more gently then we would have avoided such disaster. Osborne would find the whole crushing weight of popular media brought down upon him. Simply, he would not survive. Yet all of this is based on a false premise. Britain’s economic fortunes are dependent on far more factors than pure domestic demand. In much the same way the initial crisis was triggered from overseas, so could Recession 2: The Double Dip. It is near impossible to assign an economic effect a clear cause. Cut swingeingly or cut gently, but everyone needs to be aware that the consequences are only partially within our own control.