David Boyle's Blog, page 107

What if modern government is unaffordable?

Heaven knows, I'm not a deficit hawk – though I have Victorian Liberal's horror of waste, especially wasteful public expenditure that is destructive: encouragement for buying cars, subsidised air travel or supermarkets, accountants employed by NHS trusts to code each treatment or to challenge each coding for each PCT.

But I have begun to get depressed by the rhetoric of the cuts debate. Has any modern economy actually managed to balanced their budget? Do we actually need to be in deficit jus...

A perigrination in the catacombs

In the library of the Treasury, there is an ancient copy of one of Keynes' pamphlets, and it has been scrawled over by Treasury officials with the words 'bankruptcy' and 'insanity'.

Keynes was challenging the Treasury idea, which seems to have been in their DNA since time immemorial, that the way out of recession is to get people to save not spend. The money has to be in the banks, ready to lend.

Keynes' view was that, in the end, this kind of puritanical retrenchment led to death – "a peregri...

A very British blindness

Perhaps this is very curmudgeonly of me, but we seem to be slowly drowning in that dreadful version of English nationalism called The-Best-In-The-World-Syndrome (after the well-known cliché about British bobbies).

Why is it that our commentators assume that England is always set to win every World Cup, and that everything less than that is a crime for which somebody needs to be disembowelled in the tabloids? It isn't as if we have much of a track record for the past four decades or so. Where...

What if we just cut targets?

Two things are a bit odd about all the debate over spending cuts in the last week.

One is that it seems to have been disconnected from the debate about the economy. The cuts are required partly because of the huge banking bail-out, and the abuses that led to that are still going on. Yet that debate seems to be happening in another universe somewhere.

Worse, the BBC seems to have decreed that this is not an issue that might be tackled by encouraging local enterprise – which will require some ...

This isn't localism

I've never met Michael Gove, but I grew to respect him over the last few years. I defended his policy of free schools. I struggled to keep something like that – something eminently Liberal based on the Danish and Swedish models – in the Lib Dem manifesto. I still think its an important idea.

And every time I wander around Croydon where I live I feel confirmed in that feeling. There was nothing so disempowering to parents than the Blairite roll-out of 'choice' of schools. It has left us a...

A new kind of Wizard of Oz

What is it about The Wizard of Oz that makes it so popular now? There was the new production at the Festival Hall last year. Now there is the success of Wicked. Well, I have a suggestion. It is to do with economic collapse.

The idea that Frank Baum actually wove his tale around the monetary battles of the 1890s only emerged in 1963, but I'm sure it is right. Although Oz stands easily on its own as a tale, it was also a subtle tract urging more money in circulation on behalf of the agricul...

Radical inefficiency and my local woods

Sarah called Croydon Council yesterday to report fly-tipping in the local woods. Their response goes to the heart of the problem of public services over the past decade – and David Laws might do worse than looking here for a more radical and effective way of saving money.

The lady at the call centre replied: "I don't think we can do this."

What she meant was that our local park, and the woods attached, don't have a street address, which means the fly-tipping incident couldn't be entered on the...

A peculiar moment of radical opportunity

It is a bizarre feeling. I haven't heard all the details of the coalition deal. But I have just watched a government take office involving the party I've been working for over three decades. It feels good. I keep poking myself to see if I really feel that, but I do.

As a Liberal Democrat, I am of course a manic optimist – but I wasn't sure I would ever see the day.

There is another paradox I am aware of. I regard myself as a Lib Dem radical (not that I always find myself agreeing with othe...

Risking a little optimism

I listened to Nick Clegg talking about understanding people's fears of change. I suppose he's right, though I haven't quite reached that point in the recovery process myself.

But I suppose – like so many of us (at least us Lib Dems) – I have been struggling today to understand why the excitement of the polls didn't last the full campaign, and disappeared once people were actually in polling booths.

There are a whole lot of reflections about our campaign and its authenticity that I keep being ...

The narrow imagination of the BBC

I know it's 24 hours ago now, but I've reached two conclusions about the third leaders' debate. Perhaps, more accurately, they are two emotions

The first one relates to Cameron's bizarre repetition of the word 'grip'. Often used ungrammatically as in "we must grip the banks". Strange, but clear evidence of the testing of words to destruction before Conservative focus groups. Gripping was obviously something the poor interviewees approved of.

It makes me realise that what actually made Nick ...