A national embarrassment

In February 1942 Singapore, the great Asian fortress of Great Britain, meekly surrendered to a smaller and less well-equipped Japanese force. Defeat had seemed inconceivable.

What was arguably the greatest military humiliation in British history has been examined by military historians in almost obsessive detail. The conclusions of all of them are broadly similar: the disaster was caused by a combination of hubris and vacillation.

Fast-forward seven decades and the UK faces a national humiliation on a far, far greater scale: nothing less than the collapse of international confidence in the ability of our economy to recover and prosper.

Yet like Percival and his generals our leaders stare vacantly into the distance, seemingly unaware of the freight train racing towards them. In the words of Churchill they go on in strange paradox, “decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent.”

This attitude can be seen throughout the public sector; from the international embarrassment that was the pre-budget report, to Manchester’s risible attempts to join in the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference by declaring itself the UK’s first green city (at a time when its coffers are empty), to the various development agencies embarking on major and expensive surveys to find out what 14 year-olds think the country will be like in 20 years’ time.

The answer to that last question, if things do not change soon, is up s**t creek.

This collective denial of reality by the public sector and by those in the private sector who feed off it will at least not last for too long. Reality has been delayed long enough.

If the Conservatives fail to win the next election economic catastrophe (the word is precise) waits in the wings. Not because the markets trust George Osborne to make a fist of things (they are doubtful), but because they have lost all faith in Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling.

There is a convenient fiction that the UK is currently managing to borrow on the international markets what it needs for core services – as if that proves market confidence in the economy. It is not and it does not.

Much of the debt is being bought in quietly by the Bank of England through the simple measure of printing more money to buy it. Calling it Quantitative Easing fools only the foolish.

Such madhouse economics always carry a cost and the longer they continue the greater the cost becomes.

The level of public sector borrowing has now entered the realms of fantasy and disbelief – tens of billions of pounds carry no meaning to a Chancellor who can maintain the fiction that the UK faces the next few years from “a position of strength”.

To return to Churchill it was he who in the darkest days of the Second World War was accused of being too gloomy. He replied, “The British people are unique in this respect. They are the only people who like to be told how bad things are, who like to be told the worst.”

It is the final failure that Alistair Darling could not even manage that.

I wish all our readers a Happy New Year, whatever it might bring.

Permalink