David Cameron’s party conference in Manchester was acted out in a nether-nether world in which largely vacuous speeches were interchangeable and policy announcements opaque to the point of incomprehension. Forced into sullen exile on barren lands delineated by their leaders’ endless triangulation between Labour and the Liberal Democrats and by an economy that shows little sign of recovery, the Conservative Party simply crossed its fingers and hoped for the best.
Having wilfully scared a large section of the British public into believing the myth that Britain’s economy was as vulnerable as that of Greece, the Tories are determined not to let up now. The claim that it was all the fault of the last Labour Government is also looking weaker as the same ministers who spout it preside over an ever-worsening economy.
From the man who needed to say the most about how, or even when, the promised economic recovery might appear there was nothing but the same old, same old rhetoric. The same old deficit reduction policy that isn’t working.
Except… behind the defiant rhetoric was a sign that Chancellor George Osborne belatedly realises and accepts that a tsunami of economic ordure is heading Britain’s way to pile misery on the misery that millions are already suffering. While he and David Cameron exhort the mantra that there can be no Plan B, the Chancellor whipped a hastily drafted conference pleaser out of his back pocket in an attempt give some appearance that the Government is actually doing something.
In its lack of detail the announcement on credit easing was a holding operation. Mr Osborne has until his pre-Budget report on November 29 – in effect, likely to be a Budget in itself – to put flesh on the bones of the scheme.
If it is to have any effect it will have to be fundamentally different from earlier examples of quantitative easing under which the Bank of England printed money only for the banks to greedily swallow it up to restore their balance sheets. The only people who think the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street has done a good job with quantitative easing are Mervyn King and his own colleagues. Unless the plan ensures capital reaches the real economy – construction, small businesses, high-skilled sectors – it will be, literally, a waste of money. If Mr Osborne does what is necessary, he will merely be embracing in part what his shadow Ed Balls has been prescribing as a credible alternative.
Mr Cameron and his Tory colleagues are losing their grip on credibility as fast as the risible Big Society is becoming a contradiction in terms. Just ask the respected chair of the Treasury Select Committee Andrew Tyrie –before he was nobbled at conference by Mr Cameron’s guru Steve Hilton – who described the Big Society, localism and green policies as “at best irrelevant”.
