Wobbling over Wolsey

February 26, 2010 — admin

The purchase of Wolsey Place has attracted a lot of debate in various places, including local Lib Dem blogs and a dismal Facebook group set up by UKIPpers, who have taken a break from blaming everything on Europe.

I’m disappointed that having agreed to it in council, some Lib Dems in Horsell are trying the old “we don’t have to follow the party line” gag just as they did over county hall. No – you don’t have to follow the party line on a Horsell issue such as development in the village or bus service cuts. But this is nothing to do with Horsell specifically and it’s a major financial commitment that the council has signed up to on a cross-party basis. For local activists to now try and wriggle out of their party’s official position on Wolsey Place is opportunistic and disingenuous. If they were so concerned, did they lobby their leadership against cross-party agreement?

For what it’s worth, Horsell West councillor Tony Branagan voted against the purchase but now the matter has been resolved he is committed to defending the council’s position, even though it wasn’t his own. How very easy to abdicate responsibility in the face of hard questions – to me, elected representatives need more fibre than that and Tony has it in spades.

I’d prefer a world where Woking Borough Council was debt-free, as it was six years ago under Jim Armitage. But that isn’t the council we’ve got and only a firesale would restore that position. In the circumstances, the best place to spend the borrowed money is on appreciating assets and generating revenue. So let’s look at Wasteful Woking and see just how inaccurate the UKIP information is.

“Not only do they splash out 68M for Wolsey, they also just announced a 2.5% council tax increase. It’s time to take some control back!”

And just think how much more your council tax would be without £1.5m in revenues next year from Wolsey Place. This is a totally misplaced statement based on the notion that Woking Borough Council itself has written a cheque for £68m.

“It will take the council 50 years to pay back the loan for Wolsey Place, a development that will probably be beyond it’s usab…le life within 20 years. That means a major capital expenditure to either rebuild or upgrade the current site. “Invest to save” is a phrase usually best applied to upgrade work or repairs that will lower future bill and fixed cost base. Not buying a leaky old shopping centre and half occupied office.”

What is wrong with taking 50 years to pay back the loan? People with mortgages usually pay them back over half that and they usually borrow a good deal less than half the money. As time goes on, the value of the repayments will decrease while the rental income keeps pace with inflation ie the value of income over repayments will increase hugely over 50 years. If the centre is sold on, the loan could be paid back or if the site is sold in say 15 years, it will be most likely be worth a great deal more than was paid for it and will cover substantially the amount of the loan outstanding.

Whatever the author’s view of the shopping centre, actually looking at the books (rather than guessing wildly) revealed a sound basis for buying. In addition, there is potential for development in the future, although that’s not something I think would be considered for some time. For the record, floors one to five of Export House are empty, with six to 15 occupied. The internal decor and facilities are very good and I know that because I work on the 14th floor.

Elsewhere, we’ve had concerns about maintenance, unforeseen legislation and all sorts of other things that really scrape the barrel. There are always risks associated with everything – given all the information available, councillors on all sides took the view that this was worth doing.

Finally, there are Lib Dem concerns about the process, about the fact that the deal was done with press and public excluded (Part II). I’m no fan of Part II and as a journalist I fought tooth and nail to find out what was going on “behind closed doors”. But consider this – councillors are elected by the people to take decisions. As residents, we’d no doubt prefer everything to be decided in public but just because the press and public are excluded doesn’t make the process less democratic. These are still the same councillors making the same decisions under the same constitution in the same way that magistrates confer in private rather than open court. And the Lib Dems, who have to a person all been involved in Part II items in the past, know that perfectly well.

In his blog Denzil Coulson claims that the Lib Dems have helped rescue us from a financial disaster this year by backing Wolsey Place. If that makes him happy, so be it - but he is right that the financial outlook for 2010/11 is a lot better because of this purchase. Remember that net of repayments, net of tax, net of maintenance the council will get £1.5m a year from the Wolsey Place purchase – it pays for itself and a lot more besides.

So t’s time that UKIPpers stopped spreading rubbish about the deal that was done for pure electoral gain and that Lib Dems locally had the bottle to agree – as Denzil seems to want to say – that this deal was the very best of the bad job that Woking’s borrowing is.

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Shopping Centre cardinal to Woking economy

February 22, 2010 — admin

Earlier today, Woking Borough Council officially announced that it had purchased Wolsey Place Shopping Centre following a decision on February 2 to become sole owners. The cost is £68million, which has been financed by the Public Works Loan Board.

The aim of the purchase is twofold – to invest in an asset that will both appreciate in time and generate a healthy £1.5m every year for the council and to play a pro-active role in encouraging economic growth in the town - in this case by securing the future of a major retail space. There are, it must be stressed, no plans for the council to run the centre, this will remain with existing staff.

There will no doubt be those that criticise the council for taking on more borrowing. They will stand on the fact that Woking has borrowed more than almost any other district council and that this somehow indicates financial imcompetence. Not so. The act of investing in tangible assets on a long-term basis and generating net profits from those investments is using borrowing as a force for good. I won’t defend all of the projects WBC has invested – and I favour a debt-free position – but in this case, one has to consider the broader interests of Woking in the future.

The nature of local government finances has changed. No longer are councils about revenue income, support grants, non-domestic rates and council tax versus costs – they have a wider, enabling role to play through investment in communities. We aren’t the only council looking to be more pro-active economically. Surrey Heath has got pro-active with The Atrium development and there are other options for the future. Runnymede redeveloped its Civic Centre and Guildford has worked to improve its Civic Hall and Friary Centre infrastructure for years.

The difference is that we have already gone into the market while the money is cheap and we are ahead of the curve – as suggested by the fact that the Liberal Democrats also backed the purchase of the centre. I’m pleased we’ve got a consensus on this and hope it survives the election intact.

Traditional local government finance will fade out as more and more cuts have to be made and councils look to other means of raising revenue. Outsourcing only gets you so far and is politically challenging – far better to invest cheaply in strategic assets that will generate multiple benefits for both residents and the council.

Posted in Community, Economy, Woking Borough Council. Tags: , , , , , , , , . No Comments »

May still a long way off

February 17, 2010 — admin

Teresa - know what you are going to say and what might be said back before you say it!

I drove out to Dorking this morning along the A25 via Send for a business meeting. The road, which I know very well from reporting days and past lives, is in a truly awful, appalling state. But that is Guildford and Mole Valley’s issue – the reason I mention it was that I was stuck for about ten minutes in the aftermath of a nasty car crash (at which I hope no-one was seriously hurt) that seemed to mirror what I was listening to on the radio.

Teresa May, shadow employment secretary, appeared on the Stephen Nolan Show, BBC Radio Five Live (you can listen here but need to fast forward), to talk about today’s unemployment figures (notice how the BBC allows Lib Dem Steve Webb to get in a pop at cutting the deficit at the bottom - no bias my foot), which are mixed. It is good that overall unemployment is down – but with the number of Jobseekers’ claimants up and long-term unemployment up it is difficult to argue that it’s a great day. Teresa presumably went on the air to point out the mixed message – specifically that the number of “under-employed” people – where they have been forced into part-time and reduced-hours work – stands at almost three million.

Instead, she allowed herself down a classic funnel by stating that Labour has closed Job Centres at the average of one a month since 2008. There was no need for her to go there – all she needed to do was talk about the Work Programme, express sympathy and understanding and stay calm. By raising the matter of closures, she prompted the inevitable comeback “so would you re-open them?”, to which she had no answer.

The funnel happens when you’re drawn to a pinch point from which the interview cannot go forward without an answer, usually a yes or no question. “I’ll ask you again, if you say that Labour was wrong to close the Job Centres, will you commit to re-open them?” Again she evades – it sounds very poor. Now she’s struggling because once you’re in the funnel, it’s difficult to climb back out again. “Look, you are hoping to become the next government in three months’ time, I think people have a right to know whether you will right a wrong that you say Labour has committed – so yes or no, will you re-open the Job Centres?” Crash, bang.

It’s not the point she has come on air to make (if it was, it was extremely ill-judged and poorly prepared). So why does an experienced politician like Teresa May allow herself to be dragged into the funnel so easily? By the time Labour minister Jim Knights is introduced into the proceedings, he could have danced around like a chicken and sounded more credible than Teresa. To be fair, she improved towards the end but the damage was done. And I don’t blame the BBC for being hard on her – if you make such basic unforced errors, you get what you deserve.

So how to get out of the funnel? Firstly, avoid going there in the first place. Why bring up the mistakes of government on such a peripheral matter? The essence lies in Conservative policy, which in this case is very credible. Once you’re in, there are only two options – attack the basis of the question or tell the truth. In Teresa’s case, she could have done either.

Attack the basis of the question: “I understand why you as a journalist are asking me that question but whether or not we commit to re-opening the centres is not relevant. The damage has already been done and the people who those centres could have helped have not been helped, which adds to the problems that we face now. The time to save those centres was 2008, not 2010. Instead of talking about committing to re-open those centres, we have adjusted our policy to suit the needs of today’s unemployed people.” If nothing else, it looks less evasive and puts you back in control of the issue, dismissing the question as outdated.

Tell the truth: “I think it’s important to give an honest answer to you and that answer is that we are not in a position to re-open those centres given the state of the public finances. If they had been kept open in 2008 we wouldn’t now close them because that money would already be in our budgets. This government has ruined the economy and left us with huge debts and that means that as much as we’d like to, we simply can’t go and undo this and many other bad decisions that Labour has left us with. In the light of these tight resources, it’s important that we target them properly and that is what our new programme is designed to do.”

Neither answer gets you off the hook completely but it allows you to move on. There’s nothing the public hates more than politicians that blatantly won’t answer questions and evasiveness is not a good thing for voters or party members to hear. I don’t know who’s advising Teresa May on dealing with the media but they clearly have a lot of work to do.

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Cadbury cremed by bad law

February 2, 2010 — admin

I’ve always been partial to Cadbury’s Creme Eggs and for the past two weeks, I’ve been buying boxes and bringing them into the office, exhorting my colleagues to “eat them while they are still British”. Alas, no more. At 1pm today, the iconic British company became the plaything of an American conglomerate whose trademark cheese products are, astonishingly, even less related to actual cheese than Creme Eggs are to eggs.

PM has been busy lately, launching a attempted decapitation strategy on DC yesterday in a speech filled with more chutzpah than a New York second-hand car dealership. Now he’s been to meet the Kraft CEO, who’s not averse to audacity herself on the evidence of this takeover, he is sagely warning that he’ll be looking for more detailed assurances in the coming months. I don’t think that’s going to worry Irene Rosenfeld much – she’s only 4% short of the shares she needs to take Cadburyoff the stock exchange altogether.

And what PM is less keen to let you know is that it was Labour, through the Companies Act 2006 that effectively removed the right of government to protect our long-established businesses from takeover. The act implemented the EU’s Takeover and Transparency Obligations Directives, which harmonise takeover law throughout the EU and prevent company boards from doing anything to frustrate takeover bids. But surprisingly, it’s not the EU’s fault.

Despite the obvious agenda of EU member states to fix takeover legislation to favour their own subsidised corporate environment (ever wondered why so many German, French and Spanish firms can afford to buy British companies and infrastructure?) the directive did leave EU governments free to restrict takeoever law in their states. Labour didn’t take that opportunity and so the government is now in a very weak position to do anything about Kraft or dictate terms to it once Cadbury is bought.

There’s nothing intrisically bad about large British companies getting taken over. It puts money into shareholders’ pockets and since many shareholders are pension schemes, it helps to boost flagging pension values. Certainly Kraft has chosen to pay well over the odds for Cadbury. But it is important that we have British companies continuing to develop and emerge on the global market as players.

And with little or no protection from foreign predators, that is less, not more, likely to happen.

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BBC – Broadly Bashing Cameron

January 27, 2010 — admin

In the dark - Broadcasting House seems to have its own view on economics

Apparently two separate blog entries in lightning succession trying to make hay out of the Hatfield House meetings clearly wasn’t enough for Nick Robinson, who surely won’t still be BBC Political Editor by the end of the year. The fact that no other media saw fit to run with this story in a big way shows how isolated he is, how drawn into the Labour spin trap.

We now have another blog post on Tory cuts that tries to have it all ways – saying the Conservatives will cut and if they don’t painting that as a U-turn and another slight on DC. He then helps perpetuate the myth that government spending boosts growth and will therefore aid a recovery. Government spending doesn’t boost growth - it creates its own growth, which then disappears once the subsidy is withdrawn. The UK would still be in recession without the Car Scrappage Scheme – with that scheme over, the car industry can expect a significant downturn in the months ahead.

Today, the Labour group on the LGA announced it would push for a 1% pay increase for the least well paid rather than exercise restraint. Again, the money that goes into propping up more and more public sector wages is a massive ongoing subsidy and one that cannot be withdrawn now it has been enacted without devastating unemployment. The reduction of the public sector headcount must be a target of a Conservative government because it is not healthy for our economy, society or democracy for such a large proportion of the population to be employed by the government.

But now so many are, reducing that number is a hugely painful and expensive thing to do. We mustn’t make the same mistake with the economy by using more government money to prop it up – it needs to be nurtured and kicked into a recovery of its own and the only way to do that is to reduce our debt. Yesterday Bill Gross told investors across the world to avoid the UK because of our huge debts, weak currency and fragile recovery. Like George Osborne, he sees that debt reduction – preferably quickly – is the only way to restore confidence, maintain our credit rating and keep interest rates down.

It’s all very well pumping money into the economy – even if it doesn’t actually promote sustainable growth. But if people’s mortgage rates go from 2.5% up to 6% within 12 months, it isn’t going to leave them with much money to aid the recovery; in fact, many of them will be worse off than they were while we were in recession.

So the BBC needs to stop chucking the last dice all over the place in support of Labour and start understanding that more borrowing and spending in the short-term is going to make the problem far, far worse. If they leave everything as it is, we will fingernail into a slow and drawn out recovery process during which many people will be worse off than they have been for the past two years.

Only by committing to reduce the deficit can we carry the confidence of the markets, which are the real force behind recovery. We need to cut public spending while keeping as many people as possible employed, to raise taxes for those that can afford it most and keep interest rates down while selling on as much of our debt as we can. It’s not going to be easy.

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Economy’s off the scale

January 26, 2010 — admin

Well, don’t you feel better now? The UK is officially out of recession (link to The Times because the BBC’s coverage reads like a Treasury press release), so we can all get back in our cars, go back to shopping in Waitrose and start thinking about re-mortgaging the house. Not quite. Because the government has been pumping so, so much money into our economy during the past 12 months that anything other than growth – however pitifully small – would have been utter humiliation. It’s also worth pointing out that we still have January and February’s figures to come before Q4 2009 growth is confirmed.

I believe that 0.1% is rather convenient for Gordon Brown and will be revised downwards in a few weeks when the fuss has died down. But there is a fundamental distinction between the two parties on how to maintain recovery – and remember that a second “after-slump” in the face of first recovery is something that has characterised nearly all the post-war recession. Labour wants to continue to prop up the economy with taxpayers’ money and there’s nothing particularly wrong with that in such dire circumstances.

The BBC's graph is stastically nonsense

But at some point, the props have to be taken away – and at the moment, the whole thing would come crashing down if that were the case. This is the graph that the Treasury and the BBC wants people in Britain to see. It looks like we are out of the woods. With another 18 months of quantative easing and borrowing, the figure could quite easily be pushed up to 2 or 3 percent and the government given credit for not just a full recovery but a new boom.

The Guardian's graph not only shows us where we actually are but compares with other recessions

This, though, is the Grauniad’s somewhat more realistic assessment of the situation that shows the recession has wiped out all the growth in the British economy since 2005. I have heard both George Osborne and Phillip Hammond in the media today say that the only thing that will keep us out of recession is the private sector’s profits, jobs and tax revenues and that interest rates must stay low to stimulate that growth. We need to cut the defecit to bolster our credit rating and boost our floundering currency.

A rise in interest rates, which would have an adverse affect on people’s spending power, is the most serious threat to our sustained economic recovery – apart from a fourth term for Labour. More borrowing could mean a softening of Britain’s credit rating and devaluing of the pound, which would make government guilts and bonds less attractive to investors. The government desperately needs to harden these investments to pass Britain’s debt onto those with the money to buy it; cuts in spending alone coupled with tax increases will not be enough to pay off our borrowings.

I want to see Ken Clarke and Phillip Hammond blast through Labour bluster about recovery and remind people that whatever Labour has done to bring us out of recession – and you can argue about the effectiveness vs cost of that – it’s nothing compared to the damage they have done to British business and trade, as well as landing us with a huge debt to pay off. I want to see people reminded about this until Gordon Brown doesn’t want to talk about the economy anymore. Brown’s plans to continue to spend his way out of recession and worry about the economic consequences later should convince that he can’t be trusted on this.

He’s been saying for ages that the Conservatives have made the wrong call on the economy every time. It’s not true and it’s time we hit back. He wants to continue to mollycoddle the nation and extend the pain for longer. The Conservative approach is not just a self-flagellating short, sharp shock; it makes absolute economic sense and it’s about time we said so.

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Not so easy now

January 11, 2010 — admin

Reality bites - Nick Clegg has ditched some of his key promises

Writing in the Grauniad this morning, a smug Michael White claimed that DC’s appearance on the Andrew Marr Show had clarified nothing and that he had not been able to give firm promises on any of his draft manifesto commitments. Well, I can’t deny that DC is avoiding any more cast-iron guarantees but neither can Mr White deny that the reason he is doing so is because of the total and utter ruin to which the government his newspaper supports has brought the economy.

Furthermore, we know that the government is being deliberately obstructive of Conservative attempts to gain access to Treasury information – both to hide the extent of their failure and deny the opposition any advantage they may derive once in government. DC knows that things are bad but he isn’t sure how bad and until he knows he’s not making any promises. Is Mr White saying this isn’t sensible?

The Liberal Democrats have been busy making quite a bit of hay over that situation in the past. But now it turns out that they too have seen the absurdity of promising free elderly care and scrapping tuition fees when the money most obviously isn’t there to fund it. It’s not the first time they’ve decided they want to scrap some of their policies (Mansion Tax, anyone?) but at least Nick Clegg is shelving these because he can’t afford it, rather than because they are rubbish.

As ever with the Lib Dems though, they don’t have to be properly costed because they aren’t ever going to be enacted. But there comes a time when promising the earth just looks silly - even when you don’t necessarily know the details of the costs involved. Such a point has been reached and Nick Clegg is using the opportunity to launch his own austerity regime.

Which just leaves Labour. The Chancellor has promised cuts, the PM used the word once but thinks he got away with it and one half of the Labour party wants class war and investment and the other half wants the middle class vote and a pair of sharp scissors. It is clear that the government is in total disarray not about the economic policy needed – because both spending cuts and tax rises are coming without a doubt – but how to present this to voters.

The Conservatives went for honesty at their conference last year and it went down well at first but started to wobble once the government comms department got hold of it. The Lib Dems tried honesty, the party didn’t fancy it and so they went back to investment but now Nick Clegg has obviously put his foot down for the sake of credibility – as far as it goes, good on him.

But Labour – Labour is a complete and utter shambles with PM, Alistair Darling and Milipede pulling one way and Balls/Cooper the other. Most of the cabinet seem to have given up, obviously completely bemused with the whole situation and the shattering lack of leadership.

They didn’t go into politics for this. Hopefully, they’ll be put out of their misery before too long.

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Gone to Iceland

January 5, 2010 — admin

Has the Icesave money been flushed down the waterfall?

Iceland is apparently a startling beautiful place. And up until quite recently, it was an attractive place to deposit money if you were a local authority. Indeed, the treasury included it on a list of, ahem, approved destinations for local authorities to save, such was the benefit of the interest rates on offer at places like Landsbanki.

Unsurprisingly, many local authorities did so – although not Woking – and when the whole thing went under in 2008, the price of local authorities’ silence on the Treasury’s advice was the government not blaming the councils themselves for incompetence. Many councils, in fact, sussed that there was something wrong in Iceland many months ahead of time but couldn’t get their money – tied in for periods of a year or more – out in time.

As well as councils, around 300,000 depositors in the UK, Netherlands and Germany had Icesave accounts that were guaranteed by the government – it is compensation for this bailout that is being questioned by Icelandic president Olafur Ragnar Grimsson. His government led by prime minister Johanna Sigurdardottir wants to do the right thing by paying back the British and Dutch governments nearly £3.1bn but he has decided the Icelandic people should have a say in a referendum instead.

They are likely to vote against because they believe that the country shouldn’t pay back the money to foreigners that its incompetent and dubiously run banks – the foreign debt of the biggest three was more than five times Iceland’s GDP – took from them in full understanding of their precarious position. The reducing value of the Icelandic currency was also to blame – somewhat more the fault of the people of Iceland than the people of Britain.

What this issue has to do with the people of Iceland is unclear. This is nothing less than nationalism being the last resort of a bankrupt nation and a president keen to gain some political capital out of his government’s stupid actions. Iceland has never been a centre of world finance and was scarcely able to sustain such highly leveraged financial devices – at least the City of London has that excuse.

If Iceland refuses to pay back what it owes to the people who lost out in Icesave, it will actually lose out further in the long term. It is difficult to see how it could ever enter the EU and investment in that country would be very, very hesitant in the future. Icelandic banks would remain a byword for loss and injustice along with the likes of BCCI and Barings.

Let us hope that the President and his people drop the patriotic ardour and start to understand the unfortunate consequences of neighbourly disputes.

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Which is it, Gordon?

January 5, 2010 — admin

The PM spent most of last year talking about how the Conservatives were going to cut their way out of recession. Now, with the publication of the first part of the Conservative manifesto, he has decided to try and say that we are planning to splurge our way out of it with a £34bn black hole.

Labour has form on dodgy dossiers - as we all know - and the compendium of lies that they released in response to the manifesto certainly fell into that category. But they succeeded in one way – the central message of the manifesto, the draft plans for the NHS, did not get an airing on the news. DC has to brush aside this silly question about how much of a promise is a promise and make sure that people know about our ideas and innovations for the future of the country.

As Stephanie Flanders points out, we should be mounting a two-pronged attack here – one with our own ideas and one with some serious hay-making about Labour’s own planned cuts. Where I think she is slightly off the mark is in saying that by talking about the nature of the promises rather than the content, the first day was a Labour success – DC made the point well that the promises are only tentative because of the economic mess Labour has bequeathed.

But he needs to start being more ruthless about ignoring journalists’ questions and getting his own message out. Tony Blair was a master of this art and it contributed a significant part of why he was able to seal the deal in way that DC has yet to. And Nick Robinson is as good a place as any to start.

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I should hope not

January 3, 2010 — admin

The man who nose - Ken Clarke

As well as spinning madly about security, Labour’s press team has also been trying to get stuff into the paper along the lines that the Conservative will be cutting spending and raising taxes after Ken Clarke said it would be “folly” to rule out tax increases. The BBC has dutifully responded with just such a story.

First of all, I should hope that no promises whatsoever will be made on tax increases or otherwise until George Osborne is able to see the proper and full government account – including all the off balance sheet PFI liabilities. It would be totally stupid to make any pledges on the overall tax burden until the Conservatives know just what a state the country is in. Ken Clarke is absolutely right and I hope that even tax-cutting Tories can see the logic in that position – or at least appreciate the total illogicality of promising to maintain or cut tax rates at this stage.

Secondly, the BBC has a long memory when it comes to Mrs Thatcher and the poll tax or John Major and sleaze but a very short one when it comes to recalling just who on earth plunged this country into near-bankruptcy to begin with. Every economically active person played a small part, certain larger players in the economy such as the banks and the regulators played a far more significant role but the one institution that has to carry the can for such throwaway mismanagement is HM Government.

For two years, Labour has spun that the banks were to blame and the price of the banks readily shouldering that blame has been £60bn of taxpayers’ money to make them competitive again. Those that wouldn’t play ball, like Sir Fred Goodwin, were fed to the media in a frenzy of inflammatory briefings that if they had been conducted by a private citizen on another private citizen would have been on the edge of legality.

The BBC, Grauniad and others have happily swallowed that line to the point where most of the British public believe that the banks were more or just as responsible as the government for the recession. Rubbish.

A few banks don’t make a recession, no matter how dodgy the loans. The recession was caused by a framework of poor decisions, insufficient regulation, faulty economic plans and over-optimistic projections. It was also caused because western governments were too complacent and arrogant to understand that their economies must shift to work around the emerging markets of the East rather than just continuing as per the past 50 years. The person responsible for the poor economic planning, the lack of realpolitick, the poor regulation and stoking up of the boom was not Sir Fred or any other banker. It was Gordon Brown the chancellor and Gordon Brown the PM.

Yet somehow it will be the fault of the Conservative Party if, after the next election, taxes need to rise and spending be cut. Well, spending will be cut after the next election because our national debt needs to be controlled. And taxes will rise as well because cuts alone won’t deliver the massive amounts of money that need to be raised.

DC is concerned that people will see the Conservatives offering only a decade of downbeat austerity and vote for Gordon who wants more borrowing to keep spending. It is a worry but in the end you have to trust the electorate to do what is right. And I think they will understand that a decade of different economic behaviour – most of it bearable, much of it positive but some of it unwelcome – is the price of the Noughties Boom.

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