This must be the most bizarre election in recent history. Osborne’s speech to the Tory conference today and Liam Byrne’s response to it echo yet again the same weird scenario, that both parties are competing to outdo each other in pursuing the same wrong, misguided policies and nobody is putting forward the obvious common-sense alternatives. Both New Labour and the Tories, for the same ideological reasons, refused to nationalise the banks, which would have been far cheaper than bailing them out at a cost of up to £1.4 trillions and far more effective in ensuring control of them. Both New Labour and the Tories, for the same reasons (hands off the banks), have opposed forcing them to lend to businesses and homeowners (which was the ostensible reason for bailing them out in the first place). Both parties refuse to impose any significant regulation on the banks, even though their greed and recklessness nearly capsized the entire world financial system. And now to cap it all, both parties are competing in their fixation on public sector cuts which is not only grotesquely unjust, but even more importantly is the utterly wrong way to deal with the budget deficit.

At a time when the economy has just contracted by an unprecedented 5.6% year-on-year, it is lunatic to try to resolve the deficit problem by chopping public sector pay and jobs. That will merely steepen the rise in unemployment, reduce government revenue from income tax and VAT, and increase government payouts on benefits – the exact opposite of what is needed. It is also nonsensical that the Government, having earlier cut VAT to 15% in order to encourage people to spend more to support business and jobs, is now proposing to reduce spend within the economy by freezing public sector pay and cutting jobs. Obviously what is really needed is precisely the reverse strategy, namely a massive public investment in jobs both in manufacturing, infrastructure and services, as in Roosevelt’s New Deal, which would steadily take people off benefits and get them paying tax instead.
The enormity of what is currently happening in British politics is breathtaking. There is no democracy when both the main parties are hell-bent on pursuing virtually identical policies hurtling towards the abyss, like the Gadarene swine stampeding towards the cliff-edge. The British people are ill-served by this almost total lack of accountability of political power which seems likely to cost them very dear.

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