It makes no sense to believe, as Cable does, that manufacturing can grow as a share of national income. No developed economy has ever achieved such a feat for any extended period of time; services are the only way forward. In any case, economies reliant on manufacturing such as Germany and Japan are facing a comparable or worse recession than Britain as a result of the collapse in trade.
Predictably, Cable hates tax havens, non-domiciled residents and the fact that the tax on capital gains is lower than that on income. He wants a greater share of social housing and much lower, German-style levels of home ownership. He wants us to learn from the ‘open, social democratic Nordic economies’. The list of traditional leftist prescriptions goes on and on. In other respects, Cable is content to sit on the fence, presumably to see which way the wind blows. He has become more sceptical of the euro but hastily adds that his views will depend on how the region fares during the downturn. And while I can live with the odd typo, ‘Sir Frank Godwin’ is a bit too much, even for me.
It feels almost sacrilegious to criticise Cable. I recently chaired a conference at which he was the star speaker; he was polite, knowledgeable and highly intelligent. That doesn’t mean he is right, however, or that he should be free from intellectual scrutiny. The British media mistook Ed Balls for an economics guru in the late 1990s; it should not repeat that same mistake today with Vince Cable.
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