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Friday 10 February 2012

The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore's reflections on the week

On Monday I read that Gordon Brown was about to launch a ‘£500 billion bank gamble’. By the time you read this, he may have done so, but it is quite possible that few will have noticed, or cared. These colossal expenditures or promises of expenditures or of possibilities of expenditure have become the same as most government initiatives under New Labour — designed for the headline, and then reannounced from time to time. They are like the victories in the permanent war between the super-powers constantly trumpeted in Nineteen Eighty-Four — apparently enormous, but semi-fictional. To understand what is happening, one must remember that, as in a real war, the main participants are permanently exhausted. How could they possibly remember what they decided last week, or have time to implement much of it? One of the most able civil servants trying to sort everything out is Tom Scholar, the Treasury man who handles the ‘tripartite’ (Bank, Treasury, FSA) arrangement. On a recent Monday, I gather, he had agreed to dine with his parents. He was kept late at work, of course, and then turned up in jeans. ‘Oh,’ they said, ‘why did you bother to go home and change?’ ‘I didn’t,’ he explained, ‘I haven’t left the office since Saturday.’

The government always tells us that it is doing everything for the sake of ‘hard-working families’. This is extremely annoying, for two reasons. First, what about lazy families? Why should they be ignored? They may well be nicer to their children than the hard-working ones. Second, the credit crunch has exposed the fact that hard work has not been the way to wealth in the past 15 years. People in the West have got richer mostly because of risk. They took the risk to borrow heavily against their houses and were rewarded, until last year, by a huge increase in their value. Work, beyond that required to pay the interest, had nothing to do with it. The problem turned out to be that the borrowers tended not to think of this as risk at all, but as something intrinsic to the nature of property. Now, thanks to Gordon Brown and the banks, they will have to be very hard-working indeed to survive.

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