Pedant’s revolt

It used to be that the most annoying thing in academic life was political correctness. But a new irritant now threatens to supplant it: the scourge of correct politicalness.

The essence of correct politicalness is to seek to undermine an irrefutable argument by claiming loudly and repetitively to have found an error in it. As with political correctness, which seeks to undermine arguments by declaring the person making them a bigot, correct politicalness originated in the US. But it now has its exponents here, too. Foremost among them is Jonathan Portes.

Portes’s career recalls that of the character Kenneth Widmerpool in Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time. Widmerpool is charmless, pompous and mediocre, yet inexorably ascends the greasy pole by aligning himself with the Labour party.

Portes has no PhD and has published painfully few articles in peer-reviewed journals. Yet his rise through the politicised bureaucracy of the Blair years was Widmerpoolian. Under Gordon Brown he was chief economist at the Cabinet Office. These days he serves as director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research.

According to its website, the NIESR is ‘independent of all party political interests’. The same is hard to say of its director, who has spent much of the past five years criticising the government’s economic policy. He has been very useful to the BBC, which regularly introduces him as a neutral academic. Radio 4 recently asked him to present a documentary on welfare reform, introducing him simply as an ‘economist’ — rather than as one of Iain Duncan Smith’s most implacable critics.

Portes is the Widmerpool of the Keynesian revival. ‘Aggressive tightening of fiscal policy,’ he argued in 2011, ‘is inappropriate and unnecessary, because it is likely to lead to an extended period of sub-par growth and employment.’