Spectator’s Notes | 3 September 2015

Was there ever a more unilluminating political idea — for voters rather than practitioners — than triangulation? For those readers so pure and high-minded that they have not followed politics for 20 years, I should explain that triangulation came from Bill Clinton, was imported by Tony Blair, and is now practised by David Cameron. Clinton’s adviser, Dick Morris, put it thus: ‘The President needed to take a position that not only blended the best of each party’s views but also transcended them to constitute a third force in the debate.’ The Tories’ adoption of the Living Wage is the latest example. This concept, almost as mystically bogus as the medieval concept of the Just Price, is an entirely left-wing one, but Mr Cameron believes it helps him claim (see Tuesday’s Times) that his is ‘the true party of working people’ while he cuts benefits at the same time. It may well help him electorally, of course: he is timing it to reach the specific sum of £9 per hour for those over 25 in the year of the next general election. But the Living Wage is simply bound to slow the creation of new jobs and encourage the shedding of old ones (and/or swell the black market), because it makes jobs artificially expensive. It will drive automation and work against small and struggling firms. Whereas today the minimum wage is paid to 5 per cent of workers, it is estimated that the Living Wage, by 2020, will be paid to 11 per cent. So a Conservative government is quite fast developing an incomes policy. The triangle will eventually go pear-shaped.

The more one thinks about the current witch-hunt against alleged paedophiles in the establishment, the more beyond satire it seems. What mordant novelist could have imagined, even ten years ago, that the police would be devoting massive amounts of their time to investigating famous people who were a) suspected on no actual evidence and b) dead and therefore beyond the reach of the law? Yet it has happened.