The absence of growth and the importance of credibility are recurring themes in this
morning’s papers. John Lord Hutton has told the BBC that revised growth figures make pension reform even more urgent, and he added
that the deal that was put before trade unions was ‘perfectly credible’. Meanwhile, David Cameron has
insisted that ministers increase their pension contributions by an average of 4.2 per cent (more than the 3.2 average across the public sector) to show that ‘we are all in this
together’.
Pensions also feature in an Independent on Sunday interview with Tim Farron, the Lib Dem President. Farron says he has ‘sympathy’ with state employees who are caught between the macho posturing of ‘right wing politicians’ and union leaders. The words ‘we must not return to the 1980s’ follow not long after.
But these are the 2010s, not the 1980s – and it is a time of unremitting economic contraction, as Danny Alexander acknowledged in that now infamous Newsnight interview he gave on Tuesday. Several Lib Dems have turned on Alexander for saying that the era of constraint will last until at least 2017, fearing that the party would be punished at the polls. Farron does not explicitly criticise Alexander, but his jest about needing ‘counselling’ to cope with being in coalition leaves no doubt of his convictions.
The ideological tension between the Lib Dems is as old as the party itself, but there are benefits in Alexander’s candour. An ICM poll in today’s Sunday Telegraph shows the Tories ahead of Labour for the first time since the riots (the Lib Dems have held fast at 14 per cent). Matthew d’Ancona, reprising the logic of his peerless Evening Standard column on Wednesday, describes this as the fruit of ‘the audacity of truth’ – the two Eds are being penalised for their transparent fantasy that the answer to too much debt is even more debt.
Labour went to Liverpool this year in search of economic credibility and is still searching for it. The pugilistic shadow chancellor looks a punch-drunk; and a recent pamphlet, In the Black, written by Labour stalwarts Hopi Sen and Anthony Painter lambasted his analysis. David Miliband has also joined the dissenters. In a subtle critique of his brother’s policy, he writes in the Observer: ‘without a serious answer on investment, we will not be able to take on the right – whether their recipe succeeds or fails.’ He then goes on to reimagine the state by promoting many of David Lammy’s policy objectives on contributory welfare, housing, immigration and crime.
Miliband used to express himself with a garbled of spiel of abstract nouns and diffidence, but this article speaks a common dialect. It may yet prove significant; certainly, it makes one consider the counterfactual of a Labour party led by the elder Miliband. However, all of this is just background noise to the events unfolding on the continent, on which everything hangs.
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