Toby on Tuesday

'No laughing matter...'

Anyone witnessing the surreal shambles which those who govern us have created can only be reminded of the classic 1930’s comedy “Another Fine Mess”, with George Osborne playing the role of Stan Laurel and David Cameron that of Olly Hardy.   You can almost hear our Dave yelling at little George those memorable words, “Well, here’s another fine mess you’ve gotten us into!”   With last year’s overall majority behind them, it takes carelessness of a high order to land any Government in this state.   As Work and Pensions Secretary, Iain Duncan Smith was that rare beast, a politician with a strong moral compass and a clear sense of what he hoped to achieve.   In a cabinet dominated by flaky PR men and fixers, his authenticity stood out like a beacon, so to have forced his resignation over last month’s Budget was a serious blunder to put it mildly.   And although that resignation was triggered by a cut of some £4 billion over three years to disability benefits rather than over the EU, it is worth looking at the EU dimension to this debacle.

 

What we do know is that in 2004 Iain Duncan Smith, moved by his time spent in Glasgow’s Easterhouse estate, notorious for its levels of child poverty, chose to devote his political life to tackling the underlying causes of poverty.   He therefore created the Centre for Social Justice in a search for innovative solutions.   In time its policy group released two major reports, “Breakdown Britain” and “Breakthrough Britain”, on the themes of ending economic dependence, unemployment, family breakdown, addiction, educational failure and indebtedness.   Unsurprisingly perhaps, the European Court of Justice deemed a good many of the proposals to be “unfit for a modern democracy” and “frighteningly authoritarian”, although what standing the ECJ had to pass judgment on serious proposals for ending poverty in Britain through encouragement of productive work was unclear, to say the least.   Despite this, Iain Duncan Smith’s radical ideas became mainstream and much of the credit for the high level of employment now being enjoyed in Britain must go to the Centre for Social Justice’s pioneering work.   But what caused him finally to snap last month was the way in which the Treasury continued to chip away at his department’s budget, while ring-fencing favoured expenditure, not least on Overseas Aid and the EU.   

 

This year, the Overseas Aid budget will run to some £12 billion and this is due to rise to around £16 billion in 2020.   And our net contributions to the EU (including welfare payments sent abroad to dependents of EU migrants) after our rebate and transfers to the UK from the EU is running at a similar level.   Economists speak of the “multiplier effect” of public spending which can boost the UK economy, but all of this spending is precisely the opposite as it is money that leaves the UK for good.   Although we are, after Germany, the second largest contributor to the EU budget, our influence in Berlin and Brussels is precisely zero, as is clear from this year’s “reform”, when our Dave let himself be completely stitched up by Frau Merkel.   Yet like Overseas Aid the cost of our EU membership can only grow relentlessly in the years ahead, not least when the looming accession costs of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Turkey are added.   And of course the net EU budget contribution is really just an additional form of Overseas Aid.

 

So it is hardly surprising that Iain Duncan Smith finally reached the end of his tether.   Now last week I wrote about the gifted Atkinson brothers, Rowan, as in television’s Maigret, the master detective of 1950’s Paris, and Rodney, the great sage of Europe.   And there is a curious link here to Stan Laurel (born Arthur Stanley Jefferson in Lancashire) and Olly Hardy.   For the Atkinsons’ entrepreneurial grandfather, who was at the cutting edge of new media in his own time, owned a cinema in North Shields which had been managed by a certain Arthur J. Jefferson.   Now Arthur J. Jefferson was none other than the Father of Stan Laurel and in 1908 he wrote a short play called “Home From the Honeymoon” on which “Another Fine Mess” was based.   All these connections give life its flavour and from the talented Atkinson brothers, through Arthur J. Jefferson’s “Home From the Honeymoon” and then Laurel and Hardy’s “Another Fine Mess”, we come to the graceless duo of Osborne and Cameron, with their botched Budget and their cack-handed efforts to give away our country to the failed construct of the EU – which is really no laughing matter at all!

 

Until next Tuesday!

 

Toby