One Year On
A year has passed since this book was first published in hardback. How much has changed? How do the judgements stand up? The big theme of the story that follows is the defeat of politics by shopping. The surging consumer economy has been by turns exhilarating, wasteful, liberating and narrowing. Nobody who escaped the grey years of rationing, queues and shortages should snootily dismiss the triumph of shopping; yet nobody who looks at our dead-eyed obsession with buy-and-throw newness can be comfortable either. Britain’s shopping economy, shorn of most of its industry, has produced a country which is more crowded, cleaner and richer (far richer) than it used to be, but which is also more vulnerable to shocks from outside. Consumerism has shouldered aside other ways of understanding the world – real political visions, organized religion, a pulsing sense of national identity.
Yet during 2007, the biggest change was a darkening of the national mood. It is not just global warming, but a sense that the good times are not, after all, forever. The decade-long Blair-Brown boom has been based on cheap imports from China, on very high levels of borrowing secured by upward-spiralling house prices, and on cheap, skilled migrant labour from Eastern Europe. None of these things are indefinitely sustainable. As this book shows, our recent prosperity is partly the achievement of politicians who are now almost forgotten. But after ten years in which New Labour had enjoyed the political fruits of strong, low-inflationary growth, many of us think we can see the buffers looming out of the mist.
This is recent. Early in 2007 house prices were still strongly rising. The stock market was at a six year high. Economists and opposition parties were warning about the government being overborrowed, and about private debt. But nobody paid much attention. In the City the big banks still reported huge profits. There were mysterious characters called private equity investors and hedge fund managers. Few people really understood what they were up to, except that it was all very clever and complicated. The banks were paying astronomical bonuses to their managers. And for the majority, in the shops, clothes and gizmos were ludicrously cheap. A Western economy based on high debt, both private and public, ensured cash was there to keep the spree going. But the intricate and always-shifting tangle of loans, bets, guesses and 80-proof, chill-filtered optimism that is modern global finance, was about to suffer a reality check. And if ‘reality check’ is an ugly American phrase, then it is perhaps not as ugly as another which entered the Queen’s English in 2007. ‘Sub prime’ is jargon for bad loans – the mortgages and other pricey money offers to ordinary Americans who had no proper security and in many cases no way of paying it back. This overborrowing, mere greed by the banks, had been causing worries on Wall Street as early as February 2007. We have known since the Great Crash of 1929 that a global economy transmits problems from one country to another through the banking system very fast. We are supposed to have a stabler world trading system these days. But what has also changed is that bad debts have been bundled up and sold around like sacks of plastic casino counters between banks so many times that nobody knows just who is in trouble, and for how many billion dollars. In great US institutions like Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and Citigroup, the one-time wizards started to lose their jobs.
Meanwhile back in Britain, its prime minister lost his. Tony Blair carried on working at strategic plans almost until the day he finally left Downing Street. It was as if he was still waiting for a final vindicating victory in Iraq or believed that if he could only nail down one last element of his programme to the cabinet table, his domestic legacy would be secured. But at last he went, in June 2007, telling the Commons: ‘I wish everyone, friend and foe, well. And that is that. The End.’ Gordon Brown took over without the bloodbath or recriminations that had been so widely predicted. He promised to govern differently, to take the cabinet more seriously, and to be more inclusive, bringing in outsiders with police, military and business careers to advise him – and Liberal Democrats too. To start with, all this was popular. Under Brown, Labour rose sharply in the polls and many Conservatives were dejected. Perhaps he would not turn out to be the disaster they had predicted. Their new leader David Cameron was attacked for being lightweight, ‘the heir to Blair’ just when the country had had enough of Blair. There was muttering about replacing him. So there was too about Sir Menzies Campbell, who was attacked not for being in his sixties, but for looking as if he was. A sequence of crises, including terrorist attacks in Glasgow and London, widespread summer flooding and an outbreak of foot and mouth disease, seemed to show Brown as a decisive, rather traditional leader; and his position strengthened further.
Then, in the autumn of 2007, it all started to go wrong for him. By far the most ominous event was the revelation than an adventurous building society, based in the north-east of England, had been forced to go to the Bank of England for emergency support. What had happened to Northern Rock, Britain’s fifth-largest provider of mortgages, was the direct consequence of those ‘sub-prime’ problems in America earlier in the year. Mud and ice were spreading through the Western banking system as banks, wondering how much bad debt others were exposed to, stopped lending readily to one another. The lubrication began to fail, and because Northern Rock had lent so much money so aggressively, it was first in trouble. Its bosses resigned, but not before the world had watched huge queues of people across Britain waiting to get their money out.
It was the first run on a bank in this country for 140 years. The new chancellor, Alastair Darling, promised to guarantee all savers’ funds in Northern Rock – though not elsewhere – in order to shore up the stability of the banking system. The Bank of England injected money into the system to provide some more lubrication. A search began to find a private buyer who would take over Northern Rock without being completely underwritten by the taxpayer. And another search began to find who was to blame. The management of Northern Rock? American banks? The Bank of England, which had reacted slowly to the early signs of trouble? Most attention focussed on the prime minister, who had created the new system of banking regulation early in his time as chancellor. In the end, the building society had to be nationalised – a whiff of the Seventies.
The Northern Rock crisis began just when pressure was mounting on Brown to call an early general election. Things came to a head at the Labour party conference at Bournemouth. Some of the cabinet ministers closest to him were convinced that by going to the country in October 2007, capitalizing on his summer successes, he could win a clear and substantial majority over the Tories. But he hesitated. The following week, as the Tories gathered for their conference at Blackpool, their mood was grim and there was open talk in the bars about forcing out yet another leader. Then came a speech by the shadow chancellor, George Osborne, in which he promised to abolish inheritance tax on estates worth under £1 million and scrap the stamp duty for first time buyers on homes worth up to £250,000. This would be paid for by a new tax on foreigners living and earning in Britain but not paying tax here. It was a brilliantly targeted political counter-strike, which caused an abrupt shift in the polls, confirmed after an assured speech by Cameron. Assuming that Brown really was in a strong position in September 2007, as the polling suggested, and this author believes, then Osborne’s speech will go down as one of the most significant moments at a party conference in recent political history. It persuaded Brown not to call an election. Rarely do party conferences have any impact on the real world; this one did.
In a BBC interview calling off the election, Brown repeatedly denied that the opinion polls were the cause, but the impression was given of indecision, or lack of nerve. He was not helped by maladroit political counter-thrusts nor by a series of serious failures which followed. These were, in a weary way, familiar – another Labour party funding scandal, more embarrassing losses of data, above all the personal details of a mere 25 million people involved in applying for or getting child benefit, and 600,000 who had wanted to join the Navy or the marines. The initiative had, for the time being, gone to the Conservatives who were now sounding more traditional on tax and immigration and riding so high in the polls they could dream of a clear victory in a future election. The Liberal Democrat leader was more or less pushed into resigning once it was clear there would be no election for a while. His job was taken by another young and telegenic leader, Nick Clegg. The country prepared for an eighteen-month slog in parliament, over the new European treaty, civil liberties, the problem of violent youth crime and pay – politics as usual, or at least as it had often been during the seventies and eighties. People had grown fed up of Blair, regarding his television skills and vision as lightweight: remarkably quickly, they seem to have concluded that Brown, welcomed as dour and cautious, was worse. He put his head down and resolved to batter his way back to popularity with hard work and more initiatives.
Many British people would barely have noticed. The papers were obsessed by the disappearance of a young girl, Madeleine McCann, from her parents’ apartment during a holiday in Portugal, and an inquest into the death of Princess Diana. A hard-shopping, hard-drinking pleasure economy continued to thrust ahead, even as evidence of a looming recession piled up. House prices slowed, then stuttered, then fell. Rumours about other banking problems flickered and hissed. The stock market has some terrible lurches, including its biggest one-day fall since the attack on the Twin Towers. Only a hard effect on wallets, jobs and security will really make most people think about politics at all seriously. So an obvious question is whether the triumph of consumerism, that big story of British life from 1945 until today, is about to be halted. It seems most unlikely that the country is going to be transformed merely by the economic cycle. Britain and America may well be heading towards recession, perhaps some very hard years by modern standards. But these will feel at worst more like a return to some of the earlier tough times in the seventies, eighties or nineties, than a great change of direction as happened after the war or in the Thatcher revolution. It will teach another generation that nothing goes up forever, that there are no final answers in economics and that, perhaps, we have been a little too smug in dismissing earlier generations of politicians and economists as ignorant.
More important for our shopping economy will be the effects of carbon addiction. Distinguished scientists are beginning to confront the notion that to save the planet, an age of hair-shirted austerity is now necessary. Instead there is a renewed enthusiasm for technological fixes, from nuclear power and offshore windfarms, to electric cars and sun-deflecting mirrors in space. Such optimism is urgently needed because one of the most important effects of the global warming debate is that it has so disheartened people, they simply turn away. We are flinching. This is too big, too frightening to think about. Many people felt just the same way about the rise of Hitler, or the likelihood of nuclear holocaust in the sixties. ‘You can’t just turn your back,’ some say. Oh yes you can. Without hope, without a clear sense that, beyond the struggle, there are blue skies and a life worth living, then most of us will turn away and try not to look. So far, all the main parties are sending mixed messages (to put it politely) about global warming. One day it is wind turbines on the roof, or new taxes to force more recycling; the next it is a major expansion of airports so we can fly even more often, and promises that cheap holidaymaking overseas will remain a human right. In the end, it may be the scientists, the engineers and the investors who lead the politicians, not the other way about. As a political observer myself, I cannot pretend that the past year has seen politics at its best. But is the challenge ahead so big that it dwarfs the problems already confronted? Absolutely not. The history of modern Britain tells us we have had some narrow squeaks, but also that we have done some extraordinary things – even more extraordinary than going shopping and worrying about house prices. This gives no alibi for pessimism. At the risk of sinking to sales patter, I would say – don’t panic about the crystal ball when you can settle down and read the book.
Andrew Marr, 2008