Cameron’s ‘gamble’
Watching The Politics Show this morning I paid too little heed to Cameron’s language. I was disconcerted enough by his use of the word ‘judgement’ in the gestural ‘trust me’ sense and its recollection of Tony Blair’s performance on Friday before the Iraq Inquiry that I missed the slight retreat he signalled. Aided and abetted Keynesian which I am, before I rewatched the interview I thought with his recommitment to the deficit-cutting policy those infamous posters have made unretractable that he’d erred. The risk is too high that centre-left economics isn’t labourite PR and the sort of spending cuts having a crack at the deficit requires will spur another contraction. If Cameron is sane (I thought) how can he take such a risk on his marquee policy, one of few promises he cannot not honour? Either he is terminally addled by rightist ideology, stiff inside a dated, Chicago-school cocoon, or … or what? He isn’t lying! The pledge is too visible just to be an artefact of electioneering or image-management – and in violation of his campaign’s master-theme, irresponsible to put in such stark terms – its threat of backfiring with ruinous force, if possibly good for Labour (unless he were to succeed in blaming its effects on the last government), bad for Britain.
So it’s lucky the terms aren’t stark! Perhaps Cameron has received some independent fiscal advice, because he is planting his language with hedges of qualification: so he intends not bluntly to ‘cut the deficit’, but will ‘make a start’ on that. I’m not well enough informed about the history of his positioning to know if this is a break or merely represents the difference between phrases for speeches and phrases for feisty interviews. What I’m detecting though is animal-spirits jiggery-pokery with a fresher flavour of behavioural economics: Cameron seems to conceive of the cuts, now, as a ritual for markets, as (to quote indirectly) a proof of seriousness that will inspire enough ‘confidence’ to stave off (the need for?) a rise of interest rates. Knowing economics only from the lyceum of the blogosphere, I don’t understand the mechanics of this, or feel confident to say it is sensible policy. But as a citizen it consoles.
