breakfast surprise

I nearly choked on my cornflakes this morning when I read this (try and guess the author):

"There is nothing progressive about a government who (sic) consistently spend more than they can raise in taxation, and certainly nothing progressive that endows generations to come with the liabilities incurred by the current generation. There will need to be significant cuts in public expenditure, but there is considerable waste in public expenditure."

Any ideas? Some Tory hawk? Lord Tebbit? Roger Scruton?

Er, no. It's Lord Myners, former Labour minister. The quote concludes - " I have seen that (waste) in my own experience as a minister".

Remember him saying anything like that when he was in office?

No, I don't either.

myth-busting # 1

Credit crunch myths - a guide for the Left.

1. "It was all the bankers' fault".

Because after all, no-one could have possibly predicted that when left to their own devices bankers would go for short-term gain and self-enrichment ahead of economic stability, could they? What next? Bears defecating in the woods? And the Government had no idea whatsoever that the City was parcelling up mortgage obligations and selling them on the open market; it had no idea that high-street lenders were offering 125% loan-to-value on houses, or that with so-called Lie To Buy (oh OK, Self-Certification) mortgages you could write any income you liked on the application form and no one would ever check whether it was true or not.

I'm wearied by my own irony - of course HMG knew about all these things; and did nothing about them. Why? Because the going was good, that's why. The City was booming, the High Street was thronged with shoppers, unemployment was low, house prices were buoyant (removed by one G Brown from the measure used by the Bank of England to target inflation), tax revenues were flooding into the Treasury coffers and then out again into the public sector. What was not to like? After all, the Chancellor told us he had put an end to Tory boom and bust. Where could bust possibly come from?

The Government rode the wave of debt like a surfer who can't believe there are rocks ahead. But rocks there were, and when the economy hit them Brown discovered a new variant on Keynes - borrow when the good times are rolling, and when the bad times come, borrow even more. And so the debt piles up, or at least it does as long as the gilt markets will carry on lending to us.

All the bankers fault. Yeah right.

nostalgia not what it used to be shock

I should have known when, a couple of years ago, there was a minor kerfuffle in the media about the thirtieth anniversary of punk - the features, the documentaries, the grizzled veterans, the ubiquity of Billy Bragg - that following hard on its heels would come the New Romantics. And here they are: a dramatisation of Boy George - the early years - on TV; the reformation (no, not that one) of Duran Duran (or is it Spandau Ballet? Or both?) - anyway, the reunion tours, the features, the documentaries, the ubiquity of some style guru or other. And so wearyingly on.

I have an interest to declare here, because I was a punk before you were a punk (perhaps: at least I was a punk after seeing the Stranglers play at the Doncaster Gaumont on June 16th 1977, a date that must have changed my life because I've remembered it for all this time). And after the stripped-down truth-seeking rawness of the best that punk had to offer, the mincing synthesisers (Ooh Vienna!), awful clothing, awful haircuts and vacuous partying of the New Romantics signalled less of a new dawn than a return to the proggish self-indulgence of the 70s. Plus ca change.

Other people's nostalgia is usually less attractive than your own, but my dislike of this latest outbreak is tempered by a chastening recollection. My generation, in its forties and fifties, in power in TV, in the newspapers and in politics, looks back fondly on its funny clothes, its hairstyles, the drugs it took and the music it listened to. What did my parents look back on in their flabby nostalgia for their own glory years? The austerity of the war and the struggle against Hitler.