Actually I have some sympathy with Clarkson. He was clearly trying, not very successfully, to be funny; in fact, as I've written here before, that is Clarkson's biggest problem. As his defenders have pointed out, there has been over the years a good deal more left-wing near-the-knuckle humour on TV than the reverse. It's actually quite hard to think of a right-wing comic who has got anywhere near TV recently. Bernard Manning? Jim Davidson? But just because the likes of Ben Elton were funnier (oh go on, a bit funnier) doesn't mean that Clarkson was wrong to make his attempted joke. As I weary of saying, it's much better that people are able to say appalling things than not. If you doubt this, just Google the responses of the po-faced anti-free speech Trades Unionists condemning him. Watch them and ask, who do you prefer, the rumbustious scatter-gun Poujadism of the former motoring correspondent enfant-terrible or the tight-arsed dreariness of the union apparatchiks? If the latter, I fear for you.
Anyway, about the strikes. Good or bad? As someone who quite likes the markets (with some reservations) I applaud - as surely Clarkson would - that people have the right to withdraw their labour if they like. I do slightly wonder though whether they are wise. How many people in the private sector have lost their jobs in the last five years? How many people in the public sector have lost theirs? I'd be willing to bet that private sector casualties outnumber public by ten to one, minimum. Free movement of labour means that public sector workers are free to try and get a private sector job if they like. I don't think many of them are risking it. If I was a public sector worker I'd be hunkering down and watching the cold winds blowing outside my windows with a certain amount of relief.
This sense of the wider economic context isn't one I saw widely replicated amongst the strikers. A wonder if any of them will have changed their minds after watching Robert Peston's How the West was Broke last night. My wife, for whom matters economical matter rather less than they do for me, asked afterwards, "How did this happen without anyone noticing it?" Modesty prevented me from drawing her attention to the following, written in February 2007, eighteen months before the Credit Crunch struck: "We have enjoyed a decade of economic good times built on both government and citizens spending money they did not have. . . We may well find that the trad Keynesian way out of recession is unavailable because the Government borrowed too much during the good times." Or this, from April 2006: ". . .the spending there's been in the last decade has partly been of borrowed money, by consumer and government alike. So for things to carry on it looks as if we'll have to keep on borrowing. How long can that carry on? IMO not much longer. . . it looks as if further spending growth might be difficult. That's why the end of the decade looks dodgy to me. . . Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the Keynesian idea was that you borrowed during the downswing of the business cycle and paid it back during the upswing. Seems to me that we (meaning HMG and consumers) have borrowed during the upswing (HMG to put money into public services, consumers to buy Chinese imports), and I wonder where growth will come from now it looks as if the pendulum might be going back the other way."
Some of the most telling footage in Peston's programme was the grainy newsreel stuff of Mrs Thatcher, and the mass walkouts at UK car plants like Longbridge. I remember my Dad saying at the time, "They're pricing themselves out of jobs". How right he was. But it seems to me futile to blame either management or unions. Both sides were swimming against a tide which would have washed British manufacturing industry away in the end no matter what we did.
Peston did a pretty good job of explaining how the East lent money to the West to enable it to carry on buying its products. I thought a couple of things were missing. The first was that if Gordon Brown hadn't run a deficit from 2001 onwards (when Britain was 8 years into the longest period of economic growth in its history), we would have been at least a couple of hundred billion better off when recession came, and better able to fight off the downturn without recourse to the markets. But maybe that was too party political. The truth sometimes is. The second was that all the bankers catastrophic risk-taking did was to postpone the point at which the party came to an end. It would have finished anyway at some point, with the consequences for our living standards which we're all going to have to deal with for the forseeable future.
I have strayed some distance from Jeremy Clarkson. Perhaps that's the best place to be.
