While I think of it, if any of you are in Britain and likely to be kicking your heels come eight o'clock on Tuesday evening, you could probably do a lot worse than turn the telly on and switch to Five, where Hannibal of the Alps should be playing.
I have no idea if the programme will be any good, but there'll probably be a couple of minutes of me as a talking head in it, and if the clips from its sister production - National Geographic's Hannibal v Rome are anything to go by, it'll at least look impressive. Give it a shot.
Daviddum and Daviddee
Um, speaking of telly, did any of you see Question Time last night? I was rather startled to see that the programme had abandoned its normal format to instead take the form of a head-to-head debate between the two contenders for the Conservative Party leadership. In effect, the Conservatives were given a chance - at the expense of the licence payers -- to subject the voters an hour-long party political broadcast, with Cameron and Davies wittering away and promoting their barely distinguishable political visions.
It's worth watching, for all that. Cameron came across as charming, likeable, and ultimately rather insubstantial; I couldn't help but agree with the smarmy lad in the audience who remarked that once he was out of his well-managed comfort zone, he couldn't run a bath. It was an unfair and unnecessary contribution, but for all that it left Cameron visibly rattled and was probably accurate enough.
But what of Davis? Well, he certainly came across as a rather more serious and credible figure than Cameron, but I'm not sure what Cloud Cuckoo Land he dwells in, but it's clearly one where facts must be twisted to fit pet theories and square pegs must be forcibly rammed into round holes.
After all, following an anti-European rant, which disingenuously claimed that in the 1970s the British chose only to join a single market, rather than signing up to the Treaty of Rome which its aspirational opening sentence,
he sailed off into this paean to the magnificence of the Irish economy:
'Ireland, Australia, Canada... every other English speaking country in the world has a higher growth rate than us. Why? Look at Ireland. For twenty years, every year, they've reduced taxes on the economy. The outcome? They've a faster growth rate than we do, they've actually doubled the size of their national health service, and they now spend more per head on the national health service than we do. And how do they do that? By a determined, long-run - not four years, twenty years! - strategy which led to a high growth outcome and led to a much more prosperous Ireland. And that's the way you get public services and tax cuts together.'
Um, what? I mean, where do you start with this?
How about leaving aside the question of whether a large post-industrial economy should be modelling itself on a tiny country that never had an industrial revolution to speak of but has done very well with a late Twentieth Century services revolution, and, assuming that's a valid thing to do, exploring this claim.
And let's also leave aside the fact that the economy only started to turn around from about 1994 onwards, and that the period from 1987 onwards saw all manner of government services slashed to bits in order to force the economy to turn around...
Can Bulldogs be Tigers? Even Low-Tax Ones?
Davis is basically claiming that Ireland's current run of success is due to having cut taxes for twenty years running. Every year, since 1985, the Irish government has cut taxes, and has had a long term plan to increase growth by doing so. Hmmm. As views go, that's not even monocular -- it's monocular, myopic, and quite probably in the dark.
Yes, taxes were a factor in the growth of the Celtic Tiger. There's no doubt about that. We have one of the lowest rates -- maybe the lowest - of corporate tax in Europe. But this can hardly be counted as having reduced taxes -- we had no foreign companies to give tax relief to in the 1980s, when the country was a basket case. This was a way of inviting companies in. We could only gain from this particular low tax measure -- I'm pretty sure it would hurt Britain at least as much as it would help her, as revenues would drop massively before new businesses arrived started to cause them to rise. Of course, that's assuming that they would arrive. After all, though they were crucial, low corporation tax rates weren't the only thing attracting overseas investment.
For starters, we were playing catch-up, and were the only English-speaking country in a position to do so, and catching up has had its own momentum. It's not just the convenience of a constant civil war in the north of the island having effectively stopped, though that did help hugely, especially in terms of selling the country.
There's also the fact that Ireland had a huge, young, relatively well-educated, English-speaking labour pool that was desperate for work and would do so for less than workers elsewhere...
And then there's Europe. Interesting that the anti-European Davis didn't mention the fact that the EU basically built our infrastructure in the 1980s and 1990s through our favourite charity, the European Social Fund, or as we like to think of it, the German taxpayer.
Or the fact that we're still subsidised to the tune of more than €300 a head by our European neighbours. Or that Ireland's membership of the EU and participation in the Union is a lot less ambiguous than Britain's, and by having decided to share a common currency with our European partners we've eased access to the common market, facilitating and increasing trade with our neighbours.
Oh, and on top of that, there's social partnership. You know, the whole framework in which everything else works? If there's one factor above all others that has led to Ireland's current success, it's surely this - a series of three-year deals done between government, unions, employers, and other interested parties. Can you see Davis sitting down to do business with the unions?
(And partnership itself was only adopted when, back in 1987, the main party of opposition -- Fine Gael, then under Alan Dukes -- decided that it would stop opposing the government for the sake of opposition. That it would back sensible and necessary policies, as long as they tallied with their own general ideas. There was none of that whinging about 'It was our idea first' -- instead it was recognised that the country's health was more important. Reckon either Davis or Cameron would have the balls to do that?)
Nah, Davis is talking nonsense when he views Ireland's success as solely due to a sustained twenty-year campaign to lower taxes. Even Tommy Friedman has a more nuanced view of the Irish economy than that, and his analysis was a joke.
Advocates of Neuro-Linguistic Programming are fond of the phrase 'the map is not the territory'. It's a good principle to bear in mind. Davis's map of the Irish economy is a flat earth map, and doesn't remotely match the Irish territory. And scarily, he seems to think he can use it to navigate that of Britain.
Frightening, eh?
And you know what's worse?
He seemed more clued in than the other fella.
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