If there is any truth in this rumour then it would be an enormous problem for May. One that would dwarf every crisis she has faced so far. Explaining his resignation to the British electorate and getting the talks back on track would be nigh on impossible.
It is of course more than likely that the article was false and a bit of mischief making by a national newspaper. A rock-solid Conservative supporting national newspaper. Which ought to have led to a lot of the other papers asking what on earth is going on in government when the Telegraph prints mischief making rumours like this. The faction fighting and back biting over Europe has reached a very extreme pitch when disloyalty of this nature sails by with scarcely a batting of an eyelid.
All of which led me to think of an interesting question. It is clearly in a mess over the EU but how would this government be doing if it weren’t for Brexit? Ignore for a moment the chaos, incompetence, uncertainty, lies and confusion it has indulged in over Europe and ask yourself whether this government would be doing alright if it weren’t for all that. How are they managing the UK economy and the UK society and how well are they preparing us for the rapid changes that are taking place globally just at the moment?
The good news is that the UK government has an industrial strategy and that Hammond is highly likely to use his budget to claim that this is going well and the economy is in fine shape. The bad news is that it isn’t a strategy just a collection of sound bites, the few useful measures are being implemented slowly and badly, and the economy is in an extraordinarily fragile, imbalanced and unsustainable condition.
In order to prepare the UK for the future Hammond has decided to invest in roads, oil and gas, and a clumsy overblown nuclear facility that produces ludicrously over expensive electricity. That is a seriously outdated approach. All the signs are that the prime sources of reliable and sustainable economic growth are: knowledge industries, software engineering, medical technology, creativity and sustainable environmental methods of production, consumption and trade.
To take advantage of the UK’s key strengths in the knowledge economy you might therefore reasonably think that any sensible Chancellor would be investing in attracting foreign students to spend a great deal of foreign currency studying in UK universities. This is almost the ideal way to strengthen a knowledge economy and to help to fund the research and ideas that will be critical in driving the UK forward. Instead the government is driving away overseas students because it is worried that a few far-right fanatics think bringing in foreign students for 3 years is dangerous immigration.
To take advantage of the UK’s leadership in many areas of medical technology and in pharmaceuticals you might reasonably think that the UK would be thinking hard and long about how to use the NHS to best effect. It ought to be relatively easy to use a strong national health service to put the UK at the forefront of the next phases of medical technology and to help the country prosper as well as keeping us healthy. Instead of focusing on simple practical ways of doing this the government is obsessed with an ideological problem over public ownership which results in it constantly re-organising the NHS. They are also busily weakening our healthcare system by contracting out the easy to run profitable services, leaving the NHS desperately short of money to do the difficult and expensive things. The UK government ought to be empowering our publicly owned service to use its economies of scale and its ability to direct enormous resources to investigate new challenges. That way it could be generating powerful medical technology innovations that could out compete anything coming from inefficient private health care models like those in the US. What we are getting instead is a drip feed of demoralisation of the NHS and an utter failure to see the opportunities to both help people better and to generate high quality jobs and strong medical technology spin off companies in the UK.
To take advantage of the UK’s strong cultural economy the Chancellor is ……………. well not much. He’s simply ignoring the opportunity. Actually that is not entirely accurate or fair. He is actively damaging the opportunity. Austerity cuts are closing down museums, weakening theatres and making it expensive to study creative skills. Where is the wall of money and the publicity campaign to help students with artistic and creative talents to become modern engineers? Where is the massive programme designed to ensure that our school students understand the connection between their creative talents and the software industries? All we seem to have is a deeply reactionary assumption coming from the government that all this creativity stuff is a bit of a luxury that we can’t afford. At exactly the moment in history when the most in demand skill out there in the real economy is creative talent connected to an understanding of the world of business and technology.
And then there is the small issue of taking advantage of the major technological shift which is taking place away from fossil fuels and their associated technologies, and away from unsustainable production and consumption of products such as plastic. No one country can possibly hope to be the leading force in every aspect of that change. But the UK seems determined to keep squandering early leadership in important new scientific advances. It risks becoming a country that is left behind by opportunities and then forced to buy technology from abroad which started out in the UK. This is largely down to lack of investment in the right things. Whilst China is investing in the transition to a low energy consumption economy with real determination and putting trillions behind the necessary technological change the UK is treating the major economic and social challenge of the next 30 years as a minor side issue. Hammond will put a bit of money into electric charging points and milk a few empty sound bites about driverless cars. He is also expected to take the helpful but feeble step of undertaking into the possibility of taxing a few plastic products at some time in the distant future. Small token gestures. But completely inadequate. He demonstrates a seriously short-sighted failure to recognise the speed and the scale of what needs to happen.
It is worth mentioning in passing that on these issues things are little better in the Labour ranks. The Shadow Chancellor got a two page write up in the Observer on Sunday. There was not one mention of the environment or the least sign that he understood the scale of change that is coming. He sounded like a man who was putting forward a fair and reasonable solution to the economic problems. Provided they were the economic problems of the early 1970s and they could be solved by nationalisation. He did not sound like a man who was well placed to challenge Hammond about the paucity of his vision for change. Or someone who had a clear vision for where Britain needed to be 20 years from now.
So I was left with the conclusion that even if it weren’t for Brexit that the Conservatives would be doing very badly indeed. And the worry that the opposition don’t look to be doing massively better.
And, of course, we do have Brexit.
Something which is supported and justified by both major parties.
What could possibly go wrong?