There’s only one person who is genuinely funnier than David Mitchell. I think that person is Robert Jay QC, lead Counsel for the Leveson Inquiry. Jay can deliver gags with more precision than an exocet missile, for example referring to the bias of Jeremy Hunt as ‘equal and opposite’ to that of Vince Cable.
Jay has been clearly worrying about the issue of the difference between apparent and actual bias in his line of questioning. The jurisprudence of this will indeed be very well known to all law students, including Porter v Magill and Pinochet [No 2]. On the whole, apparent bias, so believes (or so knows) Jay, is harder to prove than actual bias.
So by what standard should we judge George Osborne? Should Osborne be judged by the standards of a reasonable Minister, or one who has a specialist expertise in economics and finance? Arguably he should not be judged against the latter as he has a II.1 in the Final Honour School of Modern History from University of Oxford.
Victoria Coren, who is better known as Victoria Coren than Mrs David Mitchell, was forced to respond to a question last night on BBC Question Time (available here) as to whether Osborne was incompetent. Coren conceded that this was a difficult question, but explained that – if it came to looking after her pets or pot-plant when she went on holiday – the answer was no.
Labour has a massive problem in the perception of its economic competence. That is despite the overriding consensus of available data proving that Osborne’s economic experiment has wholeheartedly failed. Osborne managed to reverse a growing economy into a failing economy, way before any Eurozone crisis, with falling tax receipts, an overall decrease in full-time employment, greater spend on welfare benefit, and of course negative growth. That is actual incompetence.
It is going to be easier to prove the apparent incompetence of George Osborne. Members of Labour will remember clearly how he used to treat Alistair Darling with contempt, but there is now a never-ending stream of debacles for Osborne to admit. You can choose between the caravan tax, the pasty tax, or the charity tax, in addition to an imploding economy – it doesn’t matter. Whether you throw into the mixer his collusion with Jeremy Hunt in dealing with the BSkyB, as evidenced in Leveson yesterday, quite frankly neither here or there.
I have never bought into the agenda of Osborne as a great strategist. In fact, I think he is also abysmal at economics. He epitomises for me what the wonderful John Maynard Keynes, from King’ s College Cambridge, described as the type of person who does not wish to invest in the future, for various reasons:
(vii) To bequeath a fortune.
(viii) To satisfy pure miserliness, i.e. unreasonable but insistent inhibitions against acts or expenditure as such
“The general theory of employment, interest and money” John Maynard Keynes
It’s no accident that the UK tax system treats capital and income separately. In an ideologically-driven austerity driven agenda ‘to pay off the credit card debt’, the deficit doubled in February 2012, as the nation’s income fell, as a result of its disgraceful treatment of human capital, in what promises to be one of the most spectacular failings of the UK government. The return on such high risk strategy means that Osborne will not be able to pay any electoral dividends in 2015 as he will have no distributable profits by then; in fact, the Coalition deserves to go into receivership.
[This post does not represent the views of BPP, or of the BPP Legal Awareness Society, a society to promote law in the business strategy.]
