Labour, Brexit and an Alt-Econocrat

There is no more pressing issue in British politics than that of the future relationship of the UK to the European Union, and therefore no apology is required on returning to the subject.

The Labour Party has taken a huge step towards rationality on that matter over this Bank Holiday weekend by making a new and very different statement on its policy. Under the new Shadow Secretary of State for exit, Sir Keir Starmer, they now accept that it would be essential for there to be significant transition period during which the UK would continue to enjoy the comfort of being within the European Economic Area [though out of the political Union, in deference to the referendum resut]. This would be at the  expense of keeping the country under the jurisdiction of the European Court, and obliged to accept the free movement of people with the EU. Starmer can claim to be far more traditionally Labour than the public schoolboy Jeremy Corbyn, because his working parents named him in honour of Keir Hardie: an early Labour leader. If discussions during the transition can include the resolution of the two difficult issues of free movement and the extent of the powers of the European Court, Labour holds out the prospect that the 'transitional' could become the permanent basis for the relationship of Britain to the EU: while the country would be able to make additional pacts on trade with other countries provided the conditions for retaining membership of the European Economic Area are maintained.

This presents a package on which Labour can make a strong bid for the 'middle ground' of politics, and knocks any idea of the LibDems forming the core of a strong new 'Centre Party' right out of the picture. Corbyn's caricature student-leftery can virtually be ignored if the party continues to promote rational 'moderates' [with good political credentials] to shadow posts. Pro-EU Tory MPs - who formed the vast majority at the time of the referendum, and who have been largely ignored since Mrs May's 'conversion' to hard Brexitry - should be really scared, to the extent that they should now make clear their reservations about the tone of Cabinet policy, in view of the fact that Labor has displayed a capacity for rationality.

Also in recent days, Professor Patrick Minford has obtained publicity for his view that a 'hard Brexit' would be beneficial for the United Kingdom. According to his ultra-Econocratic model of the economy, Britain would gain massively by being completely outside the European Union [including all aspects of the European Economic Area], with a GDP at least 6.5% higher than is being achieved within the union. This rests on the assumption that the country could trade on a completely level playing field with all economic entities in the world; according to his model of a market economy whose participants operate on the basis of 'rational expectations' of each others' actions conforming to the psychological assumptions that are implicit in the model. Professor Minford achieved prominence when he supported extreme Thatcherism against the majority of the then-still-NeoKeynesian 'economics profession' in 1981. For a while he had the Prime Minster's favour, though he was eventually palmed-off with a CBE.

The fruits of Thatcherism are here for him to see, and to input into his model [which is now even more comprehensively Econocratic]: desperately low productivity, nil productiveness, a massive deficit on public spending, a constant deficit on the balance of payments, over-dependence of the economy on the service sector and on consumers spending borrowed money. To that catalogue of the achievements that are ascribable to the policies that he recommended to the Thatcher government, we can be sure that after a hard Brexit the UK would find that there was no permanently level patch on the playing field of global trade. Point protectionism [as mentioned several times in this blog], combined with long-term protectionism of favoured sectors in virtually every economy on the planet will ensure that a naked Britain, alone in the wicked world - which still remembers the slights from the British Empire of the past - would be nothing like the heroic entity in the professor's model, and the irrational prejudice which is more common in global statecraft than anything like Minford's 'rationality' would ensure that the model could not work. The limit to the Econocrats' world view is seen in the fact that real people have not vanished from the villages that surrounded the closed coal mines: they stay as second and third generation malcontents whose habits undermine their health, while they survive on a combination of low wages from non-productive jobs, state benefits and borrowing.

Keit Starmer is well on the way to producing a rational and humane model of Brexit for the Labour Party. Patrick Minford is trying to power the nutty Tory Brexiteers along a path that would enable
them massively to intensify the range and extent of the problems that already confront the real-world population of this benighted country.