Rolled up, set alight
THE ECONOMY, stupid — as an elec- tion-winning slogan, it is hard to beat. It did the trick for Bill Clinton, and no wonder Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have bor- rowed it. What is more, they have borrowed the spin that the Clinton campaign put on it. The economy may be stupid, they say, but we aren't. We've learned something. On every stump from Dixville Notch to Dixieland, Governor Clinton explained that he was a New Democrat. Goodbye, he said, to his party's tired old policies of tax and spend and elect. Goodbye to those burden- some'links to the big unions. His sort of Democrats could talk the language of the markets. (He went on to recruit from Gold- man Sachs.) Now here comes Mr Brown with the manifesto of the New Labour. We've learned something, he says: 'The old Labour language — tax, spend and borrow, national- isation, state-planning, full-time jobs for men while women stay at home — is inappropri- ate.' Fancy that. We don't stand for high taxes, Mr Blair tells us, just fair ones (ouch) but just look how the Tories are spending the taxpayers' money — on unemployment, wel- fare and social decay! They are, too. The bill has been roaring away for years and now accounts for £80 billion of the £246 billion the government raises in taxes or the £292 billion that it spends. That worries the pub- lic-choice economists at the Adam Smith Institute, but until now the bleeding-heart tendency has been all for it. New Labour, Mr Brown says, is against it. I begin to see the attraction of New Labour economics. Rolled up and set alight, they could give me a warm, happy feeling, and I might start seeing things. Mr Brown and Mr Blair should check this out with Mr Clinton. Being a New Democrat, he could tell them, is all right — so long as you do not inhale.
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