Open Road

Sunday Sep 28th 2008

Party like it’s 1979

If a Labour revival is on the way no-one seems to have realised it in Birmingham.  A tour of the bars in the Hyatt Regency - the main conference hotel - revealed a collection of very happy delegates busy ignoring the leadership’s suggestions that they should look serious in the face of looming economic disaster.  Typical quote:  ‘Whatever he [Brown] does he’s finished.  Everyone’s fed up with him’.  Perhaps they have all read George Osborne’s economic reconstruction plan as leaked to the BBC.  Or perhaps they’ve all had too much to drink.  Either way the atmosphere is a lot more upbeat than Manchester.

Battling the bounce - the Tory conference

Although Salieri would never admit it, the possibility that the Tory conference would be - well, a bit dull ,was beginning to hang in the air like a nasty smell.  Adversity is interesting, dominance isn’t.  The polls were fantastic but the leadership would spend all its time looking as uncomplacent and downbeat as possible.  And as for the idea that the fringe would be a bubbling fervent of new ideas, backers of that one had obviously forgotten that Tories only have one real idea:  getting and staying in power.  Ideas are for socialists (and look where they have got us):  the Tories are rightly proud of being the stupid party.
But now as Salieri speeds toward Brum (£15 on Virgin for a first-class upgrade - very reasonable) things are livening up.  It might be a paradox for Brown to pose as the voice of experience when he landed us in this mess but it seems to have given him a lift.  And frankly economics would never be DC’s Mastermind specialist subject.  So a lot hangs on whether Gorgeous George can repeat his triumph of last year.  It could be very interesting…

Friday Sep 26th 2008

On borrowed time

I was not alone in hoping for a good performance from Gordon Brown over the last week. Many of those sounded out within the Manchester secure zone, whether grassroots, PPCs or assorted agency and in-house professionals, admired Brown greatly, were willing him to see off the challenge to his leadership, but were also seeking some reassurance that he is the man to provide the energy and drive to extricate his party and the country from the delicate situations in which they find themselves.

What a disappointment.

The media and many delegates welcomed the speech as a triumph. Absolutely. But only because Brown and his record had led them not to expect much. The speech, whilst better packaged and with a surprise introduction, was predictable and flat. A broken record. “Did I tell you about the time that the NHS saved my eyesight?” Here we go again. At least he didn’t talk about his parents. 

Some would say that this is what you get with our Prime Minister – monochrome and low key. The trouble is that Brown – a man that has spent the last twelve months fighting for his political life and taking the party to new depths of unpopularity – needed to do so much more than that to even begin restoring some confidence among party members and the wider electorate. Instead, his body language on platforms was atrocious – he looked knackered, terrible.

The consensus from the conference fringe events is that the party is in a serious bind. The grassroots are desperate for the leadership to provide the inspiration and empathy that will put the party back on the front foot and in a position to take its principles and solutions forward. The main thing that Gordon Brown will have achieved this week – other than what promises to be a short-lived bounce in the polls – is to emphatically prove that, over the long-term, he is not the man to deliver that.

Here endeth the lesson

There is enough stuff to worry about in the financial markets right now without Archbishops wading in with their opinions.

News that short selling has been described as wrong and immoral by the religious authorities has been rather undermined by the fact that the Church has approved of the practice in its own investments and has been busy lending their stock to hedge funds who have been using it to – you guessed it – short sell.

Religious leaders absolutely should have views on all sorts of things in life.  But it would help if they were based on some actual knowledge of what they are talking about and didn’t someone in the mists of time say something like ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone’?

The financial crisis

This is very very serious stuff.  Financial meltdown in the US is possible unless the bail out deal is approved.

The ructions in the financial markets have had all sorts of extraordinary consequences.  Here are just a few.

Some estimate that George Bush, one of the most right wing Republican Presidents in many years, will have nationalized more assets (in dollar terms) than Lenin ever achieved.

The fall from grace of capitalism’s finest – Lehman, AIG, Bear Stearns, HBOS, Morgan Stanley, Northern Rock etc – and the crisis in the financial markets have rejuvenated the Left in the UK and also in Europe.  The unions are back on form railing against the perils of untrammeled markets and capitalism and the French and German governments are – with some justification – saying ‘we told you so’ to the UK and US authorities about the dangers of capital markets without transparency, toxic debts, excessive lending and off balance sheet vehicles.

The US and UK Anglo Saxon model – as the Europeans see it – is now a pariah in Continental Europe.  Some shifts in the regulatory landscape for banking and financial services are now surely inevitable.  Some major changes would be a good thing.  Who the hell thought it would be a good idea for banks to create off balance sheet vehicles with billions of pounds of liabilities selling dodgy sub-prime loans?  Where on earth were the authorities when all of this was happening?  Is it really sensible for an investment bank to be able to expose itself to 20 times the amount of risk as it has in available capital?