France

One of the things I love about playwriting is the way it suddenly tips you into a completely unexpected areas of thinking and imagining and research. For the last thing I did, I read a huge book on the early Christian martyrs and found out more then I ever thought I'd need to know about ecclesiastical embroidery.

For the first episode of our Zola adaptation, I had to translate 'The Marseilleise'. The French national anthem, as I'm sure you know, was composed by a French army officer in 1792 under the name 'Battle Hymn of the Rhine Army' but it was seized upon with glee by army volunteers from Marseille who sung it as they marched towards Paris: hence 'Marseilleise'. France was under attack from Prussia and Austria and the song is a rallying cry that upholds the spirit of the revolution and swears death to its enemies.

This is why it is extremely bloodthirsty. In my translation, I made it slightly more bloodthirsty, because it is being sung by Antoine, a rather petulant Republican sympathiser, to wind up his conservative brother Pierre. So, in the first verse, the 'flag red as blood' in the original is actually that of the tyrants. But I've made him sing a version that is more of a threat.

Here's my version of the first two verses.*

Rise up you children of our country
The day of glory has arrived
We will fight and destroy all the tyrants
And we’ll raise up our flag, red as blood
Yes we’ll raise up our flag, red as blood

Do you hear in the lanes and the forests
The song of our soldiers so brave
They will come to save us all
And cut the throats of all their enemies

To arms, citizens!
Form battalions!
March on! March on!
Let traitors’ blood
Water all our fields!

We see the armies of our enemy
Holding out their iron chains
We will not let those shackles bind us
We will not submit to slavery
We will never submit to slavery
Do they think that France bows before them?
Do they hope we ever will be slaves?
Let fury fill your hearts
Let anger break their chains of iron

To arms, citizens!
Form battalions!
March on! March on!
Let traitors’ blood
Flow throughout the land!**

I thought of this on Friday night as the terrible news came from Paris of the series of coordinated terrorist attacks. I'm not of course suggesting that bloodthirsty reprisals should be the French response, but I love the song's spirit of unbending defiance, defiant in never bending to a would-be master, be it ISIS or fear itself.

England is playing France in a friendly match on Tuesday. I would love to hear the whole stadium singing the Marseilleise.

Notes

* Of course there is dispute about what order the verses go in. My version will not be agreed by everyone.

** Allons enfants de la patrie, / Le jour de gloire est arrivé! / Contre nous de la tyrannie / L'etendard sanglant est levé! / L'etendard sanglant est levé! // Entendez-vous dans les campagnes, / Mugir ces féroces soldats? / Ils viennent jusque dans nos bras / Égorger nos fils, nos compagnes! // Aux armes, citoyens! // Formez vos bataillons! / Marchons! Marchons! / Qu'un sang impur / Abreuve nos sillons! //Que veut cette horde d'esclaves, / De traîtres, de rois conjurés? / Pour qui ces ignobles entraves, / Ces fers dès longtemps préparés? / Ces fers dès longtemps préparés? // Français, pour nous, ah! quel outrage / Quels transports il doit exciter! /C'est nous qu'on ose méditer / De rendre à l'antique esclavage! // Aux armes, citoyens etc.

No Platform

A thing may or may not be happening. Speakers are allegedly being banned from universities because of views that they hold. There are certain 'extremist' groups whose representatives have been banned - fascist and racist groups like the BNP and the EDL or extreme Islamist groups associated with anti-semitism and homophobia like Al-Muhajiroun and Hizb ut-Tahrir, for instance. But there are also individual speakers, often holding controversial views on sexual matters, who have been targeted. 

• The clearest instance of this is that the National Union of Students in 2009 voted to ban the feminist activist Julie Bindel from its various student unions because of an article she wrote five years earlier which made a series of crass, flippant and insulting jokes about transsexuality.
• This is the most explicit instance of this type of no-platforming, but earlier this year comedian Kate Smurthwaite had her invitation to Goldsmith's College withdrawn because her views on prostitution (she's against it) contravened the university's 'safe space' policy. What this seems to have meant in this case was that several people apparently planned to picket the gig and the Union would find it hard to keep the event secure.
• In November 2014, a debate on abortion at Oxford University, which would have included someone offering a pro-life argument, was shut down to protect the 'students’ emotional wellbeing'. 
• This month Manchester's Student Union banned Julie Bindel and the horrible arsehole Milo Yiannopoulos, also for contravening its 'safe space' policy, because of the previous views expressed  by these speakers.
• And this week, Germaine Greer (pictured) faced a petition calling for her proposed talk at Cardiff University to be banned because of her views on trans people. A similar row broke out at Cambridge earlier this year over the same issue.

Let me say that I have always admired Germaine Greer very much but disagree strongly with her views on transwomen. I don't agree with what Julie Bindel said either (but to be fair, nor does she). I have no idea what Kate Smurthwaite's views on prostitution so I don;t know what I think about them but I do know that Milo Yiannopoulos is a horrible prick. And I'm very strongly pro-choice. For what that's worth, which isn't much.

But I also think that banning people from universities - universities, for Christ's sake - is counterproductive and the opposite of what universities should be. They should be safe spaces, yes, but safe spaces in which to hear and debate views we disagree with. It may be that some people would find the views expressed so upsetting that they would feel almost violated; then don't go. By banning these speakers, the views don't go away; it just makes them seem like martyrs.

Free speech isn't perfect. It's a horizon not a fixed position. No one believes that everyone should say whatever they are thinking at any moment. It's subtle; it's nuanced. Germaine Greer doesn't have a right to speak at Cardiff, but if she's legitimately and openly invited to speak, she should be heard by those who want to hear her. She's got decades more thinking, writing and campaigning than most of us and she's worth listening to, even if she's wrong. Because what's the worst that can happen?

Because let's say something about hate speech. Hate speech is not just mockery or disagreement. It must express and stir up hatred in the full meaning of the term. What Germaine Greer has said may offend you (it offends me a bit), but it's not hatred; it is not an act of violence; she is not whipping up people to hate or attack transwomen; she is not Hizb ut-Tahrir or the EDL; she is strongly expressing a view, however much you or I might agree. 

And now, of course I don't know what it's like to be a transwoman, but I'm trying to imagine what it must be like to grow up feeling that there is something profoundly dissonant about who you are and seem to be, to realise eventually that you feel you've been born into the wrong gendered body, fighting battles within yourself over what to do, having to find incredible resources of courage to fight incredible resources of fear, finding out, probably in secret, what medical options you have, steeling yourself to tell friends, family, colleagues that you are going to transition, putting yourself through a series of arduous and physically and emotionally traumatic procedures, coping with the terrifying midwayness of transition itself, learning to adjust to a changed body, making all growing up's mistakes again, coping with the multiply complicated responses of friends and strangers. Compared to that, coping with a few crass remarks by Germaine Greer has got to be a walk in the park.

Because the only way of making these views go away is engaging with them, debating with them, showing where they are wrong. Being able to defend your own views against people who disagree is a fundamental component of having serious opinions at all. If you have to shut  your eyes and cover your ears and lock your doors against your opponents, your opinions must be terribly fragile. And don't we honestly know, it's when our opinions are most fragile that we resort to closing down our opponents rather than engage with them?

And what's more, what if we're wrong? What I mean by this is: what if transwomen and women are different in some ethically/politically/cultural significant respect. Think of the politically transformative effect of 'queer' (gay people saying 'we are not just like heterosexuals') on the gay community. What if, after some time, as transexperiences become more common and everyone gets a chance to live with these new dynamics, some transpeople decide that they are not women, but something different - like, actually, the amazing Kate Bornstein has done. Are you going to tell them that they are guilty of hate speech and should not be allowed to speak in public? It is an act of monstrous historical arrogance to assume that we, in 2015, have simply got the right answers and therefore we should literally prevent anyone from challenging it. When has that ever been good? How different is that from the Inquisition showing Galileo the torture instruments to stop him arguing for a heliocentric universe?

And we shouldn't be afraid of debate. Remember when Nick Griffin went on Question Time. Lots of people were against it. I may have been nervous about it too; I honestly can't remember. But when he did go on, it put an end to the rise of the BNP. His bluster was apparent; the thinness of his ideas was obvious; he was a massively unpersuasive and unimpressive figure. Without that appearance, quite possibly, he would have continued to grow the BNP's support.

Yes, Germaine Greer and Julie Bindel and others offend you. I have probably offended someone writing this. But being offended is not a bad thing. If we try to ban being offended we are turning politics into a species of etiquette.

*****

As a postscript, let me say something else. This whole, 'no-platforming' debate has been an opportunity for the right to characterise the left as intolerant and authoritarian, wanting to restrict our freedoms from a position of holier-than-thou sanctimony. See here and here and here and here and here.

And what that does is draw attention away from the most powerful version of no-platforming in the last quarter-century. Margaret Thatcher and her followers tried to shut down a left analysis of the economy with their slogan 'There is No Alternative' (TINA). It's what Tory governments have done ever since, try to make it impossible for anyone to offer an opposing argument to their small-state, free-market, private-sector, competition-is-always-good ideology. Okay, no, it's not exactly the same thing but there are strong parallels. Note how rarely the Tories ever argue. Instead they just shut the left-wing speaker down. It's only a debate in the sense of the sixth-form common room debate, which is all bluster and ad hominem and smart-aleckisms. When have you ever heard George Osborne or David Cameron actually make a reasoned economically-literate case for austerity? Ever? They don't do it. They will not have the debate. They just smear and lie and shut down their opponents.

This most spectacularly happened in relation to the national debt; they have simply, unmistakably and wholly lied about it since 2010 and anyone who makes the - perfectly reasonable - case for public investment they smear as a 'deficit denier'. Anyone who tries to argue against welfare cuts, they ask 'where's the money going to come from' as if governments simply have no possible way to stimulate income. When Corbyn started riding high in the Labour leadership polls they said he'd 'drag us back to the eighties' (what? when the Tories were in power?); when he got elected, they insisted, without any explanation, that he would be 'a threat to our national security, our economic security and your family's security'. They pretended that he thought Osama bin Laden's death was a tragedy. They accused him of snubbing the Queen. They said he disrespected our armed forces for turning up to a Battle of Britain memorial and standing in dignified silence. There are no arguments here.

The economic arguments of the left have been 'no-platformed' since the early eighties. The reason why they are so aggressive towards Jeremy Corbyn is that here, for the first time in a generation, the debate is happening and they don't like it.

Eppur si muove.

The House of Lords

The House of Lords has voted to reject George Osborne's proposed ending of tax credits. Osborne has, in response, promised to look again at the policy but at the same time has fired a clear warning shot in insisting that the Lords have acted unconstitutionally. They will, he has just said, 'be dealt with'.

But who is behaving unconstitutionally in this situation? There have been conventional limits to the House of Lords' actions, but in this instance, I think, they have behaved quite properly. Because here's what the Government could have done:

1. Put the axing of Tax Credits in their election Manifesto

There is a constitutional principle called the Salisbury Convention which states that Bills voted through by the Commons which were mentioned in the governing party's manifesto cannot be struck down. But the Government did not do this. There is no hint that tax credits were to be abolished in the manifesto. Indeed there are two mentions of these tax credits ('the tax credits that top up low wages' it boasts, p. 30); both of these references in the context of denying them to migrants, which plainly implies that they are to be continued for everyone else.

2. Not actually promise to keep them during the election campaign

In fact, David Cameron went further. On the BBC Question Time leaders debate on 30 April 2015, David Cameron was asked by an audience member if he would cut child tax credits and he replied:

No, I don’t want to do that – this report that was out today is something I rejected at the time as prime minister and I reject it again today

David Dimbleby reiterates: 'clearly there are some people who are worried that you have a plan to cut child credit and tax credits. Are you saying absolutely as a guarantee it will never happen?' Cameron tries to parry this by insisting that the Coalition have increased child tax credit, but Dimbleby presses him: 'And it’s not going to fall?' Cameron's answer is unequivocal:

It's not going to fall.

The context for this exchange was that the Government did announce that they were going to make £12bn of welfare cuts, but they refused to be led on what they were. The Liberal Democrats, who had stopped them cutting these tax credits before, knew this was potentially on the table and tried to force the Government to admit what it was up to. Hence these questions. But it's clear: Cameron explicitly denied he would cut Child tax credits. This was exactly what they didn't want to pledge but it explains Osborne's policy which cuts working tax credits while limiting child tax credits for new claimants. It observes the letter, though not the spirit, of Cameron's pledge.

3. Cut tax credits as part of the Budget

Since the Parliament Act 1911 (following the battles over the 'People's Budget' in 1909-10), the principle has been established that the Lords will not vote down Finance Bills. If Osborne had included the cut to tax credits explicitly as part of the Budget, it would indeed have been constitutionally very difficult for the Lords to reject it. But he didn't. Now he's trying to claim that cutting tax credits was financial legislation and therefore should not have been opposed. But that's absurd: almost all parliamentary bills have some financial ramifications. To claim that bills with financial aspects cannot be opposed would be to say the Lords can't amend anything. But why did Osborne not put them into the budget? Because he knew how much scrutiny a Budget gets. There's a substantial debate, covered live on the broadcast media, pages and pages of analysis. It would - quickly and publicly - be seen for the highly controversial policy that it is.

4. Cut tax credits as part of a Bill

So, this is complicated. What the Lords were voting on was not a Bill. There was no Tax Credits Bill 2015 before them. What they were voting on was a 'statutory instrument', a kind of secondary piece of legislation. The Tax Credits Act 2012 establishes powers for a Government to amend bands and levels of the tax credits, without the need to create a separate Bill. When they want to amend tax credits, the earlier legislation allows them to create a simpler 'statutory instrument' which is then voted on in the Commons and Lords. It's significant because statutory instruments are intended to be minor, technical amendments; they get much less parliamentary time for debate, because, it is imagined, they would usually be waved through.

But the abolition of tax credits is no minor, technical thing. The Child Poverty Action Group has produced a study of what these cuts will means for a range of families and incomes. A farm worker on £20,906 will lose £2,247.62 in 2016/17; a childminder on £16,779 will lose £1,958.73. A library clerk on £18,524 will lose £2,080.88. And so it goes on. Overall, the Group calculate that 3.2 million low-paid workers will lose an average of £1,350 a year. These are not technicalities; this is the forcing of millions of people further into poverty. If the abolition of tax credits had been introduced as a Bill, there would have been more parliamentary time to air these concerns, to bring out fully to horror of what George Osborne is trying to unleash.

***

There's a pattern here. What we notice in each of these instances is a Government is trying to introduce a policy with the minimum public scrutiny, almost in secret. They didn't mention it in their manifesto; they brushed over it in the election campaign; it wasn't made explicit in the Budget; it was rushed through parliament. This is a Government with the thinnest mandate: less than a quarter of the electorate voted Tory. They need to win the argument; persuade people; take people with them. If they had presented the policy honestly and won the argument, the Lords would have been hard-pressed to defeat it. But instead the Tories tried to sneak their cruellest legislation through, using technicalities, threats and three-line whips. They hoped we would find tax credits so confusing that we would hesitate.

There are plenty of things wrong with the House of Lords, but, for now, they have performed a valuable service in putting this covert and deceitful policy right in the glare of public attention. They are quite right to have opposed it.

French Without Tears

So I've been writing about Terence Rattigan's plays for twenty-five years now and what I love is that he still has the capacity to surprise me. There are plays of his that I would rank among the finest plays of the last century and it would be fair to say that he wrote some plays I don't care for at all. I'll be very honest and tell you that I've always secretly thought French Without Tears to be a very interesting play but one that was rather dated and probably not actually very funny.

I am so wrong. Paul Miller's revival of the play at the Orange Tree is deliriously funny from beginning to end and achieves this not by imposing anything on Rattigan's words but simply - as all the good productions of the last 25 years have done - by stripping away the period trappings, keeping only what is necessary for the play to make sense, and finding in its rhythms and beautiful observations of character and language what is true and telling. And what emerges from this fresh, vigorous, pacy production is a very, very funny play indeed. Funny from the opening lines to the very last with constant genuine great gags throughout. Rattigan shuffles all his characters, putting them in every possible combination to wring every last drop of laughter from them. Miller and his young cast do not miss a note - the play is just a riot.

If you don't know it - and why should you? - the play is set in France in the home of Monsieur Maingot, to which a group of Englishmen have been sent in order to be taught French. The problem, if it is a problem, is Diana, the sister of one of the younger men. She is, as one character puts it, 'rather fast'. She's a promiscuous man-eater and the men are terrified of her to the same extent that they desire her. She begins the play attached to Kit but when Commander Rogers arrives she decides she must have him too. When confronted, she admits or pretends - we can't tell - that it's always been Alan she wants. The play ends with Diana threatening to go back to London, in pursuit of Alan who has decided to throw away a potential career in the Diplomatic Service in favour of becoming a writer (this was indeed Rattigan's own wish).

The play shows Rattigan's theatrical influences; there are Chekhovian moments (as the characters imagine what the world a hundred years hence will think of them) and there are frankly Zolian moments too (as they speculate on whether human beings are really just animals). There are moments of great farce but there are also moments of real tenderness, particularly around the character of Jacqueline, M Maingot's daughter who is, for much of the play, silently in love with Kit. You sense, even here, a playwright exploring his own talents, roaming the stage finding unexpected depths, moments of sudden intensity and feeling.

The Orange Tree turns out to be the perfect place for French Without Tears, for three reasons. First, it's a very intimate space, which gives the actors a chance to play the scenes lightly and quickly. Second, it's in the round, so nothing needs to be cheated out front and the playing can be truthful and intelligent. And third, because we surround the action, the theatre becomes a pressure cooker in which the pattern of tension and laughter is explosive; last night the theatre boomed with laughter all the way through.

And there's something else interesting about this production. Paul Miller has directed the play before, for English Touring Theatre, in 2007, which I saw on tour when it came to the Richmond Theatre, just round the corner from the Orange Tree. It was a terrific production, robust but fluent. In that larger theatre, though, its energy seemed harder to maintain; it was always at risk of dissipating. Here the humour catches light but what also became much clearer and sharper was Rattigan's careful exploration of male sexuality and, in particular, the way the heterosexuality of these characters shade into homosociality or something even more profoundly homosexual. It is, without effort, a very queer play.

Aficionados of classic-era Doctor Who will remember the great scene from The Ribos Operation in which a space traveller called Unstoffe is thrown together with the disgraced heretic Binro. Binro was once a scientist who believed that the planet of Ribos revolved around the sun, which produced its long seasons of Ice Time and Sun Time, and that the stars were not ice crystals but suns around which revolved other planets. For his pains, he was punished and his hands were broken. When Unstoffe tells him that he is from one of those other worlds and that Binro is right in all he has said, Binro is able to die happy. In 1994, I wrote my introduction to the Nick Hern Books edition of the play and, reading it then, I was very struck by the patterning of camp humour, transvestism, gender confusions and general queerness, as well as the very witty observation of male fears of desire. They formed the basis for my analysis. To be honest, I am not sure if I thought this was a performable interpretation or merely a textual one. A month ago, as I revisited my argument to write a short article for the Orange Tree's programme, I was genuinely unsure whether maybe I'd just misread the play. Tonight I feel a bit like Binro the Heretic to discover that I was right. French Without Tears is one of the great queer plays of the twentieth century wrapped up in one of the great comedies of the twentieth century.

Miller has emphasised these elements with great subtlety and discretion. The transvestism of the Casino night (either side of the interval) is given full absurd value; Alan and Kit's confusions about sexuality, particularly in Alan's description of the perfect woman ('she will have all of the masculine virtues and none of the feminine vices') are allowed to resonate, and Kenneth Lake, Diana's younger brother, is allowed to have a sweet, moving, unacknowledged crush on Alan through the length of the play. The cast are mostly pretty new to the stage. but they create an immaculately balanced structure: the mild hysteria of Alex Bhat's sardonic Alan is countered by Williams Belchambers's Commander Rogers, calm and mature, with a hint of the juvenile. Joe Eyre' Kit Neilan is a high-intensity performance, as he whirls ever more in the paradoxes of love with style, which contrasts with Tom Hanson's Brian Curtis, all affable cynicism and relentlessly unaccented French. Diana Lake is, in some ways, a rather unforgiving part; she's less fully written than the men, but Genevieve Gaunt (pictured) fills her out, flirtatious, elegant, cheeky, and clearly smarter than all the men put together. Gaunt's confidence with the role released the humour in the play's most basic mechanisms. By the end she could just enter the room at the right time to get a laugh. And just when you might think the play's lightness could pall, Sarah Winter's Jacqueline created an intensity of emotion that gave the whole play and production heart. 

Binro the Heretic was played by Timothy Bateson who had the distinction of being the first Lucky in Waiting for Godot on the British stage, taking the role at the Arts Theatre in 1955, in the production directed by Peter Hall, one of the productions that announced the change in British theatrical fashions that made Rattigan seem old-fashioned. Now we know how to get rid of any old-fashioned taint to Rattigan's work: treat his plays as serious proper plays with persistent and sophisticated things to tell us about who we are. This is the best Rattigan production I've seen since the National's After the Dance. It's staggeringly good. It's riotously funny. Eighty years later, Rattigan's first big hit is a hit again.

Budgetary Responsibility

What does ideology mean? Confusingly, it has two connected but distinct meanings. First, it means a structured and coherent set of political ideas. Using this definition we might talk about a Marxist ideology or about ideological Euroscepticism or indeed liberal ideology. We might talk about classic ideological conflicts between Left and Right. 

But there's a second sense in which the word is used, which means something like passing off your own political idea as not a political idea at all. Let's call the first sense 'ideology' and the second 'ideology'. In this second sense, ideology is precisely managing to give the impression that you don't have an ideology. Everyone else has an ideology, not me. I'm just speaking plain old-fashioned common sense; I'm accepting the centre ground; I'm just saying what you're thinking.

According to ideology, ideology is a bad word. It suggests dogmatic adherence to a possibly extreme set of ideas; it sounds unpragmatic and inflexible. And this is probably now the main  usage of the term ideology; it's what other people have. Tony Blair famously presented himself as a non-ideological politician. David Cameron, as the authors of a recent book have suggested, describes himself and is described as a 'non-ideological, practical, "whatever works" type of politician'. As Terry Eagleton put it, people are unlikely to describe their own ideas as ideological in the same way that one tends not to refer to oneself as 'fatso'. To have an ideology is to deny that you have an ideology.

But this is disingenuous. For two reasons: first, everyone is ideological, a bit. Ideology is not an extreme thing; a commitment to free speech is an ideological position, albeit, in this country, not a very extreme one. Just because you may take your policies from various points on the political spectrum - as Blair and Cameron have both done - doesn't stop you having an ideological framework in which these all make sense; second, ideology is a kind of self-denying mask, behind which may indeed lurk an extreme political attitude. Blair was pretty centrist on many things but beneath the guise of his ordinary-bloke pragmatism he introduced some fairly left-wing things, like the minimum wage. And David Cameron presides over the most economically right-wing government we've ever had. He and Osborne are children of Thatcher. They see themselves as completing her project - and by that I mean, they are trying to do all of the things that even Thatcher thought were too extreme for the 1980s, like demolishing the BBC for instance and privatising the NHS. They are, by action if not conviction, far more right-wing than she was. And yet their political stance presents itself - daringly! astonishingly! - as centrist, as non-ideological.

Nowhere is this more clear than in the current scrap over the Charter for Budget Responsibility. This document was produced a year ago, alongside the Chancellor's autumn statement.

Not many people seem to have bothered to read the Charter but, friends, I went into that jungle and I'm here to tell you what it says:

• It sets out a 'fiscal policy framework'.
  • it sets out some bland objectives to 'ensure sustainable public finances' and 'support and improve the effectiveness of monetary policy' *[3.1]
  • It says how this will happen - and this involves such extraordinary innovations as
    • setting a Budget each year [3.6]
    • taking advice from experts (Office of Budgetary Responsibility [OBR]) [3.7]
    • indicating targets for the future [3.15]
• It then sets out in a bit more detail how the OBR will operate

And that's it. Also it's pointless, for four reasons:

1. The Charter, even if it is adopted into law, can be amended [1.4]. Section 1(4) of the Budget Responsibility and National Audit Act (2011), which brought the Charter into being, says you can amend the Charter, provided that amendments are published in good time and voted on in Parliament. So quite rightly it's not a permanently binding document. Of course it isn't.
2. Its rules, even the specific ones set out below, are only deemed to operate 'under normal circumstances' [2.3]. What are 'normal circumstances'? The document does not say and obviously any Chancellor who wants to break these rules will be able to find some evidence of abnormality to justify a change of policy.
3. What happens if you miss your targets? You have to explain yourself to Parliament [3.30], just as the Chancellor has to do every year anyway. There are no sanctions, no real consequences to the Charter being breached.
4. And while it does say that it needs to listen to the OBR, it also specifically notes that it can also ignore the OBR [3.7].

The Charter is basically a bit of clutter that gets in the way of the already-overcomplicated Treasury process and will no doubt be abolished within a decade or so.

But the bit that's caused all the furore comes in 3.2 & 3.4 which set out these specific aims:

a forward-looking aim to achieve cyclically-adjusted current balance by the end of the third year of the rolling, 5-year forecast period. [3.2]

[a] cap on welfare spending, at a level set out by the Treasury in the most recently published Budget report, over the rolling 5-year forecast period, to ensure that expenditure on welfare is contained within a predetermined ceiling. [3.4]** 

Now, first of all, remember the four reasons why this doesn't matter. But, yes, it does seem to try to lock a government into aiming for a balanced budget in the middle of the cycle. 

Well that sounds alright doesn't it? Deficits are clearly bad things. We need to live within our means! We need to balance the books!

Have you got an overdraft? Ever used it because you know you've got money coming in soon but need to spend money now?*** Yes, you have, cos that's what an overdraft is. And what you are doing there is running a deficit. Let's assume you're spending this money on fairly respectable things like shoes and food; you might well say you are investing in yourself to make you more able to earn more later on. In such circumstances, you are wisely going into deficit. So deficits are often perfectly fine.****

If the Government builds a bunch of hospitals, it may well go into deficit for a bit. But building a hospital has two great benefits: (a) the long-term benefit of being able to treat more sick people and make them better (which is good in itself but also releases them back into the economy) and (b) the medium-term benefit of giving salaries to hospital-builders who then spend their money, putting it into the economy to do more work and stimulate growth. It's a good thing to do in a recession, because it gets people off the dole (reducing government expenditure but also raising morale, improving health, etc.) and stimulates the economy. If you cut during a recession, you would expect to see the opposite: unemployment rising, low morale (hence things like riots), blossoming NHS waiting times, and low growth.

(Now where have I heard of that happening...?)

But this Charter is sort of trying to stop governments investing. This is because of the ideological commitment of the Chancellor to small government, even if it wrecks the economy (and, let us remember, we are precariously climbing out of recession, but its the slowest exit from a recession in recorded history).

But the key thing is the title: The Charter for Budget Responsibility. The title is what this whole stupid saga is about. It's all part of an ideological move to redescribe conservative economic ideology as nothing more than 'budgetary responsibility'. Who's in favour of budgetary irresponsibility? No one.***** It's redescribing the objectionable as the unobjectionable. It's the very definition of ideology.

And of course, because it's a George Osborne idea, it's nothing to do with running the country, it's a trap for the Labour Party. If they support budgetary responsibility they tie their hands and commit themselves to Tory policies. If they oppose it, they look like 'deficit deniers' (another wholly ideological phrase). It's the legal continuation of everything the Tories have said about Labour since 2010: that Labour can't be trusted on the economy because the huge national debt was run up by excessive welfare spending, which is such an obvious falsehood, I genuinely admire Tories who can make the claim without blushing.****** 

Labour have fallen into this trap a bit. So powerful has the Tory line about Labour and the economy that even a dyed-in-the-wool Keynesian like John McDonnell, thoroughly opposed to Osborne economics, made it his duty at the Labour Conference to come across as a boring, respectable, bank manager type and declared 'we accept we are going to have to live within our means' and that he would be supporting the Charter for Budgetary Responsibility. In the fortnight since then, he seems to have realised this is absurd and so, at a stormy meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party, he yesterday announced a reversal of policy.

Well, he could have managed that a bit better, but ultimately, of course, Labour should oppose it. How can the Labour Party sign up to something that is basically a declaration in favour of Tory economic policy? This is exactly the idiocy that had Labour MPs whipped into abstaining on the introduction of £12bn in welfare cuts this July, on the basis that it would make Labour look more fiscally responsible. No. Supporting Tory policies like this makes them look like they have no principles except the desire to get into power. Who wants to vote for that? It's quite right that Labour see this Charter for what it is: ideological warfare and nothing less.

The problem is that 'budgetary responsibility' means nothing without an ideology to support it. Osborn would like us all to think that welfare and investment are bad for the economy and this is his way of getting us to think that way. But it's not true. Welfare and investment are not bad for this economy. Its this economy that's bad for us.

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NOTES (NOTES! ON A BLOG! MADNESS!)

* These are actually weasel words; specifying that 'the effectiveness of monetary policy' is a core aim is cheeky because, in this context, it reflects a view, prevalent on the right since the early 80s, that the best way of running a stable economy is simply by adjusting the money supply (that's what monetary policy is) and not through public investment, so it's implicitly marginalising public investment.
   Or, as John McDonnell has taken to calling it, 'people's quantitative easing' which is quite clever because 'quantitative easing' is an instrument of monetary policy (increasing the money supply). By rebranding public investment (building schools, hospitals, motorways, etc.) 'people's quantitative easing' McDonnell is trying to make a stimulus policy look like monetary policy, though it kind of doesn't work because people who don't know what quantitative easing means, don't get it, and people who do, see through it.

** Also, let's note that [3.25] the Government can annually adjust what it is including in its definition of Welfare. It's like me saying I have a predetermined cap of FIVE 'bezzie mates' and, if I make a new great friend, I can just demote someone else.

*** Having said that, comparisons between government and personal finances are always bullshit. I don't get tax income, governments do; I can't print money, governments can; my expenditure doesn't go up when people become sick or unemployed, government expenditure does.

**** A note just to clarify the difference between a debt and a deficit. With apologies to the note above, if I get a mortgage, I have taken on a debt. If I can make my regular mortgage payments, I'm fine. But if I fail to make those payments, I am in deficit. Debt is not a bad thing; most people could never buy a car or a house or go to university without it. Deficit is only a bad thing if you can into a spiral, as in the people who take out a pay-day loan to make a mortgage payment and then they can't pay off the payday loan and the situation just gets out of control. A Government like ours really is never going to get into that kind of spiral. Over the last 60 years, UK annual growth has averaged 2.48% which means that both deficits and debts have tended to diminish over time.

***** Okay, me, at the beginning of the month.

****** It's straight out of the Tony Blair playbook. If you remember, for a generation, the Tories had a terrible reputation on the economy, because of Black Wednesday, when sterling was bounced out of the ERM. New Labour pounced on this because they knew it was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to challenge the Tories on the economy. And, look, I dislike the Tories as much as anyone, but actually coming out of the ERM was pretty swiftly rather good for the UK economy. Yet the mud stuck.