You’re a busy working person and your job is quite difficult. Like many people with difficult jobs, you think about it quite a bit. There’s probably no harm in that. Your job rests, in part, on a kind of fantasy, a great lie. That lie is that there is such a thing as ‘macroeconomics’, where individuals sitting in buildings called treasuries, ministries of finance, central banks — those people, some of them at their standing desks — can really control, rather than minutely influence, the wealth of nations. That’s your job. You’re chancellor, and the ship is sinking, and you have to pretend you have a plan to stop it going down.
So you’re set to give a big speech. A major speech. That’s what the papers have been calling it, a major speech. And in the speech you have to remember that you’re the representative of a party, a weird party with tribal loyalties among many strange and unwell people. A lot of the people you most hear from are strange and unwell people on disability and they do nothing all day but make your life difficult with their emails and phone calls and tweets. There’s probably no harm in that.
In theory, your management of the economy can help those people. That’s another lie — the lie your party campaigns on, that the squeaky wheel getting the grease is good, actually, that it’s the way for all wheels to work better, really, and that all you need to do is to hobble the wheels that do not squeak — just hobble them enough — and then the squeaky wheel that gets the grease will be no worse than the other wheels. You’ve rather lost control of your metaphor.
Now it’s time for a speech. You have to deliver a speech, and it has to be about all the things you apparently sincerely believe you can do to make the economy improve. There are things to do, of course. There are always things to do, but they’re often done in far-away places run by Asians or Americans who your advisers are unwilling, flatly unwilling, to copy. The rich world is a foreign country. They do things differently there.
You know that the previous government, the one you soundly beat, declared war on all facets of economic activity, regulating whole industries into non-existence, crushing the wills and abilities of individuals to make any progress, to improve their lots in life, to buy and to sell and to improve. There are a lot of things they could have built that they did not build. In theory, you could build those things. Hell, you can announce building them, announce it in your big speech, completely irrespective of whether these fantasy projects will pass the insane hurdles, the obstacles thrown up, vomited forth, by the evil state, the evil courts, the enemies of the people in the bureaucracy you now perilously sit atop.
You have some powers to get these things done, but do you have the will? The will to fight the state, the state that advises you on everything, the state that surrounds and binds you? Do you have the will to offend the only people your party really loves: public sector workers and racial and sexual minorities? Would you be permitted to do anything that might leave them less well off?
You think about your opponents again. What’s at the roots of their mental illness? Why are they so dysfunctional and failed and discredited for all time?
They clearly despised the young — something you affect not to do — and spent their fourteen years pulling up the drawbridge behind the only lucky generation Britain has produced in two hundred years. You say you won’t do that but oh dear, it looks as if the nation’s experientially growing population on disability, and all the pensioners who have nothing but time to write to you — they’re the most influential voices in this nation of ours. You can’t ignore them all that much, it seems. Their wheels squeak. They cry out and scream for satiation.
So you make your speech. You plan for a lot of things that won’t happen for ten years. Implementation? Do you think of that? It’s a game for little people, people who don’t give speeches. Will any of this be done by the time you are out of office, indeed, by the time you’re dead?
Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen. Place your bets. That may well be in the text of the speech. There’s probably no harm in that.