Tenhle týden se v Manchesteru koná velká konference britské Konzervativní strany, což je debata přeci jenom na trochu jiné úrovni, než naše sjezdy ODS. Je kolem toho spousta zajímavých projevů a komentářů, myslím, že bych se mohl podělit.
Tenhle vyšel v dnešních Timesech, autorem je šéfredaktor D. Finkelstein (člen konzervativní strany - v Británii se na "nadstranický tisk" moc nehraje). Neznalým jazyka se omlouvám.
Hands up who's paying for the free lunches;
Not Just lunches: frozen fuel duties, tax allowances and more. Fine, but let's pay off our huge debts first
Ireally can't believe it is necessary to say this again. But oh well, here goes. At the beginning of my first ever school lesson in economics, my teacher informed us that before he could continue, he needed to introduce us to the most important economics professor we would ever encounter. And then he wrote on the board: TANSTAAFL.
Tanstaafl, he explained, stood for "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch". And for all I went on to learn later at school and then at the London School of Economics, nothing ever provided greater insight than these first five minutes. The whole of economics, all the textbooks and lectures, is basically a footnote to this central idea. Things have to be, and always are in the end, paid for.
These past few weeks, as the party conferences have proceeded, Tanstaafl will have been rolling in his www.grave.No sooner have we begun to make progress taming the massive deficit than we have started trying to hand out free lunches again. And I don't even mean this to be a metaphor. Free lunches. Literally.
The slogan at the Conservative Party conference this week is For Hardworking People. It turns out that when people are asked who is the party of those who work hard, they tend to say the Conservative Party, but when asked to name they party they associate with hardworking people, they have a greater tendency to say Labour.
In other words, while associating the Tories with hard work and the people who do it, voters still associate Labour with the broad mass of working people. In Manchester, David Cameron's party is trying to address this problem. (An aside is that this effort began last year, the campaign guru Lynton Crosby having brought much-needed discipline rather than changing the strategy.) Everyone seems to agree that a major part of the next election campaign will concern who will gain from the recovery. Both Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband made essentially the same argument, albeit with different policies attached. With the Tories, recovery will be for the few; with Labour or the Liberal Democrats it will be for the many. The many versus the few, Gordon Brown's old dividing line.
And this is a very potent attack. A gap is opening between people's optimism for the country and people's pessimism about themselves. Polls show that voters think the economy is getting better and will get better but that the same is not happening to their household budget.
From this it is only a short step for voters to reach the conclusion that the rewards of economic improvement are being appropriated by someone less worthy than them. A general sentiment to which we are anyway all attracted almost all the time in almost all circumstances.
The Conservatives do have their own response to this. Rich people are only one of the groups of people we think are making off with money that should rightfully be ours. We pretty much think everyone is doing it. This is why welfare reform is popular. And immigration control. And cracking down on bureaucrats in order to provide money for tax cuts for aspiring people. On these issues, Tories are politically stronger.
So I've listened to all of this, and it is fine as far as it goes. I realise the political necessities. I think it is important that those who earn well pay their fair share, welfare reform is clearly necessary, I support immigration control and there's much to do to change the way public services are run and decrease the tax burden. Fine. Let it be a recovery for all.
First, however, how about we have a www.recovery.No one is making off with money that should be ours because we haven't got any money.
It is amazing how quickly, how soon after a disaster that almost engulfed us all, the debate has turned back to who can offer people the most "free" stuff. As if a gigantic budget deficit has taught us nothing. If, for instance, you are going to give school lunches to loads of children, you have to, erm, pay for the lunches. And we can't really sensibly do that because we are already spending vastly more than we are bringing in in tax.
The same goes for making tax allowances transferable, freezing fuel duties and the billions of pounds of extra spending necessary to buy the things that last week Labour said it wanted. All of this talk about living standards seems to assume that there is a way of improving them without earning money.
Around the conference there has been talk that Ed Miliband has, with his freeze on energy prices, made a great retail offer that the Prime Minister needs to match. A great retail offer? Well, not for the retailer it isn't. Retailers that make offers like that - here, take my product, and hey, don't worry about paying - tend to go bankrupt.
We are currently spending £120 billion more in a year than we are taxing ourselves. Because we are adding to our debts so quickly, debt is still rising as a proportion of what we all earn, and by 2016 our total borrowing will equal our entire national income.
In order to deal with this we have all agreed - Labour is a little vague on this, but I sort of think they have agreed - a plan to reduce public spending in the first three years of the next Parliament. Only the first year of those cuts has been identified.
Another £25 billion of cuts or tax rises will need to be identified. Where, these past three weeks, has been the debate about this £25 billion? So the Liberal Democrat promise to make £600 million of school meal costs disappear garners headlines, and so does the facile Labour energy freeze and the Conservative promise on transferable allowances. All because they help with the cost of living. Yet all of these things are going to be paid for by pretty much the same people who benefit from them, because there isn't anyone else to pay for them. Yet on this, silence.
And on top of these new promises, very broadly the same people will have to pay for the £25 billion in one form or another. The amount we are studiedly not talking about dwarfs the amounts we have all been discussing over the past three weeks, for all the world as if only one of them is part of living standards.
We are cutting to the bit of the debate where we all split the goodies between us, but we aren't there yet. We aren't even nearly there yet. This conference season has been very interesting, but on the wrong subject.
When I arrived in Manchester there was a big demonstration against public spending cuts. So I waited to go in to the conference, while the marchers marched, and meanwhile sat down eating a sandwich. Opposite me sat a union steward wearing one of those high-visibility yellow jackets. On it were the words: "There is an alternative". I wish I knew what it was.
daniel.finkelstein@thetimes.co.uk