Economical With The Truth?

A correspondent today has reminded me that I had organised one of at least two letters from academic economists that were published in the summer of 2015 in support of Jeremy Corbyn. Not that I have ever claimed to be an economist, but they signed, including nine Professors, one of whom has since been given a peerage.

Nothing remotely like that was organised in support of any of that year's other candidates for Leader of the Labour Party. Nor for Owen Smith. Nor for any Labour Leadership candidate in 2020. Nor for any candidate to lead the Conservative Party, ever. Nor to oppose the prospect of a Corbyn Government either in 2017 or in 2019. Several of the signatories to my letter had been among the very long and distinguished list of those who had denounced George Osborne's scheme a few weeks earlier. No comparable roster ever defended it.

No economic policy that had been devised by electoral politicians will ever be altogether respectable academically. But just as the City had never stopped wargaming the outside possibility of a left-wing Labour Government, so that it had been fully primed for a McDonnell Budget without ever having considered any prospect so absurd as Liz Truss's and Kwasi Kwarteng's proposals, so Corbynomics was the nearest thing in recent decades to an academically respectable political programme for the management of the British economy.

Yet while Labour opportunistically pretended to oppose the abolition of the 45p rate of income tax, the only mini-Budget measure than had not been in Truss's prospectus to her party's membership, it supported everything else that even Jeremy Hunt, of all people, has felt the need to reverse. Had the mini-Budget ever been put to a Commons Division, then Labour's whipped abstention would have saved Truss and Kwarteng from Hunt, Rishi Sunak, and all the rest of them. Labour is going into the next General Election as the only party that still thought that Trussonomics was broadly, and often very specifically, a good idea.

Keir Starmer versus Truss could have resulted in a Labour overall majority, but Starmer versus Sunak will result in a hung Parliament. To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.