VAT and, er, reflation...?

Mr Darling and his Treasury madarins ought to win a Nobel prize in economics, for (unbeknown to the rest of the economists practising and writing today) they seem to have come to the remarkable conclusion that one can reflate an economy by means of reducing VAT by a modest 2%. Yes, the VAT the we all discount as a part of the purchase price of goods and many services. The VAT that we pay at a fixed rate on most purchases, whether they be capital or non-capital goods. The VAT we expect to have no chance of escaping unless we are villainous. The VAT many of us, if we are businesses, reclaim just as we pay in on purchases. So what will the great plan achieve?

Well, think about Christmas shopping for a moment. Last year a report here suggested that the average spend on Christmas presents was £570. If VAT at 17.5% was incorporated in the price of all of the goods bought as presents - unlikely, since at least that selection of jams for Aunt Mabel and little Timmy's new sweater will be zero-rated, as will much else in the £570 - a reduction to 15% would 'save' you £14.25. That's a Kung Fu Panda DVD and a box of chocolates at Tesco. For all of the effort to reflate the economy by the extraordinary measure of VAT reductions, even at the peak of our annual spending the best we can expect is the equivalent of a couple of hours of animated comedy and a handful of caramels and orange cremes.

Now don't get me wrong. It may be worth it - after all, at least Tesco will benefit. But there is no evidence here of targeted thinking in relation to VAT reduction of the type the economy needs and the government seems to believe it is providing. What about a bigger reduction for capital purchases? What about even extending zero-rating for charitable purchases to a more extensive range of capital items? What about extending the idea of reducedVAT on some services that are provided in the main by small firms?

Come on, Darling, think....

Keynes is back!

It seems to be an age ago that we could mention the name of John Maynard Keynes without howls of derision. Now, though, Keynes - a liberal intelligence of the highest order - appears to be back in fashion. If you don't believe me, have a look at the New Stateman for this week in which, with extraordinary zeal, the likes of Noreena Hertz claim him for their own.

Now, I don't know about you but as one of those for whom the bankruptcy of monetarism, then supply-side economics, then neo-liberal market economics and (that famous phase) 'post-neoclassical endogenous growth theory' came and went as so much froth and fluff, I am glad that the old boy is due for a serious examination again. But it should be a serious and sensitive rehabilitation - not a 'hero-fest' for socialists.

Let's be clear. Keynesianism (or the moderated neo-Keynesianism of the late eighties) isn't for softies. It is for real, thoughtful and purposeful liberals. Socialists beware. There are no easy rules for state management of recessions, and intervention is not - genuinely not - the simple prescription anywhere in Keynes. Keynes was, and remains, a difficult - sometimes even an unpalatable - thinker and that great trinity of works (The Treatise, the General Theory and How to Pay for the War) evolves an approach to economic analysis that is subtle and powerful.

What he did not offer was the sort of simple panaceas that Labour politicians seem to want and socialist commentators insistently believe are at least palliative in effect (never enough for them of course, but a means of mollifying the voters that usually eject Labour when recessions strike).


What he did offer was a thoroughgoing analysis of how, by concerted action allied to confident and assertive government leadership in the face of business apathy and loss of confidence, an economy like our own could be coaxed back to health.

Keynes knew that his prescription would allow capitalist economies to retain their liberal freedoms, but that other (similar but by no means identical) prescriptions - from the authoritarian left and right - were available. In the General Theory he wrote:

"The authoritarian state systems of to-day seem to solve the problem of unemployment at the expense of efficiency and of freedom. It is certain that the world will not much longer tolerate the unemployment which, apart from brief intervals of excitement, is associated - and, in my opinion, inevitably associated - with present-day capitalistic individualism. But it may be possible by a right analysis of the problem to cure the disease whilst preserving efficiency and freedom."

Keynes saved liberals the fate of sinking with the classical system that demanded constraints on the demand side of the economy in a recession, but more than that he outlined an economic liberalism that is still relevant today.

Oh, and if Mervyn King happens to read this, he also said - as Mervyn will know - "a decline in the rate of interest will be a great aid to recovery and, probably, a necessary condition of it". Go to it, Mervyn!

News coverage and recessions

The BBC is at it again. Cataclysmic economic disaster is just around the corner, the soup kitchens will be open this weekend and sales of Down and Out in London and Paris are set to skyrocket...

News broadcasters are insensitive - or, more worryingly, hypersensitive and very, very aware -to the power they exercise over the fate of the economy during recessionary episodes. Research seems to suggest that news plays an important effect in actually shaping our economic behaviour - and it is an effect more pronounced in periods of recession than in periods of prosperity or boom. Two studies worth reading are this one by Goidel and Langley from 1995 and this one by Wu et al. Both analyse the impact of news during the recessions of the 1990s. Both conclude that the reporting of 'bad' economic news has an effect, and that it can exacerbate behaviour, which must include 'dis-saving' (as Keynesians used to call it) and putting off purchases.

What does this mean for the BBC? Well, it must mean that this great public service institution is currently doing all of us a tremendous disservice. It is actually stoking the recession gleefully. Interviews during news bulletins today have included 'vox pops' insisting that a largely bemused public shares stories of 'how the downturn has affected them this lunchtime'. Not only is this editorially silly, it is potentially damaging.

Yes, the economy is faltering. Jobs will be lost. Businesses will go to the wall. But this is a cyclical phenomenon we have lived with for centuries. That, of course, is the BBC's argument - they proclaim that they are holding a mirror up to nature, not shaping it.

My point is that, with evidence showing so strongly the very real effect of news coverage in exacerbating the recession, should they take the risk?

Or are ratings worth that much to the BBC?

Lembit for Party President?!?

Like thousands of others, I have received an email from Lembit Opik soliciting my vote for the position of President of the Liberal Democrats. I have to say almost the first line put me off voting for him: "I have always believed the Party President is the ideal job for me", he writes, as if that is a recommendation. Hmmmm. Modesty? Evidence of fitness? Strategy? No, just vote for me to make me happy. Encouraging, isn't it?

No, spelled with a 'B'...

Bankers. Don't you just love 'em? Not content with creating a crisis in their own industry by mispricing risk on doubtful derivative instruments and accumulating them to the point of near destruction, they have the temerity to wonder whether the taxpayer is 'doing enough' to bail them out of the mess. Moreover, after a helpful and well coordinated move by the central banks to cut interest rates as an assistance to them - not taxpayers and savers, by the way - they have the further effrontery to say that they 'might not pass the benefit on' to mortgage borrowers. Yet more indifference to the rest of us comes from the 'shock' that the governments of the western world are apparently not saving all of their banking bretheren, and are not quite prepared to back the hunch that interbank lending might get going again with borrowed cash and taxpayers' money to the tune of 1.5 times GDP.

Can we get this right for once? Banks are the servants of our economy, not the masters of it. The government has to assert the basic principle - which voters have now clearly realised and politicians should quickly understand - that our finance system is too important, should be made less important, and should be placed in the hands of people with common sense. Spivs, self-regarding quants and 'masters of the universe' need not apply this time.

As winter comes on, and pensioners on low incomes face hypothermia again, bankers railing at the rest of us for our 'indifference' will be an affront.

Groan...it's Lembit again

The ability of the leadership of my party to shoot itself in - or, probably, near - the foot is extraordinary, and that arch-transgressor Lembit Opik is at it again today. In an interview reported on the BBC website he makes some rather innocuous points about the Segway personal transporter, a motorised scooter for grown-ups, in a rather silly 'protest' outside the House of Commons. Lembit, who holds a responsible position in the party usually reserved for grown-ups, believes the Segway is " flexible, convenient in rural areas as well as large cities - and environmentally friendly". As it may well be.

But how, even if this were the solution to the transport problems of the UK, does Lembit make the point? By describing it as "...biggest step forward in transportation since the Wright brothers", by stencilling (yes, stencilling) the word 'Police' on the front of one and driving it up and down in front of the House of Commons, and by claiming that adoption of the Segway would constitute, in the words of a BBC report "...a transport "revolution" in the capital as commuters turned to them instead of cars and bicycles".

Now this may be a happy, jolly little jape to Lemit, but it is making my party look silly, trivial and childish. There is nothing wrong with humour in politics, nothing wrong with eccentricity. We don't need only the high-minded Gladstones, the stoical Balfours or the reserved and patrician Douglas-Homes of this world, we do need a few clowns for colour.

Why, though, do they have to congregate in the leadership of a party making a credible claim to be considered the real opposition to the government in so many areas?

Lembit? Please think about the party before personal publicity ahead of your next stunt.

What is left of economic policy?

One of the reasons why Downing Street is now hotly denying that Mr Brown was ever going to unveil an economic strategy to counter recession is that, put simply, 'economic policy' is pretty much emasculated now. It doesn't really exist.

Margaret Thatcher (in her various guises as arch-monetarist, supply-sider and non-interventionist) had one outstanding effect on economic policy making. She shifted the goal posts by moving them off the pitch. Instead of accepting that economic policy management is difficult, frustrating and risky and involves utilising a range of economic policy instruments, she embraced the myth of the single instrument (monetary base control from 1979-1983; supply-side fiscal policy from 1983-1989...). After all if you really don't understand this stuff, why not just pick a single lever and use it - and blame 'international circumstances' when things go wrong?

Mr Brown, of course, hasn't just moved the goal posts from the pitch; he's given them to another team. The one instrument of macroeconomic policy left to us is interest rate polcy, and he shifted responsibility for that to the Bank of England in 1997. Now you could argue that with the reforms in exchange controls in the 1980s, the restructuring of our economy through privatisation and outsourcing of public assets and services, and indeed economic growth, there are strong reasons for believing that government can do less now to avert a recession than ever before.

This is nonsense. There are still levers of influence and action that Alistair Darling could use - from effecting changes in bank balance sheets through BoE action, through to encouragement for business investment via tax credits, to changes in the purposes of planned public spending (reducing discretionary recurrent spending and increasing capital infrastructure spend, for instance) - that would, when taken together, amount to an economic strategy for coping with the effects of recession.

The belief seems to be that all of this is too hard, too risky. It makes the brain hurt. Better, then, to cushion the blow for (some of) those on low incomes and hope the rest of us can weather the storm - and be prepared to take the credit if we do.

This is politics without principle and without guts. It is artless, deficient in leadership, stumbling and incompetent, and unimaginative.

Wordle fun

It's the silly season, and I have been playing with the wonderful Wordle (http://wordle.net/) over lunch to look at the, er, shape of political thinking in the UK. Here's a tip for a way to make even Gordon Brown's speeches look more colourful:

1. Cut and paste a speech of the dear leader into Wordle at http://wordle.net/create and press 'Go'

2. Admire, collect, print and laugh at the sheer artlessness of political communication in the UK. Compare with those shown here of the speeches at the Democratic Convention, and tell me that UK political rhetoric is as clear about its purpose at that of our American cousins.

Still on the Chartist list...

Liberals will be cheering and supporting the continuing attempts by MPs of all parties, and others, to institute fixed term parliaments, but what about the old Chartist demand for annual parliaments? Of course the case for annual parliaments was made much earlier than the Chartist movement of the 1840s, but while four of the six points of the People's Charter were achieved in the last century (I'd argue that we've not really achieved 'equal constituencies, however fleetfooted the Boundary Commission may be) there is still that one glaring omission - annual parliaments.

Now you could argue that the fact of party politics, and the party nature of government, would make annual elections impossible. Every election would produce, potentially, a different government and, well, that would be awkward. Continuity of policy...long-range strategy...time to achieve our objectives. But that's all a bit like saying that you can't have the sweets you want from a pick and mix stall because the paper bag is the wrong colour.

We could have annual parliaments, easily. We could insist on parties putting up all seats for reelection annually, while retaining the present government unless a clear majority was obtained by another party. Would annual parliaments, though, have any advantages?

Well the old Chartist argument was that it would be a "check to bribery and intimidation" at a time when the rotten boroughs of England were notorious and many remained unaffected in that way by the 1832 Act. That wouldn't be an argument for establishing them today though.

I'd argue that there may be - just maybe - a couple of good solid arguments for annual parliaments worth considering:

(i) annual parliaments would make it impossible for the electorate to ignore politics; they'd have to become involved since voting would be an annual event.

(ii) it would, paradoxically, give rise to more stability in the political process. Knowing the proximity of an election, MPs would be more dutiful, governments more careful and voters more aware of change.

In all of this I am being only half serious. After all, the thought of David Dimbleby Election programmes annually is too much. Besides which, annual canvassing....?

Obama liberalism

Is Senator Obama a liberal?

At first blush this may sound like a question with a strightforward answer - of course he is a liberal, he believes in fairness, social justice, personal freedom, the responsibility of communities for their members and of their members for the community. He is, most people, would say, very much a liberal. No question.

Hold on, though. His acceptance speech at the Democractic convention, filled though it was with references to plans for changes in taxation, social security and public spending was light, nonetheless, on clearly liberal values. Instead Senator Obama talked the tactical talk of a man seeking office and keenly aware that he needs to attract those for whom the word 'liberal' makes them slightly uneasy.

So he said thigs like this:

"We [Democrats] measure progress by how many people can find a job that pays the mortgage; whether you can put a little extra money away at the end of each month so you can someday watch your child receive her college diploma."

and this:

"We measure the strength of our economy not by the number of billionaires we have or the profits of the Fortune 500, but by whether someone with a good idea can take a risk and start a new business, or whether the waitress who lives on tips can take a day off to look after a sick kid without losing her job - an economy that honours the dignity of work."

This is ameliorative liberalism. It says that the liberal values of a secure and thriving society that matter are those that make middle class voters vote for this candidate.

Now, I hope that President Obama wins the election in November. The alternative is not a pleasant one for the world, let alone the people of the United States. Let's pause, though, and wait to hear more from Senator Obama before we take the tactical talk of a salesman for the genuine article. He may turn out to be a credible liberal; it is, paradoxially for a man so often feted as one, much too soon to tell.

One in three!

One in three young people, according to a survey by the Prince's Trust reported here, "do not think of their own parents as people they respect". I can't say I have ever been more moved by a single statistic about the attitudes of young people. Now we could become very Daily Mail about this and call for measures to make them show respect (National Service/ prison-meaning-prison/ 'make them clean it up' etc - choose your own favourite), but the essence of the problem is surely to do with a rootlessness of mind that is now endemic in whole generations - and not just young people.

This 'rootlessness' is now particularly strong among the young. Many of them lack confidence in themselves in this society, and express that lack of confidence in aggression and a bigger, more showy, version of teenage arrogance. This is the teenage arrogance that thinks nothing of shootings in supermarkets, the teenage arrogance that thinks nothing of robbing single pensioners at knife point, the kind of teenage arrogance that regards authority of any kind as being not protective of common interests but necessarily antithetical to your own.

How do we deal with it? It is easy to decide on solutions, and Lib Dems are announcing some of their own at the moment (see here), but solutions to youth violence are not the same as solutions to the deeper, more pervasive, rootless inaction and fatalism that grips the Jeremy Kyle generations. This isn't (for the Marxians among you) alienation since alienation is a conscious and active rejection of a social order; this is a strange mix of separateness and a dependency that leaves mothers at once indifferent to their childrens' violence, afraid of it, yet clinging to state solutions for both the violence and their separation from 'grown up' living.

No amount of brave talk about 'zero tolerance' on the one hand or "understanding the roots of young peoples' alienation" on the other will help. We need to tackle the much more grave problem of the generations of people - grandparents, parents, kids - who no longer think of themselves as influential in their own lives.

'I have an announcement to make...'

Alistair Darling may, or may not, announce a stamp duty holiday, or pause, or redefinition...or none of the above. As a result, house sellers are up in arms, estate agents are crying foul and the government is, again, in hot water for - in this case - actually doing nothing, and still making life worse for many people.

Is there ever a case for announcing that you will do something before you do it? Well, liberals would I think argue that the pre-emption can protect in some instances. Announce today that you intend to tax immoral earnings at 20% above the standard rate and you can reduce exploitation now. The problem with it is, of course, that pre-emption is a bit like having your cake and eating it if you are a cynical political calculator. I announce that I will impose the super-tax, there is no reduction in the tax take, but I gain political kudos from the announcement. Something of this thinking must have been behind the then Chancellor's announcement ('the then Chancellor' being one Mr. G. Brown) to trail most of the budget in an earlier 'budget statement'. The Chancellor gained kudos, looked in control and open at the same time, and lost nothing. A perfect solution for a canny politician.

Let's try to avoid the cynical thought that this is the only mode of 'announcement' that has political viability. I'd like to see a whole lot more stick being used instead of expensive carrots as far as industry policy is concerned for example. If a government were really serious about fairness and equity, as well as encouraging the use of public transport, would it not announce the steps it would take if rail fares were to rise above the rate of inflation, for example? Would it not in fact have a duty to make that threat very public? Recently, in Britain, governments of all persuasions have been too timid to do this. But it is a clear, honest, and I think liberal tactic.

Richard Hofstadter

Wednesday sees the anniversary of the birth in 1916 of Richard Hoftstadter, American historian and thinker who, perhaps more than many others, gave shape to the liberal centerist critique of American affluence and its politics in the post-war world. Brilliant and engaging, his writing on a wide variety of themes (party politics, radicalism, political paranoia and populism, academic freedom and social darwinism to name a few) influenced a generation shaped by totalitarian conflict on the one hand and political conceit and self-satisfaction on the other.

I first read him in my teens and thought the pure unfussy cadences of the American east coast made him approachable, easy to read and engaging. After years away from the books I happened to dip into my two favourite the other day (The Paranoid Style in American Politics(1965) and Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963)), and my view of him has changed, slightly.

Let me explain. Yes those easy cadences were still there and yes the essays in Paranoid Style were as engaging and interesting as ever. But 'easy to read'? Perhaps not quite. Now I don't mean by that that the style or the substance was difficult. Rather, that more than 40 years after they were written these books provide an eerie echo of an era (the 1960s) straddling the uneasiness of a Cold war world and the burgeoning hope for a better future - an era in which politicians could hope to win elections by pure, unadulterated populism, from the cynical right and the calculating left. Hoftadter showed, possibly more acutely than any other historian of American thought, just how close to the surface of democratic life are the impulses to punish the non-conforming, to deny reason in order to hijack voters' anger, and to divide in order to rule. Democracy can hurt when it embraces populism, and it is uncomfortable to see just how.

In Anti-intellectualism in American Life, perhaps the most challenging argument of the two, Hofstadter showed that Americans had become used to denying the force of special knowledge, expertise and know-how. It wasn't just that intellectuals had been regarded since colonial times as dangerous but anyone setting themselves apart from a created orthodoxy or a manufactured populist concensus was deemed to be 'un-American'. Hence - and it hardly needed to be pointed out to readers - the vitriol of McCarthyism but also the hatred of the technocrat among many on the left.

Hofstadter only on rarely touched on the roots of anti-intellectualism and populism in Britain. but is it too far fetched to believe that he would have found - in the resurgence of the New Right from the 1970s, in the populism of Blair and Brown - the very same forces that shaped the condemnatory and heckling politics of the US for generations?

And is Barack Obama, perhaps, an antidote for liberals?

How to make policy through your political party...

Policy-making. Art? Science? A bit of both? The problem for all political parties in participative democracies is that the inclusiveness of policy making depends upon the inclusiveness and reach of policy consultation. So when governments seek to involve members of their parties in policy-making the results can be perverse.



Labour's National Policy Forum back in July is a perfect case in point. First stage: invite all of the activists, supporters and workers engaged in your party to a meeting, at which you encourage them to shape policy. Second stage: fight off attacks on what is and isn't ideologically 'pure', what you as a government haven't yet done because you were too timid, and the lobbying of special interest groups, and try to get some form of confirmation from the meeting on the general way ahead. Third stage: Reluctantly cart all of that back to the reality of a constrained budget, other pressing demands, the need to avoid damaging talk of 'U-turns' and 'caving in to special interests' and the like, and come up with a policy framework for government in Cabinet.

Since the 1960s most rational political parties have tried to evolve (to one extent or another) an inclusive approach to party policy making that will affect their programme in government. For Lib Dems, it has become an essential article of faith that conuslting members IS policy generation in action.

And yet...There is much to be said for the argument that consulting your members on future policy is like asking random car drivers to design a Formula 1 car from scratch by committee. I don't mean by that that car drivers might not be able to reconcile their differences, shape something that might look like a F1 car and even ape one, but they are unlikely to produce the next best thing in F1 car design. For that to happen, you need to ensure that they understood the very latest on aerodynamics, for example, and understood how to reflect that in the design of something they would only ever see others use. Moreover you would need to ensure that the car drivers who happened to prefer low emissions cars and those who were wedded to gas guzzling 4x4 cars put aside their differences and, indeed, looked at full efficiency from the point of view of the aim of a totally different driver - someone for whom fuel efficiency was about pit stops and acceleration.

Now there may be those among the leadership of many political parties who wish this sort of party member consultation would not take place and others for whom a technocratic elite would be better at doing it anyway. Neither would enable truly participative party government.

However, we do need to ask our parties - including the Liberal Democrat party, by far the most open of the major three on policy consultation and party policy making - how far consultation in policy fora can be an entirely shapeless affair, with no more than a background brief from the expertise within the party and a contribution from a hapless minister enjoined to 'put policy thinking into practice'.

Here's my suggestion (and it is an approach that, at various times, party politicians have favoured). Why not leave the broad ranging consultation as consultation so that the leadership knows what members think, but have policy proposals developed by independent policy teams - independent, that is, of the party. Those proposals could be regarded as the blueprints for that F1 car designed by the top car designers of their generation.

'Skyl', skill and skills - how words affect liberal policy

We use the word 'skills' these days with abandon, forgetting that we have constructed it as a noun only relatively recently (oh, and by the way an etymologist should help us work out just when, and why, we started adding that 's' every time).

Skill (or 'skyl' [OE]) is a term that survived until probably the middle of the seventeenth century relatively unmolested by any association with education. A skilled person was one with a profound discernment that came from practised knowledge - not just someone who could make something, but someone who knew how to judge whether something was well made and make it himself, certainly the attribute associated with a guild Master rather than an apprentice or even a journeyman. A 'skill' was different from 'cunning' (which for centuries had no association with any disreputable), the latter word meaning that one knew something that gave one a skilled understanding. We occasionally, but now quite infrequently, talk about people 'conning' a subject.
What we didn't mean by the term 'skill' until relatively recently (mid-17th century by my reckoning) was a learned ability to produce a particular output or activity. That, for our forebears, would have been to trivialise skill. But, in the industrialised world in which Adam Smith's pin manufactory economics of labour specialism became and remains a key to industrial success that is just the relatively trivial meaning that it is essentially bears. I have 'skill' in something that differentiates my labour from yours.

In recent years we have taken this word so lightly that now we talk about 'skills' (noun) as a thing that we can 'have' or can 'get' or can 'learn'. This is learning to do something with this toolkit or this system, not learning to understand the tools and how they work or the systems of production that are possible and how they are arranged - not the type of 'skyl' that the medieval guild Master was reputed to possess.

What does all this historical etymology mean for liberal thinkers? I think it means quite a lot.

I think we have unthinkingly accepted that 'skyl' is a dirty, small-minded, uneconomic and possibly undemocratic and elitist idea. We did so probably in the early years of the twentieth century when mass production and Taylorian notions of production became commonplace.

I think that we have come to think of 'skill' in that Smithian sense as the instrument for capturing the internal economies of industrial performance. And we have certainly come to think of this new thing, 'skills' (noun, and often these days regarded as singular!), as a bundle of attributes associated with some form of economic activity that need regular replenishing.

'Skills', we are told, are (is?) in demand. What people mean when they say that is not that the profound insight of the Master craftsman is in high demand, but that now, today, we need people who can push button B or pull flange G into alignment, whereas yesterday we will needed people who can push button G and pull flange B into aligment. 'Skill' is a commodity that today only really means 'mechanical skill', the ability to fit in with a cycle of production in that Smithian pin factory in one part of the process today and another tomorrow. Technology may, of course, be the reason why we need people who can pull flange B into alignment tomorrow, but there is nothing else that distinguishes this source of 'skill need' from any other in the pin factory.

When we talk about 'skills' what we inevitably mean, it seems to me, is 'fluidity' - the ability to roll with the punches of modern competitive capitalism. We mean no more and no less than that.

So for that reason can we agree that 'skill' and 'education' can be kept in two very different compartments of policy? I really don't mind my 9 year old son being told that his education may provide him ultimately will 'skyl', but I really object to education being hijacked to provide sustained shareholder returns as technology changes or competition hots up. Let's take 'skills' off the table, and think a bit more about the precious value of 'skyl'. In all of this I know that I am sounding rather like a passionate William Morris or a Paul Lafargue, but that can't be helped.

Let's rescue 'skill' for oblivion, think better of 'skyl' and banish 'skills' from our vocabulary. For the sake of our children.

Future generations

I have been reading Nigel Lawson's rather strange book on global warming, An Appeal to Reason: a cool look at global warming and his even more curious dialogue with Oliver Letwin in the July edition of Standpoint magazine. Both pieces by Lawson are impassioned and at times intemperate (appropriately), but aside from that does he say anything that - policy differences aside - a liberal ought to pause over? Certainly the book has huge weaknesses (much for example depends upon his analysis of surface climate data for the first 8 years of the current century as an 'eccentricity' that cannot be explained by global warming theorists, while ignoring the fact that the data he uses has since been re-based by the Hadley Centre to give a more accurate picture of what's actually happening to our climate).

But there is one key point that ought to strike a chord with most liberals and it is about that old chesnut of intertemporal choice. (By the way, Lawson's discussion of it is has technical errors in presenting the economics of discounting future costs, but let's put that aside since it doesn't materially affect the value of the point he is making).

The question that I think most liberals would pause over is the extent to which we would choose to benefit future generations at the expense of our own. Is it, as Lawson says, largely a matter of moral choice rather than economics? I think he has a point.

Liberals like me are often too fond of arguing that future generations need to be endowed with some benefit by our forgoing some pleasure now and that this is a matter determined by some external necessity. 'Gosh,' we say, 'we must protect our granchildren from the prospect of not having X, the loss of which must surely be greater than the pain we'll suffer from not having it today'. It's a pure utilitarian argument, and there is nothing wrong with it.

What Lawson says, quite rightly in my view, is that liberals deceive themselves if they think that the liberal calculus isn't a moral preference rather than some abstract economic one. If we do want to preserve something for our grandchildren at the expense of ourselves that is a moral decision; but if we want to preserve something for our grandchildren at the expense of our children that is also an (albeit different) moral decision.

The question he quire rightly puts is, who has the right to make that scale of moral decision?

Can governments elected for four years ever be in a position to do it? What alternatives are there that are democratic? And how do we entrench the moral decisions of one generation with regard to the life chances of future remote generations as generational moral choices and not just the arbitrary decisions of one government to be overturned by another?