Dr. Bickerton & Cilla Black

Dr. Christopher Bickerton writes-

We need to steer British growth away from its reliance upon consumption to allow room for the expansion of other sources of aggregate demand, such as net exports, private investment and government expenditure. Our goal should be to rebalance the components of British economic growth.

Why should this be our goal? Consumption is good in itself. Exporting stuff may be if it allows us to consume more. Private investment is only good if it boosts consumption now and later on. Government expenditure is either a type of consumption- that of 'club goods'- or permits consumption through transfers- or is wasteful and not a good thing at all.

What sort of Government expenditure does Dr. Bickerton have in mind?

 On how to pursue this project of economic rebalancing, we make two recommendations. Firstly, changing Britain’s political economy will require a more effective exercise of actually existing sovereign power. The problem of recent decades – in areas such as skill formation or regional policy – has not been over-centralization. On the contrary, it has been the absence of the exercise of public power over the private activities of markets. Any effort at rebalancing will meet deep and sustained resistance from some sectors of society, making the political will to implement change more necessary than ever. 

So the central Government must spend money fighting 'sustained resistance' to centralized 'skill formation'- e.g. kids not wanting to sit through shite courses on how to drive a forklift truck and taxpayers not wanting to pay for these shite courses- and also to centralised 'regional policy'- i.e. telling the regions what they can and can't do and getting everybody to fill out lots and lots of forms for some grant or the other.

Naturally 'political will' needs to be very well paid in order to sustain itself in beating down howls of rage and ridicule and yobbos headbutting bureaucrats and yokels turning up to dump truckloads of slurry on your driveway.

Still, just paying officials a lot of money isn't enough because the masses- an ignorant lot- will simply get yet angrier when the Daily Mail informs them of how their tax money is pampering this class of gobshites. How then are we to crush 'sustained resistance'?

Dr. Bickerton has an answer-

Secondly, the UK needs not only new policies but also a new social settlement. This settlement must mediate the relations between individuals, the state and markets such that the whole is more than just the sum of its parts. Without such a settlement, any fundamental shake-up of the British economy will only lead to fragmented support whilst opening up multiple opportunities to resist change.

We already have a 'social settlement' as expressed by a regime of taxes and benefits by altering details of which we can cause people to prefer to save rather than consume, to export rather than supply the domestic market, and to fund much higher levels of Government expenditure without causing inflation or raising the real interest rate.
Changing this 'social settlement' opens one single opportunity to resist change- viz. voting any one who tries it on out of power.

Dr. Bickerton has a solution to this problem- viz. before changing the 'social settlement' we must pursue a new social settlement. This involves getting people to believe stupid shite like 'we lost our sense of society 40 years ago. Jim Callaghan took it into the loo with him but forgot to bring it out. Then some bastard shat all over it and so it got flushed down the drain. We've got to locate the sewage farm where it ended up and dig around there in pursuit of it.'

 Over the last forty years in Britain, as individualist outlooks have prevailed over any belief in collective action, we have lost our sense of society as a collective macro-subject, able to legislate and act in the common interest. This loss is not only at the level of sentiment but also reflects a material transformation in the British economy that has left us without a ‘national economy’ properly speaking. The pursuit of a new social settlement is a pre-condition for implementing policies that aim at fundamentally rebalancing the British growth model.

Pursuing some stupid shit is not a precondition for anything. It is stupid shit. Growth models get rebalanced where incentives change. This happens through fiscal policy and changes in the interest and exchange rate. To a large extent, these are self-equilibrating provided financial markets are free of certain types of agent principal hazard- which is a matter of regulation and mechanism design.

Still, it may be argued, that a superior outcome might arise by changing the Supply Side, if only Democracy and the Rule of Law did not prevent us from doing so.

Bickerton says-

At the same time, our service sectors need to change radically. Automation for the lowest skilled activities should accompany a fundamental revalorization upwards of the most ‘social’ of the service sector jobs.

The problem here is that Bickerton himself has one of the most 'social' of service sector jobs. We don't want it to be 'revalorized'. We just want him to concentrate on teaching thickies from foreign countries who will pay through the nose for a Cambridge degree. We don't want him interfering with ordinary blokes like me who are so low skilled our economic activity can't be automated because machines are simply too smart. Also, it would be a fucking disaster if us townies started pursuing 'a sense of society as a collective macro-subject.' Not having been to Oxbridge, I can't prevision all the details but do know it would feature a lot of men my age dressed up as Cilla Black roaming the streets pairing off dogs with cats for Blind Dates on Blackpool Pier.

Why is this not already happening?

Bickerton explains-

 Introduced in April 2017, the apprenticeship levy requires companies with a pay bill of more than £3 million to put aside an equivalent of 0.5% of this towards levy-approved training (Moules 2018). Money not spent on the scheme would be reclaimed by HMRC as tax. Intended as one way of raising the skill level of school leavers entering the labour market, the levy has been used as a new funding stream for business schools. Sensing an opportunity, they created levy-compatible MBA programmes that have proven extremely popular with many senior managers “returning to school” as new “apprenticeships” (Moules 2018). For firms, it has proven far easier to sign off on executive sabbaticals of this kind than to create the proper frameworks and training structures that could absorb the much younger school leaver apprenticeships. An apprenticeship scheme intended to reduce the gap between low and high skilled workers has had exactly the opposite effect. Firms and business schools should be criticized for their short-termism and opportunism. However, given the absence of any labour market pressure to train the school leavers, it is unsurprising that businesses have sought to use the levy to train managers instead.

Deloittes advised the Government on this scheme and has very cleverly redesignated its graduate intake as 'Apprentices'. However, it is the Chartered Management Institute which is keeping middle aged men like myself off the streets, dressed up as Cilla Black lookalikes, by providing courses in 'Leadership Training'.

No doubt, Bickerton- who teaches Politics- could provide some similar facility for superannuated tea-ladies who now think they are Donald Trump. I'd be grateful because I happen to be the spitting image of Omarosa- give or take a couple of hundred pounds.