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Roger Warren Evans
Roger Warren Evans
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You are in the company
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item0021D 516, 517 516 11 November 2002 M andate Schmandate...Assertions fly that George Bush now has a "mandate" for every right-wing excess. But that is nonsense. It is clear that the electorate was buoyed up by war-talk, and were powerfully affected by the call of patriotism, and solidarity under fire. Apart from backing Bush personally, there was no identifiable policy agenda, no series of specific mandates. In the UK, very little of the forthcoming Queen's Speech will have the authority of electoral mandate, yet the agenda will be coherent and thoroughly argued.The truth is that every governmental agenda is, quite properly, conditioned by the changing circumstances which the Government faces. All that the electorate can do is to choose the team they trust. Overall "philosophy", personal creativity, experience, honesty, competence, and political track-record can all be taken into account by the electorate - but it makes no sense to give weight to specific policy promises. If that is true, it makes no sense for politicians to rely on the "authority of mandate", as a weapon of political debate. It is argued that referenda are different, for they come closer to the concept of specific mandate. But I also remain profoundly sceptical about the referendum itself as a political institution, when deployed at a high-level of abstraction. Even the recent cliff-hanger of the Irish Referendum of the Nice Treaty was a messy matter, becoming a "popular verdict" on sleaze in Irish politics, and the record of the Ahern Government generally. Even if the perfect objective referendum question can always be drafted (which I doubt), it is common for adventitious issues to complicate the process of answering the question. So there - my secret is out - I emerge as an old-fashioned adherent of representative government. I am convinced that the management of the civic order is a particularly demanding assignment, perhaps even a vocation, calling for a distinctive range of skills and personality. At Elections, I will continue to vote for the team - and if they fail, and another team proves more attractive at the polls, I will try to vote them out.
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517 11 November 2002
Central Bankers No longer in the script This was to have been very big week for the central banks, and for central bankers. Yet the week ended by demonstrating that central banks have become peripheral to the real economic action. The prolonged death of monetarism continues. My generation grew up with the doctrine that currency management mattered. The post-WW2 UK economy seemed regularly to be crucified on the vagaries of its currency - a Sterling Crisis was said to be triggered whenever "foreigners" made inappropriate use of the £-Sterling for their own nefarious purposes, disregarding the interests of the sock-knitters and yarn-spinners of Oldham. The UK Government simply had to pick up the pieces, and manage the consequences. And for as long as the nation-state was paramount as a primary unit of economic management, so national currencies had particular significance. But those times have gone . As Tony Blair is right to assert, "Globalisation is not an option, but a fact". Currencies are used or rejected, for a variety of trading reasons, in both the public and private sectors. The trend is also for Governments to borrow less, and therefore the price they are willing to offer for the top-up funds they need (i.e. the official interest-rate, in various guises, as fixed by central banks) is a factor of declining significance, as a tool of economic management. Governments can only follow trends, without aspiring to set them.My theory is that, in contemporary consumer economies, all that matters is the momentum of consumer confidence, the consumers' propensity to spend. Of course, given the institutional history and past glories of central banks, the behaviour of central bankers may itself sometimes constitute one of the factors affecting consumer confidence. In the United States, for example, Alan Greenspan has become a popular gnomic guru figure who can influence the popular mood by raising the wrong eyebrow at the wrong moment - just like Warren Buffett. In the UK (where Eddie George has no comparable personal influence), the distinctive mass phenomenon of owner-occupied housing in a class-stratified society has to be given great weight in determining the Government borrowing-rate. In Germany, popular neuroses about hyper-inflation merit particular attention, because historically they form part of the cocktail of consumer confidence itself. So the behaviour of central-banking institutions may retain some peripheral importance, nation by nation.
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