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Roger Warren Evans
Roger Warren Evans
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You are in the company
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item0034B 642, 643 642 3 March 2003 Confidence is indivisible Business news comes in dribs and drabs. News of “investor confidence”, “City confidence”, “business confidence”, “manufacturers’ confidence”, “retailer confidence” – and “consumer confidence”. They generate acres of newsprint, a torrent of headlines. Yet there is only one confidence that matters. And that is consumer confidence. To cut your way through this verbiage, always concentrate on the purchasing intentions of the ordinary family, the ordinary shopper. That is the “propensity to spend” of the ordinary customer. Everything else is derivative. Entrepreneurs are only “confident” if they sense that their customers are ready to spend, and some have an uncanny sense of knowing when that moment is come. Investors are only “confident” when the entrepreneurs are confident. The City is only confident when investors are confident. The economies of the big G7 countries are now driven by consumer confidence, to the exclusion of all other factors. Over 70% of national turnover (submerged in the jargon of "GDP" - Gross Domestic Product) is now in every major economy accounted for by the daily spending decision of people like you and me. True, Gordon Brown can help to avoid a collapse of consumer confidence by investing in new schools and new hospitals, but even that is no longer certain to succeed. That is what used to be called Keynesian “counter-cyclical investment” – when consumer-demand weakens, pump in Government-demand – that was Keynes, in a nutshell. It sounds simple. But even that device may well not work any longer. Human beings are canny, with a huge propensity for anxiety. Japan has tried Keynsianism for the last ten years, and their economy is still in recession. People may see this great construction works going on and still get worried about the future. There are huge increases in work-levels in all US industries supplying the armed forces – but the effect of that is far outweighed by consumer worries about the impact of war. There has a gigantic fall in US “consumer confidence” between January and February. Ordinary citizens are telling us that the price of war will be very heavy indeed, because the engine of the economy will slow up disastrously, saving will be preferred over spending. The modern economy is in the mind, the “mind” of the consumers.. My wife Elizabeth, whenever she reads of Great Bargain Offers made by local firms, reacts by saying – “Wow! They must be in trouble – I won’t buy from them...” What matters is not the bargain, but the resultant anxiety. The modern economy is complex game played out in the subjective realm of consumer intentions, in the nervy interplay between the propensity to spend and the propensity to save.  Blair is being carried
away by the heady “popularity” of his war-leader status.
I heard him live,
at the Wales Labour Party Conference last Friday. He is clearly a man
carried away by a corrosive moral megalomania – his is convinced that he is
a saviour of the world, and that he is right – unlike Chamberlain, he
piously said, who was
a good man, “but he was wrong…” You can see that, as a man who has
enjoyed no other real personal success in his life, the popularity of
war-leadership is clearly intoxicating – as it is for Bush.
But the consumer statistics are telling a different story. The US economy is heading for a fall. The propensity to spend weakened disastrously, between January and February. And if US economy collapses, decimating the world economy, the collapse will take Blair with it – even if Bush survives. Do you have the same perception of consumer confidence? Drop me a line Or contribute to the new JoinWarrenEvans Discussion Group.
643 3 March 2003 Rendering Europe Real I am anguished by the feebleness of the European vision. For me, it remains an unending source of inspiration. This week, I travel with twenty Welsh Fabians to Strasbourg to establish personal contact with some of the institutions of Europe – in particular, with both Neil and Glenys Kinnock (both Fabians of long standing). But we must do much more, to give reality to the European dimension. And little will come of the high-level jockeying for position now going on in the negotiations over a written EU Constitution. The enlarged 25-state Union will be too cumbersome, I believe, for institutions of representative democracy to function as we have conventionally understood them. The solution lies elsewhere. I advocate the creation, within every settled community throughout Europe, of an elected European Community Council. That Council would act as a focus for debate within each local community of EU issues, a point-of-distribution for EU political news, a source of Press/media releases, a point of contact for travelling EU politicians and officials. It would be much easier, in educational terms, to establish the links between local life and the initiatives of the European Parliament, Commission and Council.
No top-down imposition would be necessary. It would be for each Member State to designate its own internal arrangements. For instance, in Germany, the Gemeinden might well be considered appropriate for designation as European Community Councils. Certainly in France, the 36,000 elected communes would seem to be natural candidates, even though the Government would no doubt wish to use the opportunity to secure the amalgamation of the smallest communes with their neighbours. In the UK, the parish and community council network lies ready for use, and designation with EU status would promote the completion of this lowest-tier of government, within the UK Constitution. The UK is in this respect the one one out. Most European states have some form of small-community elective system, which could easily be deployed for this new constitutional purpose. Community and neighbourhood government is much stronger on the Continent than in the over-centralised UK. Some financial pump-priming would, however, be necessary. I suggest that the EU should offer a small per-capita grant, by way of contribution to the administrative costs of running such Councils - an annual support payment (for example) of 1 EURO per elector would represent a substantial contribution to neighbourhood governance. And it might be made conditional upon the creation of an satisfactory electoral unit of a minimum size. What do you think? Drop me a line Or contribute to the new JoinWarrenEvans Discussion Group.
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