Goodbye to all that

Unpopular Christmas (OK New Year) ideas #1 There’s too much reality and not enough fantasy in European political and economic policy.

I’ve lately been enjoying David Runciman’s Past, Present and Future podcast and in particular the History of Bad Ideas series. If you haven’t listened, I highly recommend it.

I’m borrowing this idea to suggest one of my own: that the nations of Western Europe are paying far too much attention to what we might call ‘the old politics’ and not enough to what we might call ‘the new economics’.

The former is defined by a continued insistence that narrowly-defined, party political systems – whether first past the post or coalition-based – are fit for purpose, when they increasingly fail to reflect the views of voters.

The latter, and really the point of this mini-article, is that largely because of the above, the same nations pay far too much attention to the bad news actually happening in their economies and fail to dream outlandishly of better.

No such need for realism constrains the politicians in the US and China (and to some extent Russia).

In the US, buoyant consumer economy is being turbocharged by a fixation on the stock market and its demented brother, crypto. If you are on the right side of the election victory then it’s good news for the next four years at least. If not, well I guess you start your own podcast.

In China, a lack of timeline for a transition to democracy means the CCP must continue to pour fuel on an unquenchable fire of liquidity that no-one believes will ever be allowed to go out.

Different economies, same opportunity. Keep people happy (or distracted depending on your level of cynicism) and they will be content.

Meanwhile European economies have zero economic growth, a series of political crises and increasingly complex relationships between the courts, government and the electorate on a range of issues.

Is this because they are still living the ideas of the 20th century, clinging to the belief that voters still trust them to deliver a better economy and more stable, equitable society?

It should be increasingly clear to European leaders that more and more of their own voters don’t think like this and their economies suffer because of their inability to grasp the reality of their situation.

It would be possible to make a convincing argument that Europe never really recovered from the Great Financial Crisis. The idea that a decade of austerity was enough to return European economies to growth has been spectacularly disproved. The political crises are simply the logical by-product.

But instead, Europe’s leaders find themselves either unable to govern or unable to effect change. Within the EU, coalitions that would once have been fractious are toxic and more eastern European fringe countries are voting for their own Trumps while the going is good.

In the meantime, the UK has plenty of people who want a better economy and even a better society but the government appears unable to deliver anything but bad news. Perhaps they long for someone to tell them what they want to hear, rather than reality.

This may not be entirely the government’s fault, after all, there’s a lot of misdirection and political fantasy about. But it is noticeable how, having won a landslide at a general election, the UK government continues to insist we focus on how bad things are.

Perhaps the once great nations of Europe need to look at this problem from a different perspective. Since there appears to be no jeopardy for deliberately misleading your electorate or by diverting their attention from reality with shiny promises or shiny beads, perhaps their leaders might be more popular for trying something similar.

Telling people what they want to hear, rather than a balanced, nuanced depiction of reality, is what gets popular leaders elected and it seems to work more than once. Rather than doubling down on doom, perhaps the incumbent leaders should start attempting to be popular rather than proper.

Let’s face it, from the viewpoint of a great swathe of Europe’s electorate, things can only get better.