Anthony Seldon is perhaps best known for his biographies of recent UK Prime Ministers. He had a column in the FT recently, which suggested that the Prime Minister’s team had done rather better than popular perception might suggest. Two sentences caught my attention: “Credit for sticking to the so-called Plan A on deficit reduction must be tempered by the government’s reluctance to cut more vigorously” and “Downing Street insiders can claim to have managed to steer…..the recovery of a very battered economy”.
The first sentence suggests that the government stuck to its original 2010 deficit reduction plan, but it should have cut spending by more than this plan. I disagree with the opinion in the second part of the sentence, but that is not the issue here. The problem is that the factual statement in the first part of the sentence is very hard to justify. The numbers suggest otherwise, as Steven Toft sets out here. The second sentence also indicates no acquaintance with the numbers. As the well known (I thought) NIESR chart shows, this has been the slowest UK recovery this century - including those in the 1920s and 1930s. The financial crisis certainly battered the UK, but it also hit the US pretty hard too! Yet average growth 2011-13 in the US was 2.2%, in the UK 1%. The idea that macroeconomic mismanagement left the UK economy in a peculiar mess before the financial crisis is a politically generated myth which is also divorced from the data, as I have argued on a number of occasions.
In one sense it is unfair to single Anthony Seldon out in this respect, because I hear similar mistakes all the time from UK political commentators who profess to be, and may honestly believe they are, objective when it comes to macroeconomic reporting. I suspect the problem is threefold. First, the common feature of these mistakes is that they are repeated endlessly by the government and its supporters. Second, there is group self-affirmation - what Krugman calls ‘Very Serious People’ talk to each other more often than they talk to people acquainted with the data. Third, when some of this group do look for economic expertise, they often talk to ‘experts’ in the City or read the Financial Times. Unfortunately, both sources can and do have their own agendas.
Yet in another sense it is not unfair, because Seldon is a historian, and historians stress the importance of accessing primary sources. The main positive point I want to make is that political commentators need to check the data if they want to avoid making macroeconomic statements that are factually incorrect.
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