It's a common complaint, but politicians are no worse at relying too much on the past than bankers, economists or generals
What's this? Nick Clegg warning George Osborne that he'd better ease the tax burden on the working poor in his 21 March budget because family finances have reached a "state of emergency"? And what's this? Peter Mandelson admitting that New Labour oversold the benefits of globalisation to the same sort of families?
Yes to both questions and about time too, you may feel, as the economy – 0.2% off in the last quarter of 2011 — is predicted to be slipping towards a double dip recession in 2012 and the eurozone crisis wobbles on. As Heather Stewart notes in this gloomy summary, that second dip won't be confirmed by budget day because 2012's first quarter figures won't be in. We shouldn't make ourselves feel even worse before it happens.
Are politicians too slow to react to the pace of events in our interconnected world? It's a common complaint and we are likely to hear it again at the World Economic Forum in Davos this week as Angela Merkel struggles to reconcile her domestic politics with her vision for a more deeply integrated Europe in an interview with the Guardian.
Yet are cautious politicians like Merkel really worse than business leaders or bankers, economists or generals, most of whom over-rely on the past to guide them into the future?
Reckless investment bankers blew their own business in 2008. Eastman Kodak threw away a century of photographic dominance before being forced into protective bankruptcy the other day. Generals usually fight the last war before concentrating on the one in hand, and economists are still fighting over the Great Depression. Many voters threw themselves into the boom years with foolhardy enthusiasm too.
Clegg, who has taken the blame for all sorts of unpopular coalition policies – cuts, the AV referendum, tuition fees, that sort of thing — is now on a more popular wicket when he challenges the coalition, as he does in his well-trailed speech today, to make the needs of the majority (the 99% you might say) a greater priority than those of the wealthy.
That translates modestly enough as meaning that the government should lift everyone earning £10,000 or below beyond the reach of income tax in this budget rather than in £630 tranches between now – it will be £8,105 from April – and 2015. All taxpayers benefit from higher allowances but Clegg wants this one to be paid for by the wealthy via a fresh clampdown on tax loopholes, but not (he concedes) the Lib Dem plan for a mansion tax.
Is this acceptable coalition politics, to negotiate publicly like this? It certainly is. The Treasury is saying that it saw Clegg's speech in advance but has not approved it. Elsewhere there are hints that Osborne will indeed do as Clegg suggests. It does Downing St no good to weaken the Lib Dems in the coalition, even if it's what rightwing Tory MPs would like.
Unlike them, No 10 knows how far more voters regard them as sectional party – there for the better off – than they do their rivals.
As good supply side theorists, rightwingers believe - many of them quite sincerely - that lower taxes and lower government expenditure all round really will generate more growth and prosperity in the long run. " Just get out of the way," as Ron Paul, 76, the libertarian candidate for the Republican nomination, likes to put it in his cheerful fashion.
That's where Mandelson's new mea culpa - it comes in an Institute for Public and Policy Research report and was reiterated on Radio 4's Today - fits into the fast-moving picture. In office Labour devoted a lot of time and money trying to enable society's poorest to share some of the benefits of the globalised boom, he explains: poverty programmes, tax credits, Sure Start, efforts to raise skills level. It had mixed success, though more than critics concede. David Cameron is busy learning how hard it is.
With hindsight, says Mandelson, Labour should have done more by way of industrial pump-priming, interventions that link university science and business more effectively, that help firms establish themselves at the high end of the global industrial supply chain and, of course, in financial services where we are better than (say) the French or Germans.
In the old days Labour governments "set out to pick winners and ended up with the losers picking the government," he quipped. Since then the pendulum has swung too far the other way. He grasped that in his second (2008 to 2010) Brownite stint at the DTI, by now renamed Biz and currently run by Vince Cable and David Willetts. They're doing well, Mandelson conceded on Radio 4, but they're not doing enough of it: British official industrial policy is "cheese paring" compared with France and Germany.
I find all this believable and moderately encouraging. Governments have an important role to play in making market economies work better as well as fairer, in saving free enterprise from its own follies and ensuring that wider public interests – roads, healthcare and an educated citizenry and work force– can be paid for. So a Mandelson pat on the back is worth having. It's also good politics.
Where does this leave Ed Miliband? I got into trouble in the Twitter realm yesterday for suggesting that Cameron got the better of the Labour leader, as PMs usually do with their challenger, during their weekly joust – which you can read and judge for yourself.
Most of my critics said I must be mad or a Tory to reach that conclusion, some of them probably the same people who attack me as a Labour stool pigeon when I score it the other way. It's OK to disagree, chaps, I keep saying. My complaint was that Miliband's critique of the coalition's economic strategy - that the cuts that have helped push a recovering economy back down (I share it) - lacked impact.
Cameron was able to blame much of it on the Labour legacy and other externalities like the eurozone crisis. Likewise the NHS reform bill, which was Miliband's second theme. The Labour leader cited the opposition of the British Medical Association (BMA), Cameron countered with support from a practising GP in Doncaster, Miliband's political base. Few minds will have been changed by the exchange.
The Labour leader needs to win these exchanges, not always but regularly, in order to make progress. A draw is not enough. He has yet to acquire the demotic language of the street which he needs to connect with mainstream voters. He needs to talk more and shout less, and to make people laugh more. Cameron is more thin-skinned than you might expect in such a privileged chap. He rattles easily.
Remember, this is the man who approached the Guardian's Steve Bell in a hotel foyer and asked him to lay off the head-in-a-condom joke. How uncool is that? Bell, of course, carried on as before, possibly more so. It is a significant incident.
As Mandelson said on air, Miliband is in a tough place in an unenviable job, trying to mount a critique of government policy while struggling to extricate himself from the weaker elements of Labour's legacy – itself mercilessly traduced by the other side, as you would expect. That's about right, I'd say.
I mention it now to see what others think, but also to record a letter – largely ignored – which Miliband dashed off to Cameron after PMQs protesting about factual inaccuracies – no less than three of them – in the PM's answers. You can check them for yourself on Labour's website.
Does it matter? We know Dave is careless with details. So no, it doesn't matter much yet. But in time it may.