The days when ordinary people sold their own produce and bought the produce of other ordinary people are long gone
One brief phrase in Nick Clegg's call for tax cuts, aimed at low- to middle-income families, says more about Britain's current economic predicament than the rest of the debate around the subject put together. Clegg calls for the tax system to be rebalanced so that it "encourages ordinary people to drive growth". That sounds splendid.
The trouble is that "encouraging ordinary people to drive growth" is harder than it sounds. In fact, in a developed economy, it's something of an oxymoron.
Sure, consumption drives growth, and everyone needs to consume. But consumption needs production. What can "ordinary people" produce that other ordinary people will want to consume, so that they can drive growth? The harsh answer is: not much. Here is the great paradox of our so-called market economy. The access of ordinary people to ordinary markets has been severely curtailed by technological advancement, mass production and the globalisation that it ushered in.
One only has to look, literally, at actual markets themselves, to see how things have developed. Farmer's markets, or artisan markets – they are lovely places to shop, and sell quality goods, locally produced. But they are expensive. Shopping at that sort of market is a luxury. The markets frequented by low to middle-income families are quite a different matter. They are cheap, yes. But the goods offered are imported goods, of low quality and made by the poor of developing nations. The growth driven by ordinary people tends to be in far-off nations, not in our own economy.
The same divisions can be seen on local high streets. In areas without much money, small shops have been routed, unable to compete with the hangar-sized retail services offered by big companies. In areas with money, however, small shops selling specialised items thrive, staving off the march of the chains by virtue of the very fact that they are more individual, less "ordinary".
The days when ordinary people sold their own produce, and bought the produce of other ordinary people are long gone. In general, neither the artisanal producer nor the artisanal consumer is ordinary. This is the basic but unacknowledged problem that Britain has been struggling with for ages: how can people be kept consuming when they are not producing? How can national economies be sustained when local economies are dying?
These questions, simple as they may seem, are actually at the very heart of contemporary political debate. The last Labour government, let's face it, gave the wrong answer to the first of these questions, an answer which was not in the least opposed by the "opposition". That answer was to create cheap money, in the form of cheap debt.
The financial crisis has very comprehensively illustrated that this was not a tremendously sustainable solution. The great mystery now is how anyone ever believed that it was.
But Labour also tried to answer the second question. It created lots of public sector jobs, largely based in places with ailing local economies, which provided employment in dying places. This may not have addressed the underlying problem. In fact, it was funded using the unsustainable revenue generated by wrong answer number one.
But it was, nevertheless, socially ameliorative, a sticking plaster over a wound, but better than nothing. It has not taken long for George Osborne's belief that the public sector was strangling the private sector to be exposed for the risible fatuity that it is. The public sector grows when the private sector fails. It is not the other way round. But there is not a great deal of consolation in merely establishing that the Tories have no more of a clue about how to lead the nation to the "sunny uplands" than Labour did.
A lot of Britain's problems are encapsulated in the very fact that politicians feel perfectly comfortable pontificating so patronisingly about "ordinary people" at all. Yet they all do it. Labour even boasts that it's "ordinary people" that the party exists to champion.
Ask any politician what makes a person "ordinary" and they'll offer some guff about "the decent, hard-working backbone of the nation". It's nonsense. What they mean is (airy waggle of wrist): "Oh, the undifferentiated mass that we don't expect much of, except votes."
Much of the particular trouble with Britain is that its much-trumpeted revolt against "the class system" was so unimaginative. Private education may be widely reviled. Grammar schools may have been (almost) eradicated. Yet the emphasis on academic success has actually intensified. There is little sense that anything other than a specific type of quite substantial educational attainment can pluck a person out of the ranks of "ordinary people" (with even that something of a gamble). "Everyone else" has to make do with some "lesser" form of qualification, or come to terms with "educational failure". Sure, being dumped into a secondary modern at 11, to be designated as "factory fodder" was pretty horrible. But it seems to me that children now are just given more time to come to terms with the idea that they are "not academic", and therefore, well, not much use.
Amid all the talk of how Britain needs "practical skills", usually accompanied by some statistic involving the creation of a piddling number of apprenticeships, there remains a suspicion that this is merely a way of shutting down opportunity, and promoting elitism by other means. Yet what could possibly promote "elitism" more effectively than distrust of the practical, especially in an economy that relies so heavily on services?
Sure, our economy needs to be able to compete globally. Sure, that's not easy when the global market is so competitive. But people need to be able to compete locally, too. Among many other economic recalibrations, there needs to be acknowledgement that global markets crush local markets, and some willingness to tackle the kinds of protectionism that global markets employ.
Peter Mandelson this week popped up to give dire warnings about "creeping protectionism". Yet large companies constantly use protectionism to grow their own organisations. They sell spare parts at a premium, for example, and only to their own salaried fitters, when they should be obliged to sell them at a market rate to people who mend things locally. The very idea that you need to provide the serial number on your cooker so that the company that manufactured the thing that broke in the first place will deign to come and mend it – minimum call-out: something exorbitant – ought to be anathema to free marketers, but somehow just isn't.
The degree to which "ordinary people" are trammeled in their choices about the services they can offer, or consume, is massive. Then politicians stroke their chins, and suggest that changes in the tax system are the thing that will help "ordinary people" to drive the economy.
It's a bit of a farce, really. I find a line from Blake's Songs of Experience particularly haunting: "Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy."
Certainly, the commodity does appear, at the moment, to be in perilously short supply.