You can’t blame the Greeks for trying to avoid austerity. But democracy won’t work if it’s at odds with reality
A child often puts the unanswerable question. Children haven’t yet learnt about the things you don’t ask, so their untutored curiosity can go straight to the bone: a question so destructive that the adult world has covered it with layers of secondary questions, muffling the shrieking primary question beneath.
Which of you, for instance — you who accept the teachings of a major world religion — has not heard a child ask how old we are going to be in Heaven, or whether Mummy will be married to Daddy or to her first husband? My guess is that the adult’s reply went along the lines of: “Hush, child, it’s not a simple as that; we need to have faith.”
Democracy is a kind of religion. It too needs faith. And there was a childish question about democracy that occurred to me and doubtless to you before we even reached our teens. “Dad, what if a government needs to do something that voters don’t like?”
“Well, lad, it’s not a simple as that. Politicians can educate people and explain why this unpopular thing has to be done.”
“But what if they do explain, but people still don’t want the unpopular thing?”
“Then people can vote those politicians out and vote in some new ones.”
“But won’t people vote for the politicians who promise not to do the unpopular thing?”
“Hopefully not, lad. You’ve got to have faith.”
Faith, I suppose, that if only we explain carefully enough to a turkey the need for a yuletide feast, turkeys will vote for Christmas.
Some years ago, before this Government was elected, I wrote here about saucepan-banging: the recourse of the Argentinian middle classes when their Government ran out of the money needed to keep them in the style for which they had voted. So all night they banged saucepans underneath the bedroom windows of their politicians to stop them sleeping. I mentioned saucepan-banging in the light of the looming possibility that Old World electorates, too, might not respond sympathetically to an unsparing account of the difficulties we’d got ourselves into and the deprivations we faced. Saucepan- banging was my metaphor. It’s clear we’re in for a new season of culinary percussion, all across Europe.
I’ve argued that the pressure on the Greek people needs to be eased. I still believe that. But what if the country’s politicians (should they succeed in forming a government) remain unable to secure any respite from the debt-collectors of Berlin? Greek voters simply refuse to face the possibility.
Or what if a new election is called? Europe would be telling the Greeks they’d got the last election wrong and had better try again. And if recent polls are to be believed, Greece would respond with a raspberry: the far-left Syriza party would substantially improve its position.
Either way we’d be confronted with a clear democratic mandate for what Daniel Finkelstein has called the proposition that 2 + 2 = 5. The French electorate, too, has offered this month a milder version of saucepan-banging (cafeti?¿re-tinkling?) by voting in a socialist president who insinuates that 2 + 2 might equal about 4.25. Ed Balls, Labour’s Shadow Chancellor, things it equals about 4.1. But a popular mandate for reality denial is not the preserve only of the Left. A reason that Angela Merkel cannot cut the Greeks more slack is that her own deeply conservative electorate refuses to be told that Germans must pay to save the currency on which Germany mightily depends.
Pause for a moment to understand, even sympathise with, voters unwilling to vote for pain and unemployment. Most of us put our shoulders dutifully to the wheel, pay our taxes and can be forgiven for feeling that, since we’ve honoured our side of the bargain, we’re entitled to the standards of living we’ve been offered in return. When this is disputed by those we’ve elected, rage is natural. We’re not professors of politics or economics; we hear the expert arguments swirling about, hardly feel competent to decide, and vote for the party whose prospectus pleases us best. Is that irresponsible? Can more be expected of the majority than this? It’s normal to deny reality until it hits you.
When a democracy wants to deny reality, the people’s voice is never heard to cry, “What do we want? Unreality!” and the voice of vote- seeking politicians is never heard to cry “Together we’ll deny reality!” No, people displace: surrogates for reality are chosen, and attacked instead. In the present crisis there are two favourites.
The first is “low growth”. We declare that lack of growth is the problem, call for a “growth strategy” and praise politicians who promise to think of one.
It’s rather like drought-stricken peasants calling for a rain strategy, as if that would water their crops. There exist few modern circumstances where the removal of the word “strategy” from any passage containing it fails to clarify matters, usually demonstrating the argument’s circularity. “Growth” means more money. We’d all like a strategy for more money, and every debtor needs a growth strategy. Every sinner needs a virtue strategy. Every starveling needs a food strategy.
The second surrogate for attacking reality is to blame another group of people. The Germans attack the “lazy” Greeks. The Greeks attack the “bullying” Germans. The French attack “Anglo-Saxon” economics. We British attack the bankers, the immigrants, the tax-avoiders — and Brussels, which is apparently single-handedly constricting the coiled spring of Britain’s economic rebound with European red tape. When it comes to reality denial, only the Tory Right can match the ingenuity of the Labour Left.
Finally, we attack the politicians themselves: the whole class. They broke the promises we forced them to make, on pain of not electing them otherwise. It is to the credit of a politician if he breaks his promise when the promise was stupid and made under duress. It is the braver thing to do. So Fran?ºois Hollande will probably break his promises now he’s elected, and Ed Miliband and Ed Balls would probably break their promises if elected, and Nick Clegg broke his promises once elected — because they are all honourable men.
But we’ll grind the political class down nonetheless and insist on getting leadership that disappoints us. David Cameron and George Osborne bucked the trend for a while and got themselves elected on something close to an austerity ticket. But the key to their pitch was pain today for jam tomorrow. The middle classes do understand deferred gratification, and if that’s the price of better days to come then for us an economic hair shirt is not out of the question, for a while.
But only for a while. Implicitly, the Tories promised that Britain was dealing with a temporary interruption to the years of our enrichment. Once we’d fixed Labour’s deficit, the enrichment would resume. They never admitted that the deficit was the reason for the enrichment. They never suggested that without a deficit the enrichment would never return.
They couldn’t, could they? Not in a democracy. If we’ve been living beyond our means, then living within our means implies living less well.
For ever. And who’d vote for that? Who ever will?
I have, incidentally, no solution to propose.
