Earlier today, somewhat facetiously, I wrote:
It’s weird to know – like, be absolutely certain – that I would be a better chancellor than Osborne.
The point of that is not, by any means, to claim extraordinary economic competency for myself. It is rather that at every possible moment, George Osborne has been presented with two options – hold the course, or switch to Plan B/A-/whatever – and picked the exact wrong one.
Let’s look at the constraints Osborne has. It would be weird for him to just change policy out of nowhere, so it has to be in reaction to some event, or at a time when such a change would be expected. Since the emergency budget in June 2010, when the bulk of the Government’s policy was laid out, he has had two budgets, two autumn statements, and an emergency spending review, at all of which he could have changed course (which, for the avoidance of doubt, would be switching from austerity). Five blown opportunities there.
But there have also been five negative quarters since Osborne took charge – Q4 2010, Q2 & Q4 2011, and Q1 & Q2. Each one of those will have been a wake-up-call that not everything was going to plan. Yes, even the ones blamed on the snow.
So that’s ten opportunities to pick the right course. If you tossed a coin, rolled a die, or asked a pigeon to peck at two keys marked “plan a” and “plan b” in exchange for kernels of corn, you would have expected it to pick the right option five times. The chance of picking the wrong one all ten times in a row, like Osborne did, is just 0.1 per cent.
So 99.9 times out of one hundred, our hungry avian chancellor would have led to a stronger British economy than our actual one. Although to be fair, the pigeon wouldn’t look as good in white tie.
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