Former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie wrote a silly column yesterday. In it, he argued that “the middle class of London and the South East” are underserved by politicians, and called for a new political party which “believes that the striving classes in the South are overtaxed and overburdened”.
It was, clearly, bunk. Charlie Hallam took most of it apart yesterday, pointing out that high pay is not the same as a large contribution to society, and that much of the boost London and the South East gets is merely entrenched advantage:
A start-up will find loans easier to obtain with a London address. Contacts are easier to make. Lobbying is easier. And there’s that whole prejudice thing you don’t have to deal with if you’re based in the south.
The Economist’s Daniel Knowles also points out that:
Every example he offers of London and the south being attacked takes the form of taxes on the rich—stamp duty for example—which also apply in the north. Meanwhile, the subsidy he says that the north gets is in the form of public spending: welfare benefits or social housing for example, which also apply in the south.
That is, far from wanting to fight for the South, MacKenzie is arguing for the rich of Britain and against the poor, wherever they actually are.
But there’s a far simpler reason why MacKenzie is talking crap. The Telegraph’s Ed West touched upon it in an otherwise faintly patronising post, writing:
Different parts of the economy require different economic policies, which is why the convergence of interest rates made the euro such a fundamentally bad idea for those countries on the fringe, such as Greece and Spain, since monetary policy would be set by people in Frankfurt and Brussels and therefore would be suited towards Frankfurt and Brussels. That’s a model that will work fine so long as the Greeks are prepared to live in perpetual poverty in the name of European solidarity, and that Germans are happy to pay the Greeks’ welfare bills.
The north and south of Britain are, by virtue of sharing the same currency, yoked to the same monetary policy. Short of some extraordinarily unorthodox economics – banknotes which catch fire south of Watford Gap? – that policy will be suboptimal for one or both areas of the country. Aggregate demand shocks rarely affect the nation uniformly, and so the Bank of England has to decide whether (say) inflation in the south is worth preventing a recession in the north.
But one way of lessening that impact is with common fiscal policy. That way, shocks in part of the country can be dealt with more quickly by transferring revenue from the healthy part to the struggling part. Which is, of course, exactly what MacKenzie was complaining about.
(It is worth noting that this analysis is roughly that which was relied on by every anti-Euro economist ever, who all feel very smug these days as Greece needs continual fiscal transfers just to stay in the economic bloc.)
The alternative – giving the north its own currency and monetary policy – may, I suppose, be what MacKenzie was angling for all along. It would certainly get those pesky Scousers out of his hair.
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