I'm really interested in Mr Walker's work. He is attempting to discuss the serious weaknesses in the American fiscal position in a non-partisan way. For me its very liberating to hear critical issues of slow economic growth, aging populations, fiscal deficits and public sector pensions discussed without descending into political dogma. I wonder if he will manage to steer relatively free of political labelling - his comments on the British Government tackling the deficit raised a few eye-brows at the CIPFA conference.
On that tack - an interesting view from the Economist which highlights the mess the Labour party is in in presently an alternative vision to the coalition which adds up.
Britain and the public spending cuts
Ed Miliband shunted off the television news by anarchists
Mar 26th 2011, 23:29 by Bagehot
BLIMEY, Bagehot thought, Miliband's early. Your blogger was in Hyde Park in central London at an anti-cuts demonstration organised by the Trades Union Congress, and the Labour leader Ed Miliband had unexpectedly popped up on stage to address the crowd. The odd thing was, half the crowd was not there yet. It was just before two in the afternoon, and the grassy expanse set aside for the rally, stretching down from Speaker's Corner, was still sparsely populated with trade unionists and their friends. Mr Miliband was in a suit and tie, and as he appeared and started speaking, a sprinkling of hardline leftists began booing him and jeering. Others listened politely, but without wild enthusiasm. He spoke so early that when I bumped into a member of the shadow frontbench team, half an hour later, she had missed her leader's speech, and asked me how it had gone down with the crowd.
I assumed, without knowing what was going on elsewhere in central London, that Mr Miliband was anxious to speak before anything violent kicked off. I could see three helicopters hovering over Oxford Street and the West End, a mile or two to the right, and wondered if there was trouble underway. Mr Miliband's whole appearance reeked of caution: the dark grey business suit, the preamble about how "the Tories said I should not come today," his studiously generic tributes to inspiring protests of the past from the American civil rights movement to anti-apartheid campaigns, rather than any more red-blooded rhetoric about British trade unionism.
It was only later that a BBC colleague told me that violent protests had started at almost exactly the same moment as Mr Miliband began his remarks, prompting the rolling news channels to split their screens before finally cutting away from Mr Miliband completely.
Did Mr Miliband mess up? In a way, he had wretched luck. The main trade union march was strikingly peaceful. There were small children and babies in prams, and lots of marchers sitting down having picnics. The marchers were overwhelmingly public sector workers, and in real terms that meant the park was crammed with health visitors, nurses, teachers, college lecturers, tax inspectors and council town hall staff. Compared to the angry entitlement brigade I had met the previous day at Labour's People's Policy Forum in Nottingham, the TUC marchers were reasonable people. I made a point of asking scores of marchers whether they thought the cuts should be scrapped full stop, or whether they thought some cuts were inevitable. A big majority took the latter view: these were Keynesians not flat-earthers in the main. All were friendly and happy to talk.
Mr Miliband was also unlucky because the number of violent protestors was, by all accounts, small. A few hundred people vandalised branches of high street stores and banks they accuse of avoiding taxes, staged an occupation of Fortnum & Mason, the venerable Piccadilly grocers, and attacked police officers with flares and fireworks. He also repeated his honesty of Friday, telling the rally that: "I believe there is a need for difficult choices and some cuts", though this earned him boos.
But, that said, his ill-luck was also entirely predictable. Two days before the march, I found websites rallying protestors to launch physical attacks on shops in Oxford Street on Saturday, after about 10 seconds of Googling.
I think Mr Miliband's problem boils down to this. Most people in this country, including a lot of people I met on the march today, think that Britain faces a period of painful decisions and choices, because the country has been spending too much. Within that majority, there are people who are (for variously selfless and selfish reasons) attracted to a Keynesian argument that deep, front-loaded cuts are counter-productive, and so some painful decisions should be postponed. That is an intellectually respectable argument: this newspaper does not agree with it, but there are people of goodwill on both sides of the debate.
Then there is a hard core of people who simply do not accept that the money has run out. These flat-earthers think that there need not be any cuts, because if you only taxed the banks/bankers/multinationals/tax avoiders/the rich a lot more, you would unearth a hidden money pot filled with so many billions that we could keep spending as before. I don't think Mr Miliband agrees with them. I don't think most voters in Britain agree with them. I don't think even most of the marchers in Hyde Park agree with that hard core.
But that hard core has a firm grip on Labour's base, as could be seen on Friday in Nottingham. And Mr Miliband, by endorsing the wider anti-cuts movement, risks becoming associated with that hard core and their breathtaking lack of realism. He said again in Hyde Park that he was proud to be addressing the "mainstream majority". But he did not look proud: his nerves gave him away. "It is so important that this be a peaceful protest," he said at one point, almost pleadingly. The crowd seemed pretty indifferent to his presence, in return.
It was easy to get the impression that he was there because his absence felt riskier than putting in a swift, early appearance. Perhaps he had no choice. But he looked and sounded like a follower today, not a leader.
