Monnet's Masterpiece and the Democratic Deficit

The Eurozone is a contradiction wrapped in an oxymoron, inside a beautiful ideal. An elite project to safeguard peace and democracy in Europe that has led to rioting in the streets and the condemnation of a national referendum. There are two deficits in Europe; one fiscal, the other democratic.

There is no such thing as Euroscepticism. For the European project is about ever-closer union. The Americans seek to form a more perfect union. The Europeans, we’ll settle for just being closer. Therefore, to be Euroscpetic is about as useful as grumbling about the weather. Everyone complains, but no one ever does anything about it.

Like many, I was flabbergasted by Georgos Papendreou’s decision to hold a referendum on the latest bailout package to Greece. How could he be so irresponsible? How could he be so ungrateful? In what position is he to dictate terms? But this immediate reaction, whilst understandable, is as stupid as it is arrogant. In October 2009 the Greek people voted in elections. They gave Papandreou’s Pasok Party a working majority in parliament. Then, a bunch of really bad things happened one after another, and France and Germany imposed a further austerity package on Greece in exchange for a 50% haircut on Greek sovereign debt. What this means is that in exchange for a partial default, the Greeks will cede control of their fiscal policy to Merkel and Sarkozy, or whoever will beat the two bumbling leaders in 2012 and 2013 respectively. When the Greek people voted in 2009, they assumed they were voting for a parliament that would control its own fiscal future. This being no longer the case, how can any man, woman or Eurozone leader deny the Greeks' right to a referendum?

The Euro hasn't worked because the Eurozone remained a group of disparate nations which seemed surprised to find themselves with one currency and one interest rate. And the catastrophic rescue attempts have reflected this. Sarkozy cares only about the state of his toxic-Greek-debt-exposed banks, Merkel with inflation, and Berlusconi with staying in power. The connection between a democratic deficit and the failure of the Euro is that the Euro required far greater integration of member states, integration that would have required either referenda that would have been tricky for governments to get ascension to, or simply ignoring the electorate and giving away not just monetary, but fiscal powers to Brussels. The lack of democratic legitimacy in the Eurozone it's hamartia.

The solution to this crisis is the same now as it was two years ago – print money. Eurozone countries have vast debts, like the United Kingdom, like the United States, like Japan. But unlike these countries, the European Central bank (ECB) has acted about as economically adept as its acronym-sake, the English Cricket Board, could be expected to. It hasn’t just done nothing. The until very recently Chair of the ECB, Jean-Claude Trichet, actually raised interest rates to 1.5%. Raised them at the same time that Portugal found itself exactly level with the Atlantic. Germany, the main beneficiary of the Euro, is still terrified of the printing presses, because the last time they used them there was hyperinflation and fascism. Despite the fact that most of the money being used in Europe is German, the Germans have benefited more than anyone from the single currency. Without it, the Deutschmark would be painfully expensive, and Germany’s exports would be inaccessible to the world. 

It’s a great shame that the Euro is failing, because the EU, Monnet’s masterpiece, has fostered peace in Europe (at least between its members) since 1945. We take this for granted now, and the idea of Germany invading Belgium tomorrow seems absurd. But it remains one of the great achievements of modern human history. Throw in the fact that free trade is a jolly good thing and you have yourself a success story.

The people get the government they deserve, and this time is no different. We weren’t paying attention. We weren’t voting; we were consuming, and we didn’t care by what means.  I find it frankly embarrassing that, as a European, we cannot sort this mess out. We knock the Americans endlessly for their missteps, their failures in global leadership and for electing sub-standard presidents. Shame on us. It was hubris and we had it coming. And if the Greeks have taught us anything, it’s that hubris is nothing to worry about.

Capitalism 4S (and pie)

Peter Mandelson once famously (okay, not famously, notably) declared that New Labour was ‘intensely relaxed about people becoming filthy rich’. And in many ways, it’s a sensible sentiment, even for a nominally socialist party. For wealth is a reward for wealth created. You need not go into politics or run a charity in order to good works on this earth. If you run a business that employs people and pays them a fair wage, that is wealth creation. If there’s no money being created, then there’s no money to be redistributed by the government. The pie is grown, and then those responsible for that growth get to keep a bigger chunk. The rest of us get to share in the proceeds of growth, like schools, hospitals and the Millennium Dome.

That model held, or seemed to hold, until the entire edifice of the pie (I’m in too deep with this metaphor now to simply saunter out) collapsed, having been grown, not with lovely filling (sustainable growth, new technologies), but with air (derivatives, credit default swaps and lies).

Ed Miliband’s speech at the Labour Conference was poorly received. This should come as no surprise. The Labour Leader was attempting to do what only two post-war Prime Ministers, Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher, have done - reinvent British politics. Tony Blair was not a Tory; he simply operated in the post-Thatcher orthodoxy. Attlee transformed his nation through nationalisation, his most famous of course being in health, whilst Thatcher achieved her place with privatisation (though of course emphatically not of the National Health Service) and the entrenchment of the neo-liberal settlement in the UK. Forget predatory companies, the subtitle of Miliband’s speech might have been ‘pro business, anti-business as usual’.

Financial markets, Wall Street in the USA and the City of London in the UK, took an enormous slice of the economic pie in the 2000s yet did little to grow it. The 1920s and 1930s had the explosion of, amongst other things, the auto industry. The 2000s had finance. Alright, it also had broadband internet, Twitter and the iPad. But how many employees does Twitter, the ubiquitous social network site employ worldwide? 300. Now the auto industry. It currently employs around 350,000 in the US alone, and that's just the people who actually make the cars. Then there are over two million who sell, repair, or fill them with petrol. Of course I’m not including the workers who drive them with massive payloads, insure them with massive policies, nor those who built and then patrolled the roads. I could go on. That is wealth creation. Who cares if Henry Ford got filthy rich? Meanwhile, finance is the mere movement around of other people’s money through huge risk taking. What the 2008-present financial crisis taught us is that this is not wealth creation. It is a zero-sum game that creates inequality and enormous instability.

The evidence is that, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, by 2013 there will be a further 600,000 British children living in poverty whilst those born in the early 1990s will retire 25% poorer than their parents. This is the sense of injustice that the 99% of us are feeling. That somehow the game is rigged. That those who work hard, put money away and grumble only a little bit, will always in the end get screwed by a hedge fund short selling AIG stock. And so if the game is rigged, change the game. And as obscure as it may seem, that is what Miliband is attempting to do. He wants to foster a capitalism that rewards job creators, innovators, and curtails the runaway dealings of those who see nothing beyond the quick private buck which quickly turns to public debt . This is not a straightforward distinction to make, but it is a worthy one.

The financial crisis might just have brought us into a new era of British politics. If the country is won over by Miliband’s rhetoric, his beliefs and, yes, his personality, then he might add his name to that short list of transformational figures. If not, he will, like Michael Foot, be regarded by posterity as a loser and a fool. Talk about risk taking.

It's Getting Better All The Time

“Hasn’t been born yet” – Michael Johnson on who can beat Usain Bolt.

The global economic model hinges on the concept of infinite growth. When you put money into a pension as a young person, you expect to get more out of it than you put in. Not because you got lucky and invested in Apple stock twenty years ago (though if you had spent that $5,700 in 1997 on Apple stock instead of the PowerBook laptop, you would have made in the region of $330,000) but because, generally speaking, growth just happens. Our entire way of life is based around this very fact. Economic growth means people will have more money and so stocks and shares will be worth more. Hello Costa del Sol. It’s why companies invest – they believe they will make more money in the future. It’s a big part of the reason why Japan hasn’t seen consistent economic growth in two decades. Their population is shrinking, so companies see no incentive to invest, and in doing so they have essentially abolished the business cycle.

I was wondering whether the same thing might ever occur in sport. Take tennis, and the recent useful example of the US Open final. The upward trajectory of men’s tennis has been undeniable in the last twenty years. No sooner did Pete Sampras achieve an unbreakable 14 major record, then Roger Federer came a long and smashed it in six years. Then this guy called Rafael Nadal comes along and beats Federer in pretty much every match they play. And now Novak Djokovic, playing better than both these guys, is currently racking up a faintly bizarre 64-2 record for the season. Permanent growth. How long does Djokovic have until some kid comes out of nowhere to be greater still?

Maybe longer than we think, if athletics is anything to go by. World records are a rare event these days, even with the spectacular Usain Bolt. Humans have physical limitations; the 100m will never be run in four seconds, even if the mile could (quite easily these days) be completed in under four minutes. Usain Bolt runs with 1000 pounds of force, so could there be a time when the human body simply collapses under its own force? One hundred metres is a short distance, with just a few technical stages. Room for improvement is minimal. "A pen is harder to refine than a tractor”, as Ato Bolden, four-time Olympic medallist, neatly puts it. Where can further progress come from? We’ve improved diets, training regimes and sports psychology. That sounds a lot like Tyler Cowen’s low-hanging fruit.

Over the last forty years, the 100m world record was broken in tiny increments of 0.1 and 0.2 seconds. Then, out of nowhere, a man seemingly too tall for the distance smashed it once, and then smashed it again (Richard Keys would be so proud). And herein lies our answer. Usain Bolt is the human embodiment of that new technology that comes along, and revolutionises the global economy. Humans were around for quite sometime before the invention of modern agriculture. Horses were the number one mode of transportation until the steam engine was conceived and these things call trains came along. Progression is never linear. Right now, the world is suffering from too few engines of growth. We are stuck, like those 100m athletes before Bolt, at incremental growth. This is not to say that governments and entrepreneurs should be lax, and simply assume that a technology or advancement will come along and save the world. But Bolt does offer a grain (cf Norman Borlaug and the Dwarf Wheat, the technology that saved the lives of millions of Indians) of hope. That if we keep trying to run as fast as possible, we'll get there in the end. 

Except that it's infinite, so we won't. But the point remains.

‘abhorrent to society at large’

This month a man and a woman were jailed in Birmingham for having sex with each other. This was justified by the fact that the man and woman were also known as father and daughter, and incest is against the law in the UK. This has been the case since 1908 when, due to increasing concerns over child protection, Parliament passed the Incest Act, which for the first time stipulated incest as an offense. Incest is defined as sex, either heterosexual or homosexual, between an individual and their parent, grandparent, child, grandchild, sibling, half-sibling, uncle, aunt, nephew or niece. There is a maximum sentence of fourteen years imprisonment for the crime.

Forget your own instinctive views on incest – it is against the law to prevent birth defects. In the same way that wolves mate with packs thousands of miles away to avoid producing genetically weaker offspring, we cannot take our sisters or cousins to the prom for the same reason. But in Arizona and four other US states, cousin marriage is legal if you can provide proof of infertility or if you are too old to procreate. So why shouldn’t this be extended to siblings, aunts, uncles and so on?

In his statement to the court, judge James Burbidge denounced their relationship as “illicit”, calling it “a relationship that is regarded as abhorrent to society at large”. It’s sweet that the judge should take my feelings into account when handing down his sentences, but I do have several concerns. Perhaps you do find incest abhorrent. And not just the idea of yourself engaging in a sexual relationship with a family member, but anyone doing so. What is your specific complaint? Are you concerned about sick children being conceived? Well, what if the protagonists were, like in Arizona, infertile or too old to procreate? What of a homosexual couple? There is very little chance of conception in that case. Or do you just find the idea a bit icky?

Tolerance is a word that is often employed by those who wish to demonstrate open-mindedness. Except that tolerance isn’t what a lot of people think it is, or at least it is often misused. Tolerance isn’t accepting homosexual marriage because you agree that everyone should have the right to marry whom they love, regardless of sexual orientation. Tolerance is deeply disliking the idea of homosexuality, including the idea that gays might marry, yet supporting it anyway. Toleration is to, in the words of Robin Hanson, “tolerate things that actually bother you”. Gay marriage will become law in liberal democracies not because people are becoming more tolerant, but because they are less bothered by homosexuality. So who are we to be intolerant toward consenting sibling-sibling or father-daughter relationships? The government need not encourage it, but then again it need not encourage gay marriage. Simply not ban it.

Categories of behaviour, whether fashion, interracial marriage, homosexuality or incest are historically and culturally specific. Our ideas on these topics are grounded in early twenty-first century social positioning. The most common anthropological example of homosexuality in ancient Greece is a misnomer, due to the dangers of crude cultural relativism – practices, whether homosexual or otherwise are usually conceptualised in relation to a particular gender order. Homosexual acts were certainly not free of hierarchical constructs including class and gender: boys, women or slaves were acceptable partners for adult men in ancient Greece The point remains however that homosexual practices did not carry the same social and moral vilification that has characterised Euro-American cultures, in particular from the late nineteenth century. Acknowledgement of temporal and social contexts of social attitudes is vital. For example, in the 1950s and 1960s, declaration of homosexuality was diagnosed as a sign of mental illness. Today, secrecy is viewed as a sign of psychological trouble.

In our episteme, the term Foucault adopted to describe an epoch in which knowledge is grounded, incest, like paedophilia, remains abhorrent in all circumstances according to the law. But so was homosexuality, interracial marriage, divorce and many other elements of modern liberal life that we take for granted. This is by no means to equate the consensual sex between two related people in Birmingham with homosexual relations, nor to the devastating crime of paedophilia, but it reminds us that what is acceptable today may not be tomorrow, and what is regarded as abhorrent right now may not be so in the future. Though Arsene Wenger's transfer policy is clearly crazy in any episteme.

Absolute Impunity & Fitch

Imagine being told you have to lose weight. Of course you can’t, you are thin and beautiful, but suspend your disbelief for this short thought experiment. You are warned that without drastic action, your very life is in danger. So you do what you are told. Yet every time you forgo a biscuit, every time you disembark deliriously after an hour on the treadmill, you are injected with lard by those very people who told you to get healthy. That would be a little annoying. And that’s essentially how José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, feels.

Portugal’s credit rating was downgraded four notches in July for reasons that will not astonish anyone: high debt and low growth. Portugal received a €78bn bailout from the European Central Bank in May, due to the already high cost of borrowing it was facing. Essentially, no one would lend them money at a reasonable rate, so they had to go to the ECB. Subsequently Moody’s, the credit rating agency, promptly downgraded Portugal anyway. The downgrade is a result of Moody’s belief that Portuguese debt is more risky because a default is more likely. Yet in downgrading their credit rating, thereby making Portugal’s cost of borrowing even higher, they make a default much more probable. It is a painfully depressing self-fulfilling prophecy.

There are three main credit rating agencies, each with names more ominous than the last. Fitch, Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s. Rating agencies are the people who calculate the risk involved in financial transactions, and help set the price of German debt much lower than say that of Argentina. So who is the European Union to judge and complain? After all, the rating agencies are experts, and the Eurozone is simply broke and bitter about it. The problem begins, as so many seem to do these days, with the financial crisis that began in 2007, and which people optimistically thought had ended in 2009.

The crisis itself began when hundreds of billions of dollars of US mortgage debt was rated as triple-A, the safest possible, but turned out to be worthless. Who rated these junk securities as triple-A? You guessed it, Fitch, Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s. A combination of conflicts of interest, and some cases where the rating agencies didn’t understand the securities they were rating, led to financial ruin. The US Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission called the rating agencies “essential cogs in the wheels of financial destruction”. Many parties were responsible for the financial crisis – banks, rating agencies, governments and consumers. The impunity enjoyed by banks and bankers is notorious. Less well known is that of the rating agencies.

Standard & Poor’s demanded $4trn in cuts by the US government to keep their triple A status, and they haven’t got it. But say what you want about members of Congress (and I would be perfectly content with the US political system being downgraded to junk status), they do enjoy democratic legitimacy. If Standard & Poor's decides to downgrade US debt, it will be a fine example of the supremacy of financial leaders over the political. But who regulates the regulators? EU leaders want to set up their own, more dovish rating agency, but that will not solve the problem.

I leave you with this thought: the World Bank has hired as its new Treasurer Madelyn Antoncic, who is described on the organisation’s website as an "experienced senior executive from the financial industry who has been active in the regulatory and policy debate". Experience she gained as Chief Risk Officer from 2002-2007 at Lehman Brothers. You cannot conceive of the sheer tonnage of canned tuna in my immediate possession.

My fault, your fault, their fault, default

The United States is three weeks from defaulting on its obligations. Ordinarily, at this point what would happen is the party in opposition (though it’s hard to tell who that is in this case) does a lot of heel dragging, but grudgingly decides not to send the US and world economies into a downturn that would make the 2007-2009 crisis look like an amusing typo. And in many ways we are in luck. The President, Senate Majority Leader and House Minority Leader all want to raise the debt ceiling. As does the Republican Speaker of the House. But, as with many things in US politics, it’s not so straight forward.

The US owes $14trn, and it needs some more, hence the necessity to raise the debt ceiling. Throw in the fact that the economic recovery has been anemic at best, and you understand why unemployment, the truest misery index, has remained stubbornly above 9%. Republicans are demanding major spending cuts and not a penny of ‘job-destroying tax increases’ in order for them to agree to not crashing the global economy. America has an economy problem.  America has a political problem. It’s a marriage made in K Street.

This is not to say that Democrats are blameless. In the same way that they could have passed a budget deal before the 2010 midterms and therefore avoid a near government shutdown, they could have voted to raise the debt ceiling when they were in charge of the House. Furthermore, in the years of total Republican domination of the executive and legislative branches, Democrats repeatedly voted against raising the debt ceiling in protest against the policies of the Bush Administration. Neither side is blameless in this debate.

America has not run out of money. It has run out of the legal authority to borrow money, a legal authority that it can grant itself. They are in the enviable position of being their own bank manager. And if they do, they’re fine. People are falling over themselves to purchase US Treasury bonds. They can’t get enough of the stuff. In some cases, some yields are working out at negative interest rates. Simply put, there is a seller’s market for US debt. And it’s not surprising when you look around the world. Europe is suffocated by sovereign debt, the Chinese make it difficult for foreigners to buy bonds whilst the greenback remains a reliable friend, even after the near trillion dollars of quantitative easing.

Right now, America is the Titanic, but with satellite navigation and headlights. It can see the iceberg coming. And it is literally (at least in this dodgy metaphor) deciding whether or not it should hit it. America is not like Portugal. It has never defaulted on its loans. Also, if Portugal were to default, the world will not have lost $14trn. I’ve never had more than £50 in my wallet at any one time, but that sounds like a lot of money. And it’s mostly held by US citizens in pension plans, not by the cackling Chinese and their plans for global domination.

The debate in Washington, and indeed around the world, is thus: are the Republicans that crazy? And the answer is no, probably. Republican policy is, if not dictated by, then written for big business and the super rich. Hence their strident opposition to all tax rises on the uber wealthy, and to closing tax loopholes for oil companies. But if the US defaults, everybody loses. If you own anything other than gold and wheat, you are in big trouble. And the Republicans know this because their backers are telling them as much. If America defaults, big business loses. This is why there will be an agreement to raise the debt ceiling. Probably.

The US has a medium to long term debt problem. It doesn't need a short term one as well. John Boehner is a serious guy, and the main danger isn’t that he doesn’t vote yea, but that he can’t take his Tea Party infused caucus with him. The world economy is in the process of recovering from a nasty bout of pneumonia. Will the Republicans vote for Spanish influenza? No, because their financial backers don’t want it. So sit tight until August 2^nd. Though I’d stock up on canned goods, just in case.

First Past the Net Post

The Alternative Vote campaign was not a good advertisement for direct democracy in the United Kingdom. Truths became half-truths, and half-truths became Goebbels. The Yes campaign started with leads in the polls, but in the end was defeated by a margin of more than two to one. This has been explained as punishment directed at the Liberal Democrats for repudiating their own manifesto, a glorious endorsement of the first-past-the-post system or because Eddie Izzard isn’t very funny. But of course it’s none of these; it’s because we like tennis.

The essence of tennis scoring is to exaggerate slight differences between players, and in doing so create clear results. In 2007 Rafael Nadal defeated Roger Federer in the final of Roland Garros. This is because Rafael Nadal always defeats Roger Federer in the final of Roland Garros. In 2007, Nadal defeated Federer 6-3 4-6 6-3 6-4. Three sets to one, twenty-two games to sixteen, whatever way you look at it, a comprehensive victory. Except, only because of the electoral or rather scoring system. Break points are to tennis what marginal constituencies are to British elections. In that final, Federer earned seventeen break points to Nadal’s ten. But whilst the Spaniard converted four of his, the Swiss managed a measly one. It was as if Lord Ashcroft was funnelling winners to Nadal at those vital moments.

It may appear paradoxical to cite a match that took three days to be completed, but the same principle held when John Isner finally defeated Nicholas Mahut in the match that would not end at Wimbledon last year. The statistics bordered on the fantastical. The match lasted over eleven hours, the final set included 138 games and the IBM scoreboard broke at 47-all, which bodes well for our cyber attack defences. Isner won the match, but he did so by winning a minority of the points. Frenchman Mahut nominally ‘won’ the match 502-478. But as Federer knows all too well, not all points are worth the same. A double fault when 40-0 up matters far less than a missed drop shot at 30-40.

If you live in a marginal constituency, you are, for want of a more attractive analogy, a break point. You matter. If, however, you reside in the bluest of blue hamlets or the deep red of the northern inner cities, you are a 40-0 point. Like a low level US federal employee during a government shutdown, you are non-essential.

All of which of course means very little. This was an intellectual exercise, and not a very intellectual one at that. Tennis has a reputation in this country for being a middle class sport, played in country clubs by well to do ladies and gentlemen wearing their all-whites. Unfair or not, its scoring system means that tennis is a place where Conservative Britain meets conservative Britain.

In tennis you cannot play out the clock. You cannot take the ball to the corner flag, and you cannot kick it away. The match is over when your opponent is defeated. But the 12^th Century French aristocrats that invented the sport weren’t so stupid as to conceive of a game with no time limit in a region of the world that is forever blighted by that awful faux-meteorological motif ‘scattered showers’ without fixing the scoring system first. First-past-the-post, with notable exceptions, delivers majority governments. Tennis scoring separates winners from losers despite oftentimes tiny differences. What do Nick Clegg and Nicholas Mahut have in common? Now we know.

The Colour of Clay

The grass may need cutting at Wimbledon, but there’s only one grand slam where the court is alive, and that is Roland Garros. Only on clay are you playing on someone’s face.

Clay can lay claim to being the most aesthetically pleasing surface, and when the sun is shining, I cannot think of a better looking face than that of the Monte-Carlo Country Club, where the glistening Mediterranean caresses the Monegasque coast. But behind the Angelina Jolie looks is a dangerous, volatile personality.

To spend a day staring at a clay court is to watch her many moods. In bright sunshine, she is golden, tawny brown, a sea of tranquility to contrast with the fierce battle taking place on her surface.

But she changes when the sun goes down. She doesn’t just slow down serves, she drains energy from her pallet. A match with life and speed and relentless vigour slows down sometimes slightly, sometimes dramatically, as if under the spell of the surface. A day at the beach is transformed into a week in the trenches.

The rallies are extended, the grunting becomes more pronounced and the mood gets darker. Everything gets harder. As if life bleeds from the players and it’s that what turns the surface dark. It’s volcanic, sulphuric, powdered rust – a million miles from the bucket and spade post card. Where once there were shadows, now only muscles. In the sunshine, the players dance over the surface, but when it won’t come out to play, they are shackled ankle-deep in quick sand.

Clay is the surface made most malleable by the weather. In warm and dry conditions, it hardens and speeds up, but when cloudy and humid, it slows quite dramatically. Slow conditions paradoxically favour the bigger hitters, as they have the requisite power to overcome both their opponent and the clouds.

When the court is swept, the lines cleared and the sun blocked, the court is baptised, and the trailing player is given a second chance.

There’s something satisfying about the idea of blaming the weather and having physics on your side. The idea that when the sun goes out, it doesn’t just make you feel lethargic, it slows things down at the particle level. Shifting blame is the world’s favourite game. But tennis at Roland Garros must be a close second.

Labour's (David) Miliband Problem

Labour has a problem, and it goes by the name of Miliband. But it’s not Ed that is a cause for concern (at least not yet), rather his brother and defeated Labour Leadership contender, David. To state the obvious, David Miliband is not the leader of the Labour Party, and as such, even almost one year on he acts as a very visible sign of the path not taken.

The former Foreign Secretary is what Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight would call a ‘ghost’. Not because he is admirably thin, nor because he is particularly pale, but because candidate David has been usurped by the ghost of David, like the deceased hated husband who can now do no wrong.

Ghost David would have gained far more than 800 seats in the local elections, and would have orchestrated a miraculous Labour victory in Scotland. Ghost David would out do the Prime Minister every week at PMQs, framing him as a bully that panders to the vileness of the Tory right and the mendacious Liberal Democrats. Ghost David would have the Labour Party twenty points clear in the opinion polls.

Victorious candidates always live with a ghost or two. William Hague had Margaret Thatcher for company, Barack Obama had Hilary Clinton and Ron Greenwood had Brian Clough. Ed Miliband has it tougher than most; for 'Mr Miliband' once meant David.

There are still (probably) four years before a general election will take place in the UK. The result will be determined, as ever, by economics. If the Osborne plan works, the deficit is reduced and a pre-election budget delivers tax cuts for the middle classes, a Conservative majority is the most likely outcome. If, however, the economy is still flat-lining in 2015 and people feel poorer than they did five years earlier, a Labour victory is probable. Policy and even personality is marginalised when the saliency of the economy is high. That the economy (over which Prime Ministers and Chancellors, and to an even greater extent Leaders of the Opposition have only a modest influence) trumps issues in terms of importance in elections, leads one to ponder whether one of the vital foundations of representative democracy is discredited, but that is an academic diversion.

There are murmurings in the Labour Party and the media about the performance of Ed Miliband. Some of the criticisms are fair and should be taken on board, most are unwarranted and mean-spirited. But in the battle between a person and a ghost, I’d always opt for the former, if for no other reason than a man (or woman) is better than a myth.