There’s a typically reflective piece in the FT this morning from Martin Wolf, pulling out his key themes from the World Economic Forum in Davos. Strangely, I wasn’t invited this year, so I will have to take his word for it…
The article considers the short and the long term challenges for the global economy, and the killer question of if and when to withdraw fiscal stimulus and start cutting public spending. The question is a global one, but is utterly relevant to our own election campaign.
Labour accuse the Tories of wanting to ‘strangle the recovery at birth’. The Tories accuse Labour of ignoring the ‘great bulk’ of the UK’s structural deficit. There are risks to both strategies, but Wolf also points to the longer term challenges of financial sector reform and a rebalancing of the global economy.
What interested me was his perspective on leadership and consensus. An ‘impressive ability to deal with the crisis’ was shown, but now we are back to the push and pull of everyday politics, it may be much harder to generate the kind of global consensus and willingness to work together that pulled us out of the crash.
Speaking of which, there is an interesting article in this weeks New Yorker (which can be read online) about the new Tea Party movement in the US. Really fascinating to see how a disgust with mainstream politics (and mostly with the ‘liberal’ elite) has led to such an organised, collective set of protest movements. This is definitely not a coalition that would make many moderates or Obama supporters (or indeed me) feel comfortable, but its fascinating to see how grass roots mobilisation is impacting on formal US politics.
