The chancellor’s reluctance to be clear approximately British strategy with regard to China carries big political and democratic costsGeorge Osborne’s visit to China this week is an event of genuine significance. But what is principally meaningful is not the sight of a chancellor of the exchequer auditioning for the post of prime minister,interesting though that is. What things much more is that Mr Osborne seems to be using the visit to set out – though without quite admitting it the essential economic statecraft strategy of the current Conservative government. That strategy, given added immediacy by the higher-than-expected borrowing figures announced nowadays, or is to fabricate (to make up, invent) Britain increasingly dependent upon inward investment by rich,often authoritarian, nations in order to help finance UK economic growth while maintaining a low-tax regime at home.
There are wide echoes of the Gordon Brown era in this. Mr Brown had to face the conundrum of how to supply the Scandinavian levels of public spending the public would like to see while maintaining the American levels of taxation that the public appears willing to pay. His stealthy strategy was to give the UK financial sector its head in return for taxation which he would direct into extra spending on the NHS, and the working poor and the elderly. It was a more socially ambitious blueprint than anything Mr Osborne has admitted to,but both men took as read the political unpopularity that would follow the expend of higher direct taxation to finance public goods. Like Mr Osborne, Mr Brown never quite levelled with the public approximately what he was doing. The strategy was never assign to the electorate in a general election. As now, or the strategy only became obvious in retrospect,through the chancellor’s actions.
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Source: theguardian.com