Stamp out the negativity

THE US ambassador to the UK, Robert Wood Johnson IV, is a wise and cheerful soul. He has reason to be cheerful.

A scion of the family that created the Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical group, he comes in at around $4.2bn, which makes him one of the 500 richest people in the world.

He owns the New York Jets, and while his team has had an uneven run in recent years, there are high hopes for the forthcoming season.

Woody Johnson gave a most thoughtful talk about the long-term benefits of the UK-US relationship when he met a group of journalists shortly after his arrival, and he explained how he could see ways of developing that relationship much further. Now he has challenged the negative attitude that he has found here about Brexit. He is startled by the defeatism, and he is right to be.

Whatever view you take of that decision, there is no question that the general tone of the comment about Brexit from the world of officialdom has been negative.

And not just about Brexit; about the economy in general. We have a good example right now. Government figures yesterday show that the fiscal deficit last year was revised down to below £40bn, nearly £6bn less than the Office For Budget Responsibility was predicting as recently as March and £17bn less than it was expecting in March 2017. It gets better. For the first two months of this financial year, borrowing is running 25pc below that of a year earlier.

If things hold up like this, it should be possible to find extra money for the NHS without needing to increase tax rates – and even have some to spare.

Of course the figures may not hold up and it would be wise to set aside some cash for the next downturn. But an economy that thumps out large increases in tax revenues and is creating half a million jobs a year is not one that has ground to a halt, as the official GDP figures suggest.

Intriguingly, Bank of England chief economist Andy Haldane has changed his mind about the need for a rise in interest rates, as the minutes of the MPC revealed yesterday. He is still in a minority, but he has a good intuitive feeling for the resilience of the British economy that some members of the MPC lack. Expect that rate rise in August.

But why the negativity bias, evident on both sides of the Atlantic?

A couple of prominent writers have published books this year that seek to explain it. Professors Steven Pinker in Enlightenment Now, and Hans Rosling with Factfulness, both note the academic fashion for gloom. People who say things are getting better are dismissed as Panglossian or uncaring, while those who claim things are getting worse are heralded as sage.

It may be partly journalism: bad news is a better story. It may be partly false memories: harking back to a golden age of the past, focusing on the things that were indeed better but forgetting the longer list of things that were worse.

(Unemployment makes people unhappy – it is now the lowest since the 1970s.) Whatever the reasons, it is corrosive. Ambassador Johnson does us a service in highlighting it.

Now if he and his colleagues are managing to fix the Jets’ quarterback problem, a little local difficulty that goes back even further than our gloom about Brexit, he will have done well indeed.

Facing headwinds

IF THERE is one place where negativity bias has proved quite justified it is with Dixons Carphone, whose profits slumped yesterday.

It is butting into two headwinds. The mobile phone market is going ex-growth, and High Street retailing is being devastated by the online revolution. So what does it do?

Alex Baldock, its new chief executive, is positive, but that goes with the territory. Closing 92 underperforming stores out of its 700-plus outlets is miserable for the people losing their jobs, but there is a gale blowing through the retail sector that has yet to abate. It would be astounding were there not yet more closures in the near future.

Retail is detail, and running existing locations more sharply is part of the answer. But retail is also theatre – generating a sense of excitement about the shopping experience. People want to buy the stuff, but they want to be charmed and delighted as they do so. Tricky.