Sit back and enjoy the ride to a dystopian, impoverished future
COLUMNIST
WHEN you’re Chancellor and the economy is getting flushed down the pan, then the best way out is to pretend driverless cars will save the future. That future being four years away. And that Chancellor being Philip Hammond.
Forget the meaningless stuff about stamp duty scrapped for first-time buyers (talk about fiddling while Rome burns and all that).
It was driverless car technology which Hammond pinned his postBrexit hopes on amid some dire growth forecasts in his budget.
It made for a sorry – some might say distasteful spectacle – as the Tory benches laughed heartily at Mr Hammond’s bad jokes about Strepsils amid his admission that things are looking bad.
I mean, who cares about people’s livelihoods when we can chuckle at a line about what he’s drinking?
Anyway, the Institute for Fiscal Studies – a beacon of objectivity and respect when it comes to all things economics – says the economy will have lost £65bn by 2021. Average earnings will be lower than forecast and still below 2008 levels.
“We are in danger of losing not just one, but getting on for two decades of earnings growth,” says IFS’ Paul Johnson.
And still we are in the throes of austerity. A jaw-dropping, £12bn worth of welfare cuts are still needed.
There will be much less for the government to spend on pretty much everything.
What to do when such unremitting bad news is contained in your economic masterplan? Pretend driverless technology is the panacea.
A few years ago I wrote of an imagined future (2019) where the PM was still David Cameron (got that wrong), Britain had left the EU (got that right), health and education provision were increasingly privatised (yep), local authorities had been crippled by budget cuts (that was an easy one to predict), and despite the reality being otherwise Scotland and Wales pretended they were independent anyway (reckon we’re going that way).
Despite the great social injustice in this not-so-distant future, a “quiet sort of apathy has becalmed the country, nobody is angry about anything any much any more”. That’s kind of how it is now. Although, I suppose, there is anger – people are angry with each other, those they disagree with (mainly over Brexit).
You see that in the vitriol in Brexitsupporting newspapers targeted at anyone who has the temerity to question the path.
And you see it daily on social media when any kind of report or story suggests that Brexit will actually be a disaster.
But there’re no protests on the streets. The architects of the current chaos which has befallen our country are still in power.
So when the Chancellor basically admits that fact in his budget speech, well, admits the economy’s in a disastrous state without ever saying it’s because of Brexit, then where does he turn? Driverless cars.
“It will happen, I can promise you,” he evangelically told the Today programme.
“It is happening already... It is going to revolutionise our lives, it is going to revolutionise the way we work. And for some people this will be very challenging.” The people who’ll find it most challenging are those in government who will have to deal with this supposed revolution when there’s been serious lack of investment in the road network which this driverless technology will use.
No doubt the future will be filled with wondrous things like helpful artificial intelligence and autonomous machinery, which might well be brilliant.
But after 20 years where nobody feels any better off, most of us won’t be able to afford anything like that anyway.