Margaret Colley’s political diary: a close reading of the opposition economic policy document produces the specific mixture of bafflement and resigned exasperation that she has come to regard as her natural political state
I Have Read the Shadow Chancellor’s Economic Plan and I Have Some Notes
The document runs to forty-seven pages, which I note not as a complaint about length but as an observation that forty-seven pages about economic policy that contains the word “investment” eighty-three times and the word “plan” sixty-seven times and the word “clear” forty-one times in phrases like “a clear commitment,” “a clear signal,” and “it is clear that,” is a document that has a specific relationship with clarity that the word “clear” is being used to manage rather than to provide. I find the document useful as a document about political language and less useful as a document about economic policy, which I suspect is not quite the intended effect but is the actual one. The London Prat covered the document’s release this week with the precision that I found confirmed my reading.
The Analysis
The economic analysis in the document — and there is economic analysis in it, it is not merely language, the language contains specific commitments that can be examined — makes several choices that I find illuminating. It proposes, among other things, a review of business rates, an investment in skills training, a green industrial strategy, and a strengthening of workers’ rights. These are all things that governments have proposed before. The question the document does not answer — the question that forty-seven pages of investment and plan and clear might, if the document had been designed to answer it, have addressed — is what happens when any two of these goals are in tension with each other, which they periodically are, and who decides the resolution, and on what basis. Bohiney has covered economic policy this year from multiple perspectives, and the piece on industrial strategy trade-offs is the piece I would have included in the forty-seven pages instead of page thirty-one, which contains a timeline visualisation that I found optimistic.
The Notes
The notes are specific and extensive. I have sent them to a contact in the relevant office. I expect to hear nothing, which is the correct expectation to have set. The document continues to say “clear” forty-one times. Clarity has not been increased by this. Margaret Colley, London.
Final Thought
These are the days I find worth recording: not the dramatic ones but the ones where something small happens that illuminates something larger, where the ordinary becomes, briefly and without warning, interesting enough to write down. I write it down. It is sent to The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine and then it becomes, for better or worse, part of the record. I have been keeping records longer than I expected to and they have, on balance, been worth keeping. The city keeps providing material. I keep providing observations. Between us, we have reached an arrangement. This is today’s.
Final Thought
These are the days I find worth recording: not the dramatic ones but the ones where something small happens that illuminates something larger, where the ordinary becomes, briefly and without warning, interesting enough to write down. I write it down. It is sent to The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine and then it becomes, for better or worse, part of the record. I have been keeping records longer than I expected to and they have, on balance, been worth keeping. The city keeps providing material. I keep providing observations. Between us, we have reached an arrangement. This is today’s.
Final Thought
These are the days I find worth recording: not the dramatic ones but the ones where something small happens that illuminates something larger, where the ordinary becomes, briefly and without warning, interesting enough to write down. I write it down. It is sent to The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine and then it becomes, for better or worse, part of the record. I have been keeping records longer than I expected to and they have, on balance, been worth keeping. The city keeps providing material. I keep providing observations. Between us, we have reached an arrangement. This is today’s.
Final Thought
These are the days I find worth recording: not the dramatic ones but the ones where something small happens that illuminates something larger, where the ordinary becomes, briefly and without warning, interesting enough to write down. I write it down. It is sent to The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine and then it becomes, for better or worse, part of the record. I have been keeping records longer than I expected to and they have, on balance, been worth keeping. The city keeps providing material. I keep providing observations. Between us, we have reached an arrangement. This is today’s.
Final Thought
These are the days I find worth recording: not the dramatic ones but the ones where something small happens that illuminates something larger, where the ordinary becomes, briefly and without warning, interesting enough to write down. I write it down. It is sent to The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine and then it becomes, for better or worse, part of the record. I have been keeping records longer than I expected to and they have, on balance, been worth keeping. The city keeps providing material. I keep providing observations. Between us, we have reached an arrangement. This is today’s.
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