Gordon Brown’s bizarre grin as he delivered his doomed plan to cut MP’s expenses via YouTube has been mocked in so many quarters that I have no intention of adding much, but you know it’s bad when John Prescott calls your smile the “worst in the world”.
And he was spot on. It was strange, fleeting and fake, as if he was a latter day, living victim of the infamous and bizarre experiments with galvanic electricity that inspired Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
But perhaps it’s evidence that Labour is trying to snatch the optimistic agenda now that Cameron and co. have switched to extolling the virtues of austerity and talking up the mess we’re in, possibly as the size of the task they’re about to inherit dawns on them.
It was a tack also adopted by business secretary Lord Mandelson in his speech to the CBI on Wednesday, as he warned that excessive negativity and doom-mongering would lead the UK into a spiral of “inexorable economic decline”.
The culprits? The Tories, obviously, and journalists: “We seem to be seeing a deliberate political or media ploy to move us from recognising how severe the present recession is, to believing that we can never recover or be as strong again,” he said.
“Sapping our nation's will to succeed won't help us win in global markets. So we need to avoid talk of austerity becoming a licence to talk down the country and to cut back on our capabilities and confidence.
“If we do not have confidence in ourselves, why should others? If we do not believe in our capabilities, how are we going to persuade investors to do so?”
It’s a fair point and one made more interesting by a poll in the Financial Times last week which revealed that, when questioned about the economy’s prospects, journalists were the most negative profession. Ben Page, managing director of Ipsos MORI, told the publication that “the most miserable bastards in Britain are in fact the journalists, 96% of whom think [it] is going to get worse”.
It’s uncertain why hacks are so predisposed to gloom at the moment, but the fact that the newspaper and magazine publishing industries are on their knees probably doesn’t help. To echo a point made by FT writer Brain Groom about his own publication, here at GB we hope we cover both sides of the argument and are neither discouraging nor fancifully optimistic.
However, if the rest of the Fourth Estate do insist on talking everything down, Mandelson is right to urge us to try and be more positive. Entrepreneurs have surely been affected by general sentiment as well as economic reality, although as the recession continues, it does of course become harder to separate the two. Could negativity mean that yesterday’s cost-cutting measure is today’s job cut? I believe so.
If that’s the case, it’s a dangerous attitude for small businesses to adopt. Blithely cutting resources across the board could leave companies paralysed when things start to improve, and even delay the much anticipated upturn if enough business owners are plagued by pessimism.
In The Guardian, Andrew Sparrow wrote that Mandelson’s speech suggested that the recession is “a psychological as well as economic event”. The danger is that the psychological event becomes an economic one as pessimism creates a damaging negative feedback loop. Chin up.