Blue Skies, Nothing but Blue Skies

The Budget is being down-graded as a political event.  That much is obvious from the tenor of news management from the Brown regime.  It will be a technical Budget necessary for the continuance of government business and undertakings - paying of salaries etc., but the data presented will be just that, presented without any serious action proposed to deal with what, by now, the world and its wife know is there. And, to some extent,  is discounting as we type. The politics of the Budget are being removed elsewhere, apart from the parliamentary pop-shy that will greet its actual presentation on Budget day.

The constitutional importance of this is profound.  For a major underpinning of the democratic government of the  nation state is the application both nationally and internationally of economic constraints applied to nation state units.   Which is precisely what  the Regime wishes to break down, in favour of the further development of global economic governance in both policy and institutions.

The international bodies that up to now have stepped in to discipline an incompetent national economic governance range from ad hoc bi-lateral arrangements (Abu Dhabi for Dubai), semi-formal regional groupings with some prepared positions agreed (the European Union frequently, but most recently and notably for Greece) and the IMF (which has been at it for so long and so regularly its interventions form books).  But in all these kinds of interventions one characteristic is dominant: the offending nation state is told what to do, and jumps to it, or it doesn't get the bail-out.  There is a temporary loss of sovereignty that reasserts itself as economic governance returns to competence.  There is usually losss of office by the government that brings intervention indignity upon a country.

The scenario where  international institutions are instrumentalised  to propagate an explanation of economic failure not as the result of governmental incompetence but the outcome of inadequate national and international economic governance policies and delivery mechanisms, where there is no shame and blame but a co-option of international resources to increase international economic co-operation and inter alia avoid internationally-caused economic conditions wreaking their effects unjustly on the people of a single country, is very attractive to a regime suffering from both national economic failure and globalist aspirations.  If the nation-state mind-set of the IMF interventions can be combined with the common action (for instance the push for a common fiscal stance) in the global community mind-set of the G20, plus a push for a permanent monitoring and response economic structure set up out of the skeletal systems extant, then a nation state Budget could be seen as a merely technical provision and local exercise.

The setting up, by Brown, in the Cabinet Office, of a group headed by Shriti Vadera, ostensibly to provide a permanent institutional structure for the G20 (currently provided ad hoc by whoever is the host government); the speeches by Mandelson that reinforce the no shame no blame recourses to the IMF, itself routinely monitoring all members annually - the  Article 4 consultations -  and proffering pretty insistent advice; the forces of Hell attacks upon the Chancellor of the Exchequer taken together with the Budget insouciance;  manifest Brown regime irritation with the euro area and its nascent intra-state institutions for resolving euro area problems of poor regional economic governance;  the regularly exemplified constitutional and institutional destructive behaviour towards the UK as a nation state under New Labour; and last but not least the delusional grandeur of Brown's personal vision for global elites in post democratic  administration,  are pointers.  The  political and personal blame  for our economic downfall hidden under a barrage of propaganda in this vein,  is attractive.

Change of this order is not gradual, it is catastrophic.  The United Kingdom is far too small an economy to unilaterally alter the architecture of states and their economic relationships, and the institutions of the post War settlement.  At the same time it is far too  large an economy to hope not to engender major damaging response from those involved in its economy both within and without the country.