Revealed: the fatal flaw Leading article Kenneth…

The Anna Karenina theory

Economy
Alf Young
Tolstoy has entered the debate on Britain’s fiscal policies

Film
Dharmendra Singh awards five stars to ‘Blue Valentine’

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10.02.11
No. 365

Film

Dharmendra Singh reviews ‘Blue Valentine’

Rating: 5/5 stars

‘You Always Hurt the Ones you Love.’ ‘Blue Valentine’ studies the breakdown of a marriage through beautiful and heartbreaking juxtaposed scenes of past joy and optimism with present scenes of misery and depression. Flitting back and forth in the marriage, it asks: Is romantic love the ultimate form of masochism?
     Fine young actors Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams play Dean and Cindy, who unite through a dogged courtship. Dean is easy-going, happy-go-lucky and content in his removal and packing company. He is chary of formal education, but has a philosopher’s outlook. Cindy is sexually over-active and, although occasionally frolicsome, is more mature than Dean. About five years on, romance becomes repulsion, and their marriage becomes one of inconvenience.
     Make no mistake; this is uncomfortable viewing – not the explicit sex, which (believe it or not) serves the story quite well – but the paranoia, pettiness and pugnacity in the couple’s interaction. They reach their nadir when he practically begs for affection, and she pleads with him to be more ambitious.
     No two actors have complemented each other this well for some time. I can’t get that entrancing scene, where Dean serenades Cindy, out of my head. Dean’s philosophical outpourings may be interpreted by some as drivel, but more sensitive viewers will detect the shattering honesty. A memorable maxim: ‘Girls spend their whole life looking for Prince Charming [Colin Firth presumably] and then they marry the guy who’s got a good job and is gonna stick around’.
     In an age where vapid acting is the vogue, Gosling is a novelty. He possesses a James Dean-like vulnerability, has a mournful countenance and oozes charm. He’d be my poster-on-the-wall if I were 13.
     We go to the movies – many of us – to escape real life. Comfortable as voyeurs, we let our favourite stars distract us and we forget our worries. ‘Blue Valentine’ reflects a truth no cinema can shield us from. It mustn’t be missed.

Economy

The Anna Karenina theory

Alf Young

At the beginning of each year the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the nearest thing to divine intervention in the world of UK economic analysis, comes up with its Green Budget. In it the institute analyses the choices facing whoever is delivering the real thing a few weeks later, usually in March.

     When the IFS published its latest green tome last week, previewing George Osborne’s second budget, the one message everyone seized on seemed sympathetic to the coalition’s core economic mantra since the day it was formed – unless we sort out Britain’s colossal budget deficit, a sustainable return to growth and prosperity for the people of these islands cannot be assured.
     Despite the pain – in lost jobs, sweeping cuts in public spending and squeezed living standards – there can be no Plan B. Or as Lady Thatcher herself once put it, there is no alternative. The opening paragraph of last week’s IFS press release appeared to endorse that uncompromising line.
     ‘Having set out his fiscal consolidation plan, it is important that chancellor George Osborne resist the temptation to engage in any significant net giveaway in the budget,’ the IFS opined. It was saying so days after UK GDP figures for the final quarter of 2010 had spooked everyone, recording a 0.5% contraction in output that couldn’t all be explained away by the great December freeze.
     If these numbers are confirmed by later revisions, the UK economy will have been at a virtual stand-still since David Cameron first entered Downing Street. In the wake of the great banking crash and the recession that followed, what little growth we’ve seen came in the dying months of Gordon’s Brown’s Labour administration. So might there not be some around George Osborne now urging a little bit of stimulus in next month’s package?
     Don’t do it, says the IFS. But even the renowned institute is capable of equivocating in these desperately uncertain times. Having noted that the UK is embarked in the biggest squeeze on spending over the next five years since at least the second world war, it points out that only Ireland and Iceland, out of 29 leading industrial countries, are now on course to deliver sharper falls in spending than we are.
     On the very next page of its press release, the IFS acknowledges that some of the more ambitious spending cuts may prove difficult to deliver. ‘Overall, with such large downside risks to the public finances, having alternative plans to hand could prove useful,’ it suggests. Wait a minute. Should there be a Plan B or not? At the press conference to launch its Green Budget, the institute’s deputy director reportedly made it clear the chancellor should have a Plan B and should be telling us about it. But perhaps not just yet.

He reminded his audience that, in ‘Anna Karenina’, Tolstoy closed by noting that, despite life’s ups and downs, happiness is less important than trying to live life in the right way.

     It’s not difficult to understand why that plan may be needed soon enough. On Burns Night, Bank of England governor Mervyn King went to Newcastle and made a rather chilling speech. King and his eight fellow members of the bank’s monetary policy committee (MPC) are supposed to set the trend in UK interest rates each month to ensure low and stable inflation.
     But apart from a six month period in 2009, the CPI measure of price inflation in the UK has been above target (2%) every month since 2007. Sometimes it’s been well above target. And now – thanks to soaring world commodity and food prices, oil back above $100 a barrel and George Osborne’s January hike in VAT – it is climbing again. The governor says CPI inflation could reach 5% again later this year.
     With the cost of living rising that fast against a backdrop of growing unemployment, higher taxes and subdued wage settlements, millions of families are feeling poorer. Real wages fell sharply last year and will fall again this year. According to Mervyn King they will end up no higher than they were in 2005. ‘One has to go back to the 1920s to find a time when real wages fell over a period of six years,’ he told his Newcastle audience.
     While King himself insists that, despite that inflation record, ‘the right course has been set and it is important we maintain it’, a growing minority within the MPC either wants interest rates to rise now or sees an early hike in bank rate as almost inevitable. While an early rise would be good news for savers who have seen their income hard hit, it would represent another cruel twist of the screw for all those millions of working families already facing, so the governor tells us, the most protracted squeeze in their living standards in nearly a century.
     With UK growth anaemic at best, the worst of the public spending cuts only rolling out from this April and rising inflation threatening to further dent the livings standards of millions, there could be plenty more unhappiness (the main theme of King’s speech) ahead. King paraphrased Tolstoy: ‘All happy economies are alike, each unhappy economy is unhappy in its own way’.
     He reminded his audience that, in ‘Anna Karenina’, Tolstoy closed by noting that, despite life’s ups and downs, happiness is less important than trying to live life in the right way. But Tolstoy was writing about families. In modern government, foregoing the happiness of millions in pursuit of a single-minded preoccupation with fiscal rectitude can only sustain for so long.      Whether George Osborne has a Plan B or not is not really the point. If things go on the way they are now, he will almost certainly need one long before Britain is next scheduled to go to the polls in 2015.

Alf Young is an award-winning journalist who writes regularly for the Scottish Review