I’m no great connoisseur of underwear, but I’m sure the buyer could have shopped around – after all you can get three pairs for a fiver down at Peckham Rye market.
Joking aside, the auction was of course in aid of a noble cause, namely the victims of Madoff’s £65bn fraud. However, it does go some way to emphasise how the villains of the last recession (see also Fred Goodwin and Dick Fuld) remain in the public consciousness long after they fell from grace.
There’s a good reason for this of course, for the longer the UK economy continues to struggle, the more backward looking the politicians become in identifying scapegoats. Take the Cabinet’s recent media interviews and the politicians’ ongoing insistence on passing the buck back to Gordon Brown’s last government for the fiscal mess we find ourselves in today.
They have a point of course, but the exact nature of economists’ new warnings about a lack of “Plan B” were directed squarely at the drastic spending cuts introduced by the Chancellor of the here and now, George Osborne.
Today’s announcement that UK economic policy is backed (for now) by the IMF should be greeted as welcome news, at least as a symbolic endorsement of our stability as a G8 nation. But, how long until the names Brown and Osborne are again dragged through the mud (and hung out to dry) in the name of economic progress? Not long, of course, but then that’s the nature of politics.
We can all learn a great deal from other’s mistakes as much as we do from our own, and the villains are a great way of reminding us what paths to avoid. But, the sooner we put the past downturn behind us, the more we can look forward.
The academics are right to be cautious; but then Osborne too is right to stand firm with his convictions. We all know the perilous state of the UK economy, but the more positive messages that do get through, the more likely the consumer is to go out and spend and get us out of this mess.
