Despairing of the triviality of British politics? Blame central bankers

published 24 November 2014

141121-thornberry — It's never a good idea to sneer at the voters

There's something painfully unglamorous about British politics.

The French get a cheeky chappie champagne socialist, marauding les boulevards like a latter-day Benny Hill on a Vespa, looking for l'amour.

We get Twit-van-gate.

Subscribe to MoneyWeek

Subscribe to MoneyWeek today and get your first six magazine issues absolutely FREE

Get 6 issues free

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/mw70aro6gl1676370748.jpg

Sign up to Money Morning

Don't miss the latest investment and personal finances news, market analysis, plus money-saving tips with our free twice-daily newsletter

Of course, each story is entertaining in its own way. But given the problems that both the French and British economies are facing, it's also quite depressing that our politics is dominated by trivia and non-entities.

There's a reason for that. Quantitative easing hasn't just devalued the currency

Britain is in dire straits. So why is our politics so poor?

She stuck it up on Twitter. She didn't caption it. But steeped as we all are in the nuances of the great British class system, we all knew what she meant.

It's never good form to sneer at the voters. It's particularly bad form when most of your party's sales pitch is based on arguing that the other lot are the toffs and the snobs, whereas you're intensely comfortable with the salt of the earth and the man on the street.

Thing is, regardless of your view on the rights and wrongs here, it is all a bit of a distraction.

As Anatole Kaletsky pointed out on Reuters the other day, Britain is walking on incredibly thin ice. Everyone has seen us as a safe haven from the chaos in continental Europe. And London the global financial capital in particular, has benefited from offering a warm welcome to the wealth of rich citizens in unstable regimes across the world.

But that might not survive the election in May. It's highly likely that we'll see another coalition. Only this one may be even more of a shock than the Conservative/LibDem combo we ended up with last time. Who knows what rainbow of conflicting interests we might be stuck with?

And all this is happening at a time when Britain's economic backdrop is still precarious, to put it gently. Whoever wins is going to have to do more tax-raising and spending-cutting if they are to have any hope of reducing our annual overspend, let alone the national debt.

So given the potentially dire straits we're facing, why is our politics so lacking?

I think it boils down to this: our politicians the people we vote for - have delegated their most important powers to other entities, none of which we vote for.

Recent history suggests that Britons vote largely on their perception of the economy. But the person with the most obvious influence over that right now is Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England. Interest rates affect the interest on your savings, the cost of your mortgage, your day-to-day living standards.

It doesn't matter if Nick or Ed or Dave or Nicola or Nige get into power. Mr Carney is still going to be holding the interest rate lever. You are powerless to affect that. You can say the same for Europe and to an extent for the US too.

And if you feel powerless, the first thing you want to do is to wrestle that power back. Hence the rise in nationalist parties of all stripes from the SNP to the Front National to UKIP, they're all born of the same impulse and frustrations.

And as a result we end up with a focus on populist distractions like immigration, with each party trying to out-lie the other in terms of tough talking.

Japan is taking democracy seriously

Perhaps a little surprisingly (given that they're practically a one-party state), the Japanese might be the ones who have got this most right.

It's been pretty clear from the start that Japan's current bout of near-reckless monetary policy has been driven by prime minister Shinzo Abe, rather than the Bank of Japan (BoJ) itself.

Abe was elected on a platform that included a promise of money printing. It was pretty clear that if the BoJ didn't want to go along with it, he'd find some central bankers who would.

And now he's called a snap election to consolidate his already secure lead. That's linked to his decision to put off raising the consumption tax again.

In short, Japan's current economic policy is visibly driven by the prime minister the guy everyone voted for not a distant civil service or a panel of technocrats.

It doesn't necessarily mean that his plans will be successful. But it does hopefully make for more political stability than the alternative. And it's one other reason that we're still very keen on Japan as an investment.

We've talked about how to invest several times in MoneyWeek magazine. But if you're not already a subscriber, sign up today for a free trial and you can get a free report right away that covers some of our favourite Japanese investments.

John is the executive editor of MoneyWeek and writes our daily investment email, Money Morning. John graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news. John joined MoneyWeek in 2005.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.