“What a greenhorn, the man who would be Chancellor!” The view from abroad..
Let’s have a look at what the world outside thinks of Mr George Osborne, busy planning his makeover of No.11. France’s hugely respected journal Le Monde gives it’s own dispassionate view of the Tory pretender: “It’s no good. So what if he’s been the shadow finance minister in David Cameron’s cabinet for near on five years, George Osborne still isn’t a plausible chancellor of the Exchequer. This 38 year old aristocrat seems unable to escape either his youthfull looks or apparent in-experience”.
L’équipe économique de David Cameron n’arrive pas à convaincre les Britanniques
LE MONDE | 10.03.10 | 14h31 . Mis à jour le 10.03.10 | 14h49
“As the British elections draw closer - they will take place before the 3 June - the probable future number two in a Conservative government seems increasingly like the weak link in Team Cameron. And the economy, which is what most concerns the British, is undeniably contributing to the narrowing of polling gap between the Tory leader and the Labour Prime Minister, Gordon Brown.
Mr Osborne’s financial orthodoxy seems worryingly dogmatic. So what, if the economic revival is more fragile that forecast. So what, if the economy scarcely emerged from recession in the last quarter of 2009, when the experts were expecting something much clearer. Or that the International Monetary Fund by asking governments not to cripple the stumbling growth with spending cuts or tax rises, had come out in support of Mr Brown’s policies. ‘We must reduce the deficit’ (12.6% of GDP for the financial year, 2009-2010), he hammers on’, ‘in order to alleviate the debt burden on future generations’.
As for Mr Cameron, he has a problem adapting his program to an economic situation that he hadn’t foreseen. “We can’t carry on like this. I will cut the deficits. Not the NHS”, goes one of his campaign slogans, without the Conservative candidate managing to explain how he could cut back on public expenditure whilst at the same time improving delivery of services. He seems to be stuck between two pledges that in the short term are incompatible. That of tackling a public debt which is growing exponentially (it could represent some 80% of GDP by 2014), Mr Osborne’s priority. And that of not going back to Margaret Thatcher’s methods, which laid waste to British Public Services.
While waiting for him to clarify his position, the Tory chief wants to convince us that he knows where he’s going. And that his Team is up to it. He doesn’t miss an opportunity to extol the qualities of his future chancellor, who was by his side in his successful leadership bid in 2005, and with whom he has traced the outlines of his ‘compassionate conservatism’.
At the same time, he’s asking Kenneth Clarke, his shadow trade minister, to take a more up-front role. As Chancellor under John Major - he controlled the public purse strings between 1993-1997, the last time the country was coming out of a recession - he can’t be accused as being short on experience. Having the 69 year old at his side will, he hopes, reassure his fellow citizens. And for the City, it will be a sign that he’s serious.
Because London’s financial leaders can’t take Mr Osborne seriously either, despite being devotees of stripping out costs themselves. Mr Cameron’s indecision is part of it. But not all of it. That this scion of the upper classes seems to have a poor knowledge of the business world is held against him, in contrast to his conservative predecessors formed through Banking (Nigel Lawson, John Major, Norman Lamont), or through Law (Geoffrey Howe). It’s considered that in the event of a Conservative victory, he will not have heavy-weight support at the Treasury, which has been weakened by the loss of many respected senior civil servants.
Small Mistakes
And then, there are the evasive answers, summary analysis, the totally political approach to his brief. His lack of intellectual depth, to which is added his lack of courtesy and punctuality, can be measured by all the small - and not so small - errors scattered through his announcements. For instance, at the October 2009 Conservative Party Conference, he made a £3 billion pound mistake on the savings the state would make by pushing back the date of retirement. A short while ago, he was also saying that the last Labour parliament was the only one in recent history to have seen individual GDP diminish. Wrongly: the Financial Times has revealed that that was the situation between 1979 and 1983.
According to his detractors, Mr Osborne, who studied History at Oxford, is also guilty of misunderstanding the workings of finance. His support for a tax on bonuses and for the Obama plan to separate commercial and retail banking unsettles and alarms them. His apparent euro-scepticism disturbs them, at the very moment that tense negotiations are taking place between Europe’s leading financial centre and the European Commission, particularly on the proposed legislation on Hedge Funds and Insurance. And when Mr Osborne proposes transferring the Financial Services Authority’s oversight role, greatly valued, to the Bank of England which is ill-equipped for it, there’s a mocking chorus of: ‘What a greenhorn, the man who would be chancellor’ “
Virginie Malingre et Marc Roche
copyright Le Monde