Impossible places

This week: I’m still ill, but luckily I’ve got Rachel Reeves’ fiscal statement to cheer me up. Also: a lake, above an ocean; and why are there more Olympic teams than countries?

Sometimes, when you are ill, it becomes impossible to imagine being well again. It’s been 10 days now: not that long in the scheme of things, but unusually long for me to be hit by a bug, and long enough to take out the entirety of last week’s holiday. Now, the version of me who had both energy and the full use of his ears, who hated being stuck inside and yearned to be around people, feels as distant and unimaginable as the version of me that didn’t know how to ride a bike. The insomniac cannot remember what it is to sleep; I cannot remember what it is to do anything physically more challenging than sit besides a fan and watch The Americans. 

Thus it is (if this segue doesn’t work you have to be nice about it, I’m not well) with the British state. Once upon a time it was one of the world’s most powerful government machines, and even after empire, over-centralisation meant that a government with a decent majority had vast levels of power to make change within its own borders. Yet while there have been signs of radicalism in some areas, “tremble before my majority, ye mighty” is not, it’s fair to say, the vibe with which Britain’s new government is actually governing. 

And Rachel Reeves’ speech to the Commons on Tuesday was not obviously that of a finance minister who knows of no constraints. 

Cool, the backdrop’s red now! Image: Zara Farrar/10 Downing Street.

The headline, if you’ve been doing something more fun during the heatwave, like seeing how long you can hold your hand above a barbeque, is: it’s worse than we thought. The outgoing Tory government had managed to conceal the scale of the black hole in public finances, even from its own fiscal watchdogs. There’s a £22bn gap to fill. Shocking.

This was of course exactly what everyone has expected to happen since quite a long time before the election, of course. But either Reeves is an unexpectedly good actor or she genuinely was angry, and the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies has said that “in-year funding pressures and overspends… do genuinely appear to be larger than previously thought”. The Office for Budget Responsibility has gone so far as to launch an official investigation into previous chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s spending forecasts – a move which puts Liam Byrne’s infamous “no money” note into some historic perspective.

So: means testing for winter fuel payments aimed at pensioners, to ensure only those who really need them receive them; more cuts to capital projects, and no word on what happens to the missing bits of HS2. Almost certainly tax rises to come in the autumn, even if they aren’t on incomes. Austerity is back (did it ever leave?) – but now flavoured red, rather than blue.

There is a positive spin you can put on all this. For one thing the week has also brought much needed pay rises for public sector workers – that means fewer strikes, fewer staffing crises, upward pressure on wages elsewhere in the economy, and more goodwill among those whose job it is to make things work. The government has essentially taken money from the rich pensioners coddled by the last Tory government, and handed it to public sector workers. That’s arguably progressive. 

Austerity now, what’s more, may be a way of winning the faith of the markets to create room for manoeuvre later: the headline the Treasury slapped on Reeves’ intervention was “fixing the foundations”. If this is like 2010, it may be a version of 2010 in which the government actually meant the stuff about needing to avert a looming crisis, and wasn’t just hacking back the state for ideological reasons. 

Maybe. But it’s clear that people to the left of / less interested in policy than / more cynical than I am are not buying this. Occam’s Razor, they argue, is that Reeves is not playing some game of four dimensional chess, but actually means all this stuff. She has, after all, made no attempt to set up a future fiscal rule that would leave room for more investment spending; there is nothing to suggest the Chancellor thinks state investment, in infrastructure or housing or much of anything else, would be a key part of the mix to generate the growth to get us out of this mess. 

I, perhaps irrationally, remain hopeful, as I do about one day being able to hear out of my right ear once again. To the extent that Starmerism means anything, to me it seems less an ideology than a method, a way of governing through a meticulously pre-planned flowchart rather than by carelessly tossed out headlines. The opposite of what Boris Johnson did. It thus feels entirely plausible to me that this is the first step in a master plan we can’t see. 

That does not mean, though, that the plan will be one that you or I like.

Time will tell: it always does. But after well over a decade of this stuff, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to imagine the state being fiscally vibrant or healthy ever again.

Approaching the iceberg

An email from my agent tells me that UK sales of A History of the World in 47 Borders are now within touching distance of those of Liz Truss’ Ten Years to Save the West, and I didn’t even have to humiliate myself as Prime Minister to do it. I’m hoping to overtake before the summer is out.

If you’d like to help – and come on, tell me that wouldn’t be pleasing – you can buy my book from  Amazon, Waterstones, Stanfords, Foyles, Bert’s Books. Or, if you already have and you enjoyed it, you can help by leaving a nice review somewhere, or telling your friends about it. 

(If you did not enjoy it, but still wish to help, you can do so by not telling your friends that.)

Come on, team! Together we can do this.

So how can there be more Olympic teams than countries, then?

I rather enjoyed what I saw of the Olympics opening ceremony. Not only did it make good use of the physical infrastructure of one of the world’s great cities, but it accidentally referenced at least three different Doctor Who stories set in Paris¹; and anyway, I can’t find it in myself to dislike any show that turns an act of revolutionary terror into a musical number performed by decapitated women holding their heads. I also enjoyed the way that the various teams appeared on boats the Seine in alphabetical order according to their name in French, putting Germany among the As, Spain with the Es and so forth. This makes perfect sense, but made for a pleasing degree of bafflement and chaos among the BBC’s presenting team.

What I really enjoyed though, because I’m me, is trying to work out how there could possibly be 206 teams competing at this year’s games. 

How many countries there are in the world depends, as these things so often do, on how you count. But a reasonable stab is 194: the 193 UN member states, plus Vatican City (which prefers to stick to observer status because of the entertaining fiction that the papacy takes no interest in temporal politics). Throw in the facts that the Vatican has never participated in the Olympics either, the cowards, and that two other countries (Russia; Belarus) are currently banned from participating because of the invasion of Ukraine, and that means there are more than a dozen more Olympic teams out there in the world than there are countries in the world. 

So who are they? Where on earth do they come from?