There is no good option

At this stage of a dismal election campaign, there appears to be a terrible inevitability of a bad outcome: a government with sufficient parliamentary support to enact one or other set of delusions. The Tories advance a message of “getting Brexit done”, thereby freeing the country from policy paralysis and forging for it a prosperous future as a nation able to control its destiny. Labour will substantially increase the role of the state to direct investment, provide a “cradle-to-grave” national education service, and provide benefits to a range of constituencies, to be paid for by the top 5 per cent of earners and the corporate sector.

I hope that we stick with a hung parliament. A dysfunctional House of Commons is preferable to a damaging legislative programme. And that’s even before getting into the moral disgrace of Labour’s anti-Semitism crisis and the ratcheting xenophobic rhetoric coming from Boris Johnson. For what defines this election, apart from these base messages, is an absence of discussion about trade-offs.

The great insight of liberalism is that not all the things we value are compatible with each other. We have to manage those conflicts by recognising a pluralism of aims. The most basic principle of economics, as the Nobel laureate Paul Krugman has written, is that things add up. Yes, you can push through policies like the dogmas of the main parties, but they will have costs and consequences, which the party spokespeople never refer to if they are even aware of them. It’s an election characterised by intellectual vapidity as well as moral disrepute.

The slogan of getting Brexit done is inherently misleading because all the issues that have so far defied resolution between Britain and the EU will remain. The only way in which Johnson could secure a deal different from that negotiated by Theresa May was to pay a cost, namely going back on one of her red lines by agreeing to a border in the Irish Sea. Treating Northern Ireland differently from the rest of the UK, which had previously been declared inconceivable, suddenly became government policy.

It’s a precursor to what Johnson will find if he returns to Downing Street with a parliamentary majority. Yes, he can get Brexit done, but there will be trade-offs. If Britain remains closely aligned to the EU, let alone part of the single market and the customs union, then it will not have the independence that the Brexiters have always proclaimed as their goal. If Britain leaves the EU without agreement, then the economic costs will be commensurately heavier.

Beyond a few fringe figures, there is no substantial disagreement among economists on this. Introducing barriers to the cross-border flow of goods, services, investment and labour will constrain growth. It will make Britain poorer than it would otherwise be. The danger is that Brexit will impose not just a demand shock but a supply shock, in which the damage is permanent.

Johnson’s words this week about EU citizens “treating the UK as though it’s part of their own country,” are reprehensible but also economically self-defeating. Britain benefits mightily from people of other nationalities who do indeed treat this country as if it belongs to them, and as if they belong to it. Not just skilled migrants either (and the government doesn’t in any case have the information or wisdom to select overseas workers who fit just what the economy requires), but people with a work ethic and civic spirit regardless of skills, who can contribute to this country while bettering themselves and their families. If you insinuate that they don’t really belong, or hedge the immigration system around with bureaucracy and arbitrary restrictions, they won’t come. Britain will be the poorer, culturally as well as financially.

The chances of a majority Labour government appear, one day ahead of the poll, to be slim but the party entertains fantasies all of its own, quite apart from its failure to defend EU membership and freedom of movement. It proclaims the merits of redistribution but its policies across a range of issues — such as abolishing tuition fees, or “compensating” women born in the 1950s for the equalisation and raising of the state pension age — redistribute to the well-off from the worse-off, or to the elderly from the young, or both simultaneously. It’s a regressive and ferociously irresponsible programme.

Far from being radical, the party won’t consider measures necessary to mitigate real social problems. Only this week, it proposed rent controls as a means of helping tenants facing the high cost of housing. The policy is all but guaranteed to harm them instead, by reducing the supply of private rental accommodation. A truly reforming government would instead attack the planning system and the tax privileges of owner-occupation. This feeble and reactionary Labour opposition won’t do it.

The Lib Dems meanwhile exemplify their longstanding characteristic of not being in a position of power and therefore not thinking seriously about intractable issues of policy. The most visible example is its policy to revoke Article 50 as a means of avoiding Brexit. I applaud the objective but the notion that we can treat a damaging referendum result as if it was all a bad dream, and return to the status quo ante, is sheer naivete.

On a smaller issue, but typical of this approach, is the party’s policy of scrapping business rates and replacing them with a land tax. Two predictable consequences will flow: local authorities will have less money to spend on services, and occupational pension schemes (which workers rely on for their retirement incomes) will take a financial hit from the decline in the share prices of the big commercial landlords.

Every option in this election is bad. The best that can be achieved is to restrain politicians from making things worse.