Arsene up the economy

Dave Powell

21 August 2012

It's all very well having a grand plan to be thrifty. But as the Chancellor is beginning to appreciate, if it doesn't work, it doesn't make you very popular.

Ask Arsenal fans. Last year the knives were sharpening for boss Arsene Wenger. A long stretch without a trophy and a tepid series of results were one thing. But the backdrop was long-percolating resentment, now bubbling over, at Wenger's adamantine refusal to splash the cash.

Le Professeur has never hidden his reasoning. "I don't want to go into excuses, but you want a business to be run properly", he'd say, flipping his knife into the corners of the Flora pot to dig out the very last slivers of marge.  He's right, of course. Fans of Portsmouth, Leeds United and (at a lower level) my own club Brentford are still dealing with the legacy of bosses and boards that spent cash they didn't have on overpriced hoofers they didn't really need.

But the problem is that footy fans aren't generally into the beautiful game out of a love of prudence. There's only so much failing to challenge, but having a healthy balance sheet to show for it, for which the seething masses will stand. Had it not been for an in-the-nick-of-time winning spree at the back end of last season, even the mighty Wenger may have found himself hounded out of the club.

No doubt - strained comparison ahoy - over at Number 11, George Osborne sympathised. He may well consider himself the Arsene Wenger of government, as responsibly running the economy as the Frenchman runs his football team. And I guess there are some similarities.

Both have an overriding objective and narrative - constraining spending - which risks overriding the other thing they should be focusing on (in the Chancellor's case, getting the economy going again). And both are unfazed by calls for their removal, probably due to a combination of their belief in the general rightness of what they're doing and knowledge of the political practicalities of how difficult it might be to get rid of them.

But there are just as many important differences. For a start, only one of them has an economics degree (clue: it's not the man in charge of running the economy). Also, Wenger has actually won stuff. Unlike Osborne, the Arsenal boss can point to his trophies as valedictory evidence to justify a few lean years.

Most pertinently, Wenger isn't making a complete dog's dinner of things.  At the end of the day, Brian, Osborne's is relegation form. His grand plan isn't just ignoring the health of the economy, it's actively knackering it.

Month after month, grim and still grimmer economic figures trot out. The latest reveal an economy still wheezing like a tubby winger back for the first day of training. But this isn't a harmless kickabout, it's the real deal - and our economy's getting a tonking.

The empty net of the green economy beckons, but the Chancellor isn't sticking his hand up to slam the ball home.  As I wrote earlier this month, the CBI point to the UK's green economic shoots as one of the few beacons of hope in an otherwise grey and dismal arena - with environmental industry and business responsible for some 8 per cent of UK GDP.

But the gaffer doesn't get it: green still irks, rather than inspires, Osborne. If kickstarting a clean energy revolution involves spending money, he's not interested. Pleasingly for my tortured analogy, the CBI described his determination to quell the takeup of solar panels as an "own goal", and noted that the quiet growth of the UK's green sector has been as much in spite of the Chancellor as because of him.

While there's a lot of the season to play (etc etc), perhaps it'll need to be the chairman, David Cameron, or one of the backroom boys, that starts to rack up the points.

What seems obvious is that if Osborne ran a football team the way he's running the economy, he'd have been out on his ear (thoroughly sick as a parrot), a very long time ago.