The wrong Blanchflower: Jackie would have understood the need to cut now

Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business

I once heard an after-dinner speech by Jackie Blanchflower, brother of the great Spurs captain Danny. Jackie also played professional football, for Manchester United, but his career was cut short by his injuries in the 1958 Munich air crash, in which eight of his fellow ‘Busby Babes’ died. Thereafter he scratched a living as a publican, a bookie and an accounts clerk, and by the time I saw him, not long before he died in 1998, he looked so knackered that I wondered whether he would be capable of standing to speak. But he did, and delivered an unforgettably funny and poignant account of the rotten hand he had been dealt. I don’t know whether he was distantly related to David Blanchflower (also known to his friends as Danny), the left-leaning former Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee member who is given so much air time to vent his opposition to public spending cuts. But if so, the motor-mouth economist could benefit not only from a touch of his late kinsman’s self- deprecating charm, but also from his acute eye for the harsh realities of life.

‘If [George Osborne’s] plans are implemented it is almost certain that we are going to have a double-dip recession,’ David aka Danny told a television interviewer recently. ‘Where’s the growth coming from in the economy? I see no evidence at all that private firms are investing or hiring. The only show in town is the public sector.’ To give him his due, he was right in 2008 when he warned that the recession was going to be worse than his fellow MPC members were prepared to admit. And double-dip is certainly flavour of the month in pundit-land today, what with a rash of statistics indicating a slackening of activity in China and the US on top of all those scary numbers for public-sector job losses that have to be matched by new private-sector opportunities for Osborne’s cuts-and-growth equation to work.