Market failure, the economics textbooks tell us, occurs when consumers have insufficient information. When we take our car for routine servicing, and the mechanic, after looking under the bonnet, announces that something is seriously wrong, requiring expenditure of several hundred pounds, most of us have no idea whether he is telling the truth or not. We are in a similar dilemma with electricians and builders. Lacking information, consumers are easily ripped off, and may eventually lose faith in the product or service, as the DIY boom suggests. Perhaps the biggest recent example of market failure was the affair of the millennium bug, when computer "experts" persuaded governments and private companies - most of them headed by people too old to have the faintest idea of how computers actually work - to spend an estimated £430bn on what, to this day, nobody can be quite sure was any kind of a problem at all.
Post ideology, voters face the same dilemma. If the divisions between parties are not those of class or principles or ideals, but merely of managerial approach, how is the average voter supposed to choose, beyond observing that he still has a job and that he got a wage rise last year? David Blunkett insists that he has secured an extra £19bn for schools. The admirable Nick Davies seems lucidly to demonstrate, in a double page of dense Guardian type, that Mr Blunkett has done nothing of the sort. Mr Blunkett says Mr Davies is wrong. Who's right? Who truly understands the ins and outs of the working families tax credit, which is soon to be replaced in any case by a different tax credit system? Not many working families, that's for sure. William Hague promises to increase some payments to pensioners and to abolish others. He says that pensioners will be better off; Labour says they won't. Short of gaining access to the Department of Social Security's computer program, how can any pensioner tell? It is true that Mr Hague's figures - simultaneously promising better services, higher pensions and "guaranteed" lower taxes - don't add up. But figures produced by opposition politicians rarely do add up. They refer to "efficiency savings" and to government "waste". Thus, Mr Hague is like the man who looks under your floorboards, whistles softly and says something on the lines of: "You've had some real cowboys here, I can tell you. Honest, guv, that's a botched job if ever I saw one. What you need is a proper professional."
This is why a sudden outbreak of old-fashioned ideological war between the parties is so refreshing: Labour giving vent to its hatred of privilege, the Tories hurling accusations of envy and malice, the Lib Dems bleating ineffectively in the middle. The case of Laura Spence, and the failure of Magdalen College, Oxford, to offer her a place, captured the public imagination because it combined human interest with a clear political divide. No matter how hard they tried, neither side could help betraying its prejudices. Gordon Brown referred to the "old boy network", although Ms Spence's interviewers were apparently state school educated northerners. His critics pointed out, as though it should conclude the argument, that two out of five of those actually accepted came from the state sector. That makes 40 per cent from schools that take 93 per cent of our children. Isn't that what the complaint is all about?
Yes, facts get distorted. But they get distorted anyway; at least in this case, they are facts that everybody can readily grasp, unlike those involved in any argument on public spending. Yes, Oxbridge admissions are complex. But Mr Brown's point is that it would be a good start to greater equality of access if they were perfectly simple and transparent.
We should all be profoundly grateful to Mr Brown. We have heard more good, robust political debate in the past ten days than we have heard in the past three years put together. We must hope for more: on tax, for example, on corporate profits, on public transport, even on Europe. Some ministers will be worried about the effects on Middle England. But if an argument is well made, people will listen and make rational choices; they do neither when politics is reduced to the technical and managerial. The Democrats and Republicans - who agree on most of the fundamentals about how to govern - are often held up as examples to Britain. But in the US, less than half the population now votes, even in presidential elections. Bland, inoffensive politics can lead to the most catastrophic market failure of all, when the consumers just stop buying.
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