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24 September 2010

10 Questions for Vince Cable, post-Question Time

An open letter to the Business Secretary following our debate on BBC1.

By Mehdi Hasan

Dear Vince,

Nice to see you last night in Liverpool. I just got home!

You’ve had a great week, with a strong speech to your party members at the Lib Dem conference followed by a fluent performance on Question Time. (You were also, I hear, a big draw at the NS fringe on “progressive austerity” in Liverpool on Monday.)

But QT is just too short for me. Sixty minutes? Call me greedy, but I wanted more time to continue our debate and discussion on the economy. If we’d had longer, and it’d just been you and me, here are the questions I’d like you to have answered for me:

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1) You have referred to “slashing now” as “an act of economic masochism” (13 March 2010) and have said that “cutting too soon and pushing the economy back into recession will make the deficit worse, as tax receipts fall and benefit payments rise” (24 April 2010), so how can you now claim that your opponents are “deficit deniers” for making precisely the same case as you made only months ago?

2) You claimed last night on television that we were facing a financial “emergency” and that the deficit had to be confronted and cut down. But in your book, The Storm, you wrote that UK debt is “moderate in comparison with those of other countries” (p25) and that budget deficits of 13 or 14 per cent in the US and the UK were “not a great cause for alarm” (p144). How do you explain the disconnect?

3) You referred in your conference speech to the “spivs” and “gamblers” in the City, and denounced bankers’ bonuses on Question Time, but bank shares rallied after your coalition’s “emergency Budget” in June and Deutsche Bank, for example, described the Budget as a “good outcome for banks”. Again, how do you explain the disconnect?

4) Nick Clegg said five days before the general election: “My eight-year-old ought to be able to work this out — you shouldn’t start slamming on the brakes when the economy is barely growing.” How is it that eight-year-old Antonio Clegg has a greater grasp of economic theory, and of the lessons of economic history, than you, Clegg or Danny Alexander?

5) Do the latest figures from the Republic of Ireland worry you? Make you doubt your support for immediate and widespread “austerity”?

6) How about the news from the eurozone?

7) You have said that John Maynard Keynes is your hero, but isn’t Keynes turning in his grave right now? Why is it that all the leading Keynesian economists (Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, David Blanchflower, Robert Skidelsky, etc) are so opposed to your coalition’s cuts?

8) Can you tell us when exactly you switched your position on cuts? The date and time, please?

9) In the green room before the programme was recorded, you and I discussed how much Liverpool had changed and progressed in recent years. So do you agree or disagree with the Lib Dem leader of Liverpool City Council, Warren Bradley, when he says that northern cities like his own “could be set back ten or 20 years” by the impact of your coalition’s cuts?

10) You condemned monopolies and “rigged markets” in your conference speech. Will you promise to launch a review, on public-interest grounds, of Rupert Murdoch’s bid to take full control of BSkyB? Or will you have to check with Andy Coulson first?

I hope you had a safe journey back to London.

Regards,

Mehdi

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THANK YOU