Afficionados  of the elections website may have noticed our debate of the week focuses again on economic matters. Of course. “It’s the economy, stupid”, it was once famously observed – and that was in relatively good times. Right now, with the sense of slight unreality with which the current crisis was perhaps initially viewed (all that arcane financial stuff seemed like some-one else’s problem to a lot of normal people) being swept away by a frighteningly rapid tide of all-too-real unemployment across Europe, it seems almost perverse to talk about much else. Naturally, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t other important things to talk and think about, but with all those fellow Europeans losing their jobs and livelihoods, it would be wrong to stay away from the subject for too long. Moreover, this is not an autonomous editorial decision. We are driven by the business of Parliament, which at present cannot but return constantly to the subject of what to do about it all.

One perhaps unexpected consequence of the crisis is a general re-awakening to the fact that politicians are fundamentally necessary and have a very real job to do. 

Whether anyone actually KNOWS what to do is a moot point. But that said, everyone knows that someone HAS to do something, and that that some-one is a politician. One perhaps unexpected consequence of the crisis is a general re-awakening to the fact that politicians are fundamentally necessary and have a very real job to do. The notion that politicians should stay out of economic life has taken something of a battering lately. Now everyone wants to know what they are going to do. People are interested in what they have to say.

It can’t be easy for them. This recession seems to have caught everyone off-guard.  It seemingly came out of nowhere. You only have to go back a few months (say in a book , magazine or a movie) to find people inhabiting a different world, where the assumptions of big money, fatcat self-indulgence and consumerist self-gratification for the masses are unchallenged. And now, what a difference a (metaphorical) day makes… 

Another difficulty is that a large proportion of Europe’s workforce is unfamiliar with recession. Maybe once upon a time people would assume that they came round now and then. Certainly, that’s how it seemed to me, growing up in the coal-mining areas of the English East Midlands in the late seventies and early eighties. Now that it looks like the 3 million plus unemployment of that time in the UK is coming back, I can’t help wondering whether the depressing and rather grey “feel” of that time will also return.

But now seems psychologically very different. Then, in Britain, it all felt like the outcome of a long process of decline, a reckoning stored up over decades. (This notwithstanding the bitter arguments which raged over the remedies applied by Mrs Thatcher’s government of the time.) And in day to day life it was met with a kind of acquired stoicism, leavened with a fair dose of social solidarity, neither of which is easy to identify in contemporary British mores. Now is also different because, this time, the crisis comes seemingly from an external cause, which, for all that it might be associated with “Anglo-Saxon” capitalism, is truly global in impact. This is not a national recession, but one we all share. It is consequently impossible to see the current recession as something that any single government can hope to address with any success alone.

Gordon Brown at the European summit 20 March (http://www.flickr.com/photos/downingstreet)

Maybe because of this mixture of personal recollection of a past British recession, the new experience of global downturn and the central role of politicians, I was particularly hoping to talk to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who will be in Strasbourg this week to address the Parliament on the subject of the G20 summit on 2 April. 

Interestingly, Mr Brown is coming at the express request of the UK government, not because it was his duty (as President of Council or whatever) or because the Parliament asked him to. No, he actively wanted to come to address the European Parliament. This is a fascinating sign of the times. More and more, it seems that politicians who want or need to talk to “Europe”, by which I mean the people of Europe, realise that there is a body which allows them to do just that – the European Parliament. (President Obama take note!) Brown’s predecessor Tony Blair did so to great effect in 2005, perhaps providing Mr Brown with some inspiration.  As Tony Barber of the FT reminds us, Brown matched Blair’s ovation count in the US Congress, now perhaps he thinks he can match his European Parliament enterprise too?

So the “big cheese” of the title is Gordon Brown. I won’t be meeting him, by the way. My request for an interview for the EP website was politely declined by his people, because he had “no time” (the only saving grace for me being that they gave the same answer to every other request too).  It’s a shame, because I thought I had interesting questions for him which he might actually have relished answering. And so to our “sacred cows”.

I read an interesting article recently in “Prospect”, which pointed out that the three long-standing orthodoxies of European economic policy were teetering – or had definitively teetered – in the storms of the economic slowdown. I found the point fascinating. Are we seeing – yes, I’ll say it – a paradigm shift?

Are the orthodoxies set to change? I would have liked to hear Mr Brown respond to that.

First, balanced budgets, the heart of the single currency, will be hard-pressed to survive the huge public expenditure needed to stimulate the economy and keep banks and businesses afloat, especially when combined with declining tax revenue. So Keynesian deficit financing, here we come? Second, the leading economic role of the private sector (reflected inter alia in the long-standing fashion for privatisation across Europe), is under attack as governments nationalise and prop up businesses and set conditions for executive pay and bonuses. Third, free trade and open competition seem at least under threat, as least to the extent that politicians around the world feel the need repeatedly to restate their commitment not to slip into protectionism. 

So the issue is: are we undergoing a sea-change in European economic policy? Are the orthodoxies set to change? I would have liked to hear Mr Brown respond to that. Perhaps, if he reads this, he could leave the answer in a comment.