Of Course David Laws Shouldn’t Resign for Being Gay or Renting A Flat – He Should Resign for Being A Free Market Economist During A Recession
David Laws shouldn’t resign for being gay or renting a flat. These are perfectly fine, normal things to do and be. People need to rent flats, and people often have lovers. To rent a flat off a lover isn’t that strange either. It’s quite sensible in some ways. Having a lover, of any gender, isn’t particularly interesting either – although it is strange how so many Liberal Democrat politicians aren’t hetero-normative, and yet conceal it, as if it isn’t common knowledge. (There’s an interesting take on this by the Fabian Society).
However, what David Laws should resign for is being a free market economist who once ran JP Morgan and part of Barclays. In no way should this man be in charge of UK economic policy during a mass recession. Of course he’s been made Chief Secretary to the Treasury – he’s the business force behind the rampant free-market liberalism of the Orange Book.
What I think is really going on here is a comic-book style obsession with origin and revelation. The most interesting part in a super-hero storyline is the origination of the super powers: Spiderman being bitten by a radioactive spider, Batman witnessing his parents’ murder, Superman falling from the sky into a Kansas cornfield. Then there’s the making of the costume, and the first big battle. This is all basically the story of the Con Dem coalition which we so enjoyed telling and retelling: the crash-landing of the polls, the witnessing of the electoral defeats, the fashioning of the ‘New Politics.’
And now we get the next best thing: the unraveling of the revelation of the Secret Identity, and the dark past. The public edifice and the private person are in constant conflict with each other: Batman the vigilante is secretly Bruce Wayne the billionaire philanthropist, Superman the demi-God is secretly Clark Kent the mild-mannered reporter. And now we have the good ol’ political revelation: the clean cut man of business and fiscal reliability has been deceiving his family and mismanaging his expenses. Okay, so it’s not exactly the greatest of installments in the comic book universe, but it’ll do for what counts as a media story these days.
Like in all those movies where the on-screen lovers talk softly to each other while airplanes/spaceships/dinosaurs wreak havoc behind them, I sit at the screen shouting: ‘I don’t care about you’re love life! the world is ending!’, here we have a rather low key story of love and loans getting in the way of the far wider plot: cuts, closures and conservatives. In the movies, of course, the destruction of the world is a manifestation of the lovers’ crisis. In real life however, that isn’t the case – these cuts are real, the lovers’ story is a distraction.
