EDITORIAL : THE GUARDIAN, UK

       

 

George Osborne: A lonely figure

Far from things getting better for the economy, under Osborne they are getting steadily worse

Rare is the George Osborne speech that does not begin with a roll call of groups that support his spending cuts. Sadly for the chancellor, though, supporters for his historic austerity package are themselves increasingly rare. David Cameron's star guest this week, Barack Obama, was polite but conspicuous in his disagreement with the coalition's one-track stance. "We've got to make sure that we take a balanced approach and that there's a mix of cuts, but also thinking about how do we generate revenue," said the president. Then there was the chief economist of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Pier Carlo Padoan, who said there was "scope for slowing the pace" of cuts. Given how much the coalition has made of OECD approval for its policies, this is extraordinary.

The chancellor's newfound loneliness matters both economically and politically. Economically, those OECD comments followed on from its admission that prospects for the UK are getting worse. Last May the thinktank predicted that UK GDP would grow 2.5% in 2011; yesterday that forecast was cut (yet again) to 1.4%. That is higher than the prediction from the chancellor's Office for Budget Responsibility, but the OBR has also reduced its expectations for economic growth time and again. The Bank of England has had to do the same, and so have a whole host of private-sector forecasters. True, other countries have fallen subject to the same fate – but not so dramatically. The consensus is clear: far from things getting better for the economy, under Mr Osborne they are getting steadily worse.

Flick through the economic reports published this week and the same plangent theme sounds again and again. The CBI reports a "sharp" decline in trade for restaurants and other consumer-service firms over the first three months of this year. That is backed up by the detailed GDP figures this week showing a slump in household spending, to its lowest level since the height of the banking crisis. The chancellor's answer to how Britain emerges from its slump is a boom in business investment – but that collapsed 7.1% in the first part of the year. There is no good way of playing these figures – just like those big-picture forecasts, they are not going the government's way.

A canny tactician, Mr Osborne sold his austerity plans to the public as being the tough medicine prescribed by every economist going. Yet one by one, his allies – whether in the CBI, the G20 or the OECD – are distancing themselves from his policies. The chancellor may have claimed to be the consensus once; now he is out of sympathy with both the centre ground and economic reality.

In praise of … Blackburn with Darwen

With a high youth population, the towns' comprehensive children's centres helped inspire Sure Start

The wheel turns. An industrial powerhouse declines from the busiest cotton-spinning town in the world, with 2.5m spindles in 1870, to a handful of specialist, residual textile firms today. A great international name shrinks to provincial status; was it Blackburn we were talking about. Or Burnley? Or Bolton? What is the difference between them anyway? The future lies elsewhere. Such conversations no doubt still take place in bastions of ignorance away from the north, but reality is now winning out. Not only in the shape of successful engineering of aircraft, but in news about the exceptional number of young people who live in Blackburn with Darwen. One in four of the population is under 15, officially the largest proportion in the UK. Elsewhere, this might be considered a drain on resources. In Blackburn with Darwen, it is being turned to good account. The towns' comprehensive children's centres helped inspire Sure Start and, through careful budgeting and protection from cuts, continue to flourish. No local child is more than a pram push away. It has an elected "youth MP" and youngsters are involved in the governance of such regenerative centres as Blackburn College and the £8m YouthZone which opens later this year. Its online children and young people's directory is hosted at a textese web address: URBwD.com. Young people, in return, overwhelmingly want to stay and make their lives in Blackburn and Darwen. There could be no better shoulder to the wheel than that.

Ratko Mladic: An old man faces justice

Belgrade has sent a clear message that it intends to turn the page and start rebuilding the country and the region

The 16 years in which Ratko Mladic has roamed free in Serbia is not a long time in Balkan memory. It's no more than the blink of an eye. Besides, the arrest of Europe's most wanted war crimes suspect has as much to do with the present as the past. The chief prosecutor of the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal (ICTY), Serge Brammertz, was just about to deliver a damning verdict on Belgrade's reluctant pursuit of Mladic to the UN, a report which would almost certainly have doomed Serbia's bid to be declared a formal candidate for EU membership later this year. Serbia has already fallen years behind Croatia, which can reckon on becoming the 28th member in 2013. President Boris Tadic, who faces unrest on the streets and a challenge from a strengthening nationalist opposition, had to deliver – and deliver quickly. The EU, for its part, will now come under strong pressure to reciprocate. It is no exaggeration to say that the arrest of one man could open a new chapter in relations between his country and Europe.

Nothing about the stocky former general has ever been diminutive. He has, according to just two counts on the ICTY charge sheet, the blood of 17,000 victims on his hands – the massacre of 7,000 men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995 and the siege of Sarajevo, which claimed 10,000 lives. This was more than died during the German occupation. And yet the fact that he has evaded capture for so long speaks volumes about the raw memory of those terrible events. Consider the reaction yesterday of the Serbian Radical party, whose spokesman accused Serb police of treachery for arresting a Serb hero. According to one poll, 40% concur with that view, and 51% would not hand Mladic over to the tribunal. Mladic's insider knowledge of how the security services worked was surely not the only factor that kept him one step ahead of the game for 16 years. It was also the fact that he remained, to the people who began protesting in Belgrade last night, a hero worth protecting.

The cauldron of ethnic cleansing is still warm to the touch in this part of Europe, and it was only last month that Serbia agreed to hold face-to-face talks with Kosovo, whose independence it refuses to recognise. Belgrade also plays a major role in the calculations of the Bosnian Serbs, and their demands for a breakaway statelet from Bosnia-Herzegovina. If the Kosovans were allowed to break away from Serbia, why, they argue, are Bosnian Serbs to be denied the same right? The embers of this fire are still smouldering and could easily reignite. The trial of Mladic, and the painstaking unveiling of the evidence against him, will do nothing immediately to douse passions. Indeed they could fan them. The demonstrations organised by the Serbian Radical party will inevitably turn up the heat in the nine or 10 days that it will take for Mladic to be transferred to the international tribunal in the Hague. In that time, the courts and Tadic himself will both have to hold firm.

But in the long run, the state's unswerving determination to deliver Mladic to international justice is the strongest message any government in Belgrade could give to its neighbours that it intends to turn the page of history and start rebuilding the country and the region. Put to one side the carrots of EU membership. Mladic's deliverance to the Hague is the only conceivable route to establishing normal relations between all the beleaguered, and still impoverished, communities of the region. It is the only way of re-establishing Serbia's place in the Balkans, not as a pariah state but as a modern trading partner. It could also be a reminder to those manning fortress Europe of the cost of keeping the gates shut. France, Germany and the Netherlands, all suffering from enlargement fatigue, have been setting new conditions on Croatia's membership. Yesterday, Nicolas Sarkozy changed tack, acknowledging that it was impossible to tell Serbia now that the door was closed. The dinar has dropped.