The Man They Should Have Listened To

Another day in Nottingham, another wrist-slittingly upbeat speech from someone at the Bank of England.
Only this time it wasn't Governor Mervyn King, the master of devastation-by-whisper, but Professor David 'Danny' Blanchflower, a member of the Bank's Monetary Policy Committee.
And he goes as far as he possibly can in telling you what he really thinks.
I can remember the tabloid fuss when the Prof was appointed to the MPC in 2006. Here was a bloke who spends nearly all his time lecturing at a posh college in the USA telling us how much we were going to pay for our loans.
The cheek of it!
How on earth was someone who jetted across the Atlantic once a month, at UK taxpayers' expense, going to know what was going on in Blighty?
Well, it turns out he had a bloody good telescope.
How come? The good Prof is the man who warned his chums on the MPC that there were clear signs the good ship UK was heading relentlessly towards the recessionary rocks.
That was back in January 2008 – exactly a year ago. The Bank of England was still churning our detailed reports about the UK economy as recently as August 2008 which didn't even mention the r-word. Not even once.
From May onwards, Prof Danny was telling the MPC that it should look up from its inflation charts, realise what was about to happen to unemployment levels, and cut interest rates hard and fast.
It didn't, some stuffed shirts even having the temerity to suggest this expansive, passionate and deeply thoughtful man was 'bonkers'. Only after the UK banking system went off like a nuclear detonation in the Autumn did the MPC finally take an axe to rates.
By then, a recession Prof Danny had been warning about for months was already thundering away like an out-of-control locomotive – taking jobs and businesses with it.
Frustrating as he quite obviously finds it, Blanchflower will have to steer clear of speaking his mind as long as he sits on the MPC. Markets leap on the every word of economic policymakers and Gordon Brown is spectacularly sensitive about anything that might be seen to suggest that he and his Government goofed.
Blanchflower doesn't think the Government goofed. He said in plain English that if the Government hadn’t thrown the kitchen sink at the banks last October then the UK's financial system would have imploded.
But he clearly thinks senior UK policymakers – be they in the Treasury or the Bank of England – were just not tuned into the hurricane that was about to engulf the economy. They still need to do much, much more to straighten the basic financial structure of the economy out.
Trying my level best to avoid the policy and politics that would guarantee a gritted 'no comment', I asked him after his speech at the University of Nottingham what would have happened to the UK economy if the MPC had listened to him all those months ago.
"It would have been better...it would have been better if we had cut rates. But I'm not going to speculate by how much."
We didn't, and the economy is now flinching under the pain of a malevolent, job-destroying recessionary virus that, as Prof Danny observed, has disturbing echoes of the early 1980s.
When will we come out of it? In terms of pure, technical economics it may be as early as the autumn. Recessions are defined by successive quarters of negative growth, and past recessions have lasted an average of five quarters.
Blanchflower says statistical data about unemployment suggests the UK has actually been in recession since April last year. Which means the first quarter when the economy isn't contracting might be July to September.
That's pure conjecture, though, and the scale of the damage done to the economy means it will take years to recover its lost momentum.
But recover it will. For all his painful honesty, Prof Danny actually concluded on an optimistic note.
"We were fast into this," he told me. "Things will get better, and my hope is that we'll be fast out."
I'll finish with an apology for not including a pic of Prof Danny with this blog, because he looks – and is – an engaging and friendly bloke. But it's late, and I'm off to invest in the only part of the economy that's looking rosy right now: stiff drinks.