The Battle of the Chancellors

Earlier this week, Alistair Darling - the Chancellor of the Exchequer and his two 'shadows' : George Osborne and Vince Cable duked it out on national television as the pre-cursor to the Presidential style debates planned for Brown, Cameron and Clegg.

As a television event I suppose to the casual viewer it was pretty lightweight and not particularly interesting TV fare but I would guess that many small business people watched with interest to see if they could gain a steer as to which is the best way to vote in the forthcoming general election. Not only for themselves personally or to put in place the best party for their own business but more generally to see who would be best suited to spearhead UK Plc.

I have said it here on this blog before that I consider SME's (i.e. companies with less than 500 employees) to be the engine room of the economy and I viewed the program with and came out holding mixed feelings about our potential Chancellors.

Whilst it is true to say that Darling and Osborne took the opportunity to repeatedly try and score what I thought (given the gravity of the economic issues at the moment) quite petty political points off one another. What surprised me was the general lack of any real meaty policy differentiation and the amount of concensus, particularly created by Vince Cable, who although sandwiched inbetween the two 'heavier guns' managed to make some sensible if - given their likely electoral position - largely pointless points.

Having spent a couple of days thinking about the encounter this week and also watching subsequent political news stories ( where the old chestnut of immigration seems to have taken over again) I wonder whether what might win the election for the Tories is their promise to stop the 1% rise in national insurance implemented by Labour.

This was discussed during the debate and poo poo'd by both Darling and Cable but often people will still vote based on their own pocket rather than a more common sense view of the economoy.

Whichever way it goes, it will be interesting to see - assuming we do get a change of Chancellor, how the seeming lack of a business related strategy for the economy by either party will affect commerce in years to come.