Ian McMillan: What the economy needs is sweeping change

I know what you’re thinking: I’ve got too much time on my hands and I should maybe get a hobby, but bear with me.

From the brush my thoughts swept across to my Uncle Charlie, who would often tell tall and convoluted tales about a half-imagined character he called The Bloke At The Pit.

TBATP, as I came to call him, was a kind of wise man or shaman who would often come out with what Uncle Charlie called “little shiny gems of wisdom”.

Whenever I asked who TBATP was, Charlie would tap the side of his nose and say ‘That’s for you to find out’ and of course I never did, although I suspect TBATP never existed and was simply a version of Uncle Charlie himself.

Anyway, during one long afternoon when the dust motes hung in the sunlight in the front room at 34 North Street, Uncle Charlie told me the story of TBATP and The Chair.

It seemed The Bloke had this old dining-chair that needed mending, so he took the seat off and replaced it, and then he unscrewed the legs and made some new ones and then he took the back off and put a fresh one on so that nothing remained of the old chair.

“So was it a new chair, or not?” Uncle Charlie asked, in the manner of the philosophy lecturer he could have been if class, education and poverty hadn’t got in the way.

Of course, I had no answer but years later I realised that you don’t often get dining-room chairs with unscrewable legs, and TBATP had to have been a heck of a craftsman to make new ones. It made a good story, though, and it passed the time until Crackerjack came on.

So my thoughts drifted from brushes to chairs and then to rivers, because there’s that other old idea that states you can’t step into the same river twice, because the waters are continually flowing.

So when I go down to the River Dearne for a stroll, I’m actually just going down to today’s River Dearne, because the water from yesterday’s River Dearne is already some way to the sea, and water from tomorrow’s River Dearne is just trundling down from the moors.

The banks are more or less the same, and those weeds haven’t shifted much, and that supermarket trolley is just a bit rustier, but the actual river is different.

You finish reading this column and then what happens to the newspaper? You light the fire with it or you put it in the recycling bin and my words either float in the air and come down as dust motes on a sunny afternoon or they get recycled into another newspaper and another column and you light the fire with it and you sit and watch the dust-motes dreamily and it all goes on.

So that’s what I’m thinking about: renewal, and more specifically the renewal of ideas. I like ideas. I like having ideas and I wish that when you had an idea a free-standing light bulb really did go on over your head like it does in the cartoons.

Not only would it be a talking point at parties, not only would it save on electricity, but it would show everybody else that you were renewing your ideas, because, let’s face it, there aren’t too many renewed ideas around at the moment: the old brush head is still on the old stick and the old dining chair is still creaking on its rickety legs.

The economic situation is dire, as we all know, so surely there should be loads of clever people walking around with personal light bulbs going on above their skull, and not loads of people sweeping up the old ideas with an old brush and just moving the debris around a bit.

We keep getting told by the Government that there’s only one idea for wrestling the economic situation to the ground until it submits, and that idea is austerity and now, rather than coming up with brand new ideas, rather than stepping into a new river or sitting on a new dining room chair, Labour are saying that, yes, the cuts will have to stay. That they won’t be reversed. Pardon? I thought you said… ah, that’s what you did say.

Austerity isn’t working and we need new ideas. The poor are still paying more than the rich. I’m not clever and all I can do is repeat my old idea about a progressive tax system and getting the people who don’t pay tax to pay it, but maybe that’s not enough.

To sweep clean we need a new brush: the head has failed, the stick has failed. Forget Plan B, let’s have Plan NB. That’s New Brush, of course. Any ideas?