POLITICAL CHOICES

What Use Is Democracy Without Basic Economic Literacy?

How can voters ask the right questions of prospective political leaders if they don’t know what the answers mean?

Blinded by money (Photo by Raghuvansh Luthra on Unsplash)

Rishi Sunak, the current Prime Minister of the UK (as of June 21st — blink and you might miss another useless Tory being anointed), made some ‘pledges’ to the electorate earlier this year. Just so you can tell the two of them apart, opposition leader Keir Starmer has a set of ‘missions’ instead. Politics by soundbite listicle.

One of Sunak’s pledges was to ‘halve inflation by the end of the year’. This was in itself a classic con trick, since at the time pretty much everyone expected that to happen of its own accord, due to the initial impacts of energy and raw materials price hikes dropping out of the equation because of the base effect. So even if it does come to pass, it will have nothing to do with any action by the government. And in fact today’s inflation figures for the UK, still at 8.7%, suggest that the figure might be missed anyway.

Strike one.

But as I was pointing out to anyone who would listen at the time, there was another deceit wrapped up in the target. The government was trying to imply, or hoping that people…