Debate about migration, public debt and benefit fraud has been reduced to fairy tales. We don’t seem to need hard numbers when we have the more easily digestible fare of villains, heroes and happy endings
Unlike Sally Bercow, I am having a dry couple of months and, to be frank with you, I have been astonished what a difference not drinking in the evenings makes. As well as the predictable side effects of losing weight and not feeling hungover, I now realise that drinking a bottle of white wine every night was making me angry and unhappy about things that with hindsight I knew very little about.
Come 10.30pm most nights I would be shouting at Newsnight with my ill-informed but strongly felt opinions on the issues of the day. I did not let facts, statistics or the nuances of context cloud my slightly tipsy judgment. I just knew about these things and they were annoying me.
However, I suspect I was not alone in this unfounded qualitative certainty and many of you will hold equally forthright views on things you actually know very little about. Now you may snort in disagreement at this point but, to test my theory, ask yourself honestly if you know the answer to the following three questions within 5% and without recourse to Google.
What was the net migration to the UK last year as a percentage of the host population? Reading the tabloid press you would think this is going to be a big number. At least 1%, maybe as much as 5%. But the actual answer is 0.3%.
To put this into context, imagine we were on a train of 20 carriages, each seating 50 people, and three more people boarded just one carriage at the next stop. I am pretty sure the whole train would not feel swamped or the cultural identity of the passengers overwhelmed, but this is what lots of politicians would have you believe.
Secondly, what is the national debt and how much is this per person? This is an astonishing £1.4trn which means that you, your kids and your dear old mum all owe the Chinese Government and German pension funds about £21,000 each. Now that is a scary number particularly if like me you have got lots of kids and certainly puts my £5,000 overdraft into stark context.
Let's be frank here, we can squeeze the bankers until their pips squeak but we are not going to pay that off in our lifetime. Given the magnitude of this debt you would expect we would all be a bit more contrite, a bit more heads down and shamefaced. But we’re not.
I suspect you think its all somebody else's fault anyway, probably that shifty Ed Balls. No. No it’s not. It’s ours. We are the British generation that inherited 50 years of peacetime prosperity and squandered it all within ten years.
Finally, what percentage of welfare spending is spent on unemployment benefit or jobseekers allowance? This is another number that at about 3% of the budget is much smaller than you would think. This is because, at 47%, most welfare expenditure goes to pensioners. However, because they tend to vote and write angry letters to the Daily Mail, they are the great untouchables when it comes to welfare reform.
Arguably the UK state pension system is one huge Bernie Madoff type scam that only survives because new people keep signing up in the hope that other people will in the future and nobody is comparing its current assets to its liabilities.
So how did you get on? Congratulations if you got all three, but I would be surprised. Most people don’t know these simple facts because British policy debate has been reduced to the narrative structure of a fairytale.
We don’t need hard numbers and statistics when we have the more easily digestible fare of villains (swarthy immigrants, bankers and welfare scroungers), heroes (the squeezed anxious middle class and pensioners ) and happy endings (sending them all back and paying off the national debt with a bonus and mansion tax).
As my five minutes of Googling shows, these explanations and solutions to our woes are the modern equivalent of burning witches because the harvest failed. There are no quick fixes left and the way things are today is the way they are going to be for a long time. All the money has gone. We spent it. All of it.
So the next time these subjects come up on Question Time ask yourself how many of the panellists or angry audience members face up to this reality and refer to the uncomfortable facts rather than the fairytale rhetoric.
Michael Ware is corporate finance partner at BDO
