Because nobody wants to engage with the real issues or solutions. See my post at 16:22 that has received zero responses. People just want to rant about their personal bugbears and grievances. Economics isn’t taught at school. Nobody wants to engage with what needs to happen to ensure the country has a future which isn’t ever-declining living standards because the attitude is always “more tax, but not on me!”, “cut services, but not those ones that I use!”.
Depressing in the extreme.
Then cakeists come along. Promise cake. No cake comes. Then we have a contest between people to see who can promise more cake and the promiser of the most unrealistic and biggest cake wins. Cue shock from the electorate a year later when said implausible and impossible cake doesn’t materialise. The electorate’s solution? Let’s vote for someone promising an even bigger cake covered in rainbow unicorns!! We haven’t given them a chance yet…. And sure, they have no eggs or flour or butter or jam or even a baking tin but THEIR CAKE IS GOING TO BE REAL and we can all roll around in cake all day with rainbow unicorn icing and we really believe this will happen because we don’t like reality.
I was having a chat with my kids at dinner time last week (they are both well under 10) and my 7 year old piped up that something the other one had said would lead to hyper-inflation.
Kids are capable of understanding these concepts. It’s a real shame that economics is not part of the national curriculum at all and - I have to say - I believe this is deliberate because an uninformed electorate is much easier to manipulate.
If people had basic numeracy and understanding of the most basic economic concepts they’d understand that disabled children or migrants or MP’s expenses or second homes or taxing bankers or Motability are all an irrelevancy to the national budget and even though these things might be annoying to various people they would make no material difference whatsoever to their living standards or tax burden even if they were fixed instantly.
This is all a distraction from what actually needs to be addressed for living standards to rise, the most basic first steps towards which I set out in my earlier post. People would rather argue and become more polarised and extreme and attack each other than engage in a discussion about sensible economic policies to improve things, and if they can’t even do this on a Mumsnet thread then there’s absolutely no hope of doing it nationally.
Polarising the electorate is a great way to get elected but it’s an absolutely certain way to ensure that you don’t fix ANY of the country’s economic problems with the long-term solutions and evidenced-based policy changes that are required.
People peddling these ever-more extreme political stances with no economic substance whatsoever are charlatans and liars, as you may have noted over the last few Governments. The electorate, however, clearly haven’t learned this lesson and want to go to even further extremes rather than come back to the centre and work together to implement sensible policies that would raise living standards for everyone. They’d rather take out their rage on each other (“the rich”, “the disabled”, “the bankers”, “the unemployed”) than have any sensible discussion and look at data and evidence and what works.
So it will continue as it is, with declining living standards for all, and ever-increasing social division as a result while people scrap over crumbs: apparently the new national hobby.