Economics with the Truth

I rarely go anywhere first class - way too expensive - but I had a voucher for the station lounge which I used this morning prior to my journey down to London.

Anyway, there are free copies of the Financial Times along with the coffee and the croissants so for what is probably only the second or third time in my life, I picked one up (the FT, not a beverage or pastry!) and leafed through it.

In it is an article which even my decades-old Economics A level education can understand as utterly ludicrous.

The Economics Editor Chris Giles complains that the British economy has actually been doing too well since the referendum. Yep, the UK has been over-performing.

So not only is the paper apparently mystified by the country not voting as we were told to by the government back in 2016, it also cannot understand why the markets haven’t done what George Osbornes and other "financial experts" predicted either.

Giles - presumably someone with an Economics education above my A level? - states that “relatively benign economics has emboldened politicians to harden their Brexit demands and refuse to compromise” and follows that with “it is now too late for markets or the UK economy to exercise much discipline on Britain’s politics before the scheduled exit date of March 29”.  He then goes on to state that since the referendum “economic performance has been tolerable while the employment rate has reached record levels.”

Or in other words: it’s too late now for a Project Fear's Deal-free Brexit financial and economic Armageddon to happen, and far from our performance being "tolerable" one only has to flick through four pages of the very same paper to find some GDP Growth figures which list the UK as currently the fastest-growing European country in the G7 while Italy and Germany slide towards recession....

Pants on Fire?

Congratulations to the BBC's sharp-eyed Sean Coughlan for pointing out that the DfE's Nick Gibb was trying to mislead the public about education funding last week when he claimed that his department was “spending record amounts on our school funding ... the third highest spender on education of the 36 member states of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)."

However, it turns out that on a per-pupil basis, this equates to a cut in real terms of about 8%, and that the OECD figure includes private school fees, university tuition and all sorts of other non-state school funding and it's for the whole UK, not just England.

Tut, tut.

Nice to know that the UK Statistics Authority and the Office for Statistics Regulation are investigating and will publish findings “shortly", but there's nothing about whether Mr Gibb's pants are currently, or will be, on fire ….