I am not a fan of Zack Polanski, although there is no doubt he's an effective campaigner, and his party's win in Manchester is a feather in his cap. However, I think he's a populist of the left in the mould of Jeremy Corbyn, and I really don't see him ever being able to take on the role of prime minister. Hs heart is in the right place, but he's a deeply unserious person.
He admitted that he is a populist on Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell's The Rest is Politics podcast a few months ago. In the YouTube video of the encounter, the first 30 seconds is a clip of Zack Polanski showing that he had no idea of the amount of interest Britain is paying on its debt mountain:
The whole interview is well over an hour but well worth watching if only to reveal what happens when somebody is confronted with reality rather that what they believe. It's obvious Polanski is well out of his depth.
He claimed that taxpayers had borrowed £70 billion from the Bank of England, arguing that the money was owed to the government itself and therefore it wasn't really a debt at all. In fact, the BoE holds between £850 billion and £1 trillion in gilts (UK government bonds), amounting to about a third of our total national debt of £2.9 trillion, on which we pay about £100 billion a year in debt interest. He was orders of magnitude wrong.
Polanski also didn't seem to know the difference between the national debt and the deficit (the amount we add to it each year by borrowing more to make up the shortfall between spending and taxation).
He is an adherent to Modern Monetary Theory where you just keep printing money and tried to convince Stewart that it's a serious proposition. I don't know enough about it to comment one way or the other but suffice to say most reputable economists, the Treasury, the OBR and the Institute for Fiscal Studies don't agree with him. Incidentally, of the 4,825 comments posted under the YouTube video, most are supportive of Polanski, which just shows how far we've come in denigrating experts in favour of comforting madcap theories..
If you were going to make a pitch for the highest office in the land, the very least we should expect is for the prospective candidates to educate themselves on basic economics. Polanski has risen to the top on a wave of populist rhetoric, and I really believe we deserve more. He says the markets shouldn't be allowed to play a role in democratic decisions, which is the Liz Truss approach, and we all know how that ended.
The really big loser was Kemi Badenoch and the Tories. They finished fourth on 706 votes and seem to have disappeared from the political scene in this country. We can all cheer that. I am sure tactical voting was at play here, showing just what an uphill battle it will be for Reform UK to achieve a significant majority at the next general election.
The Gorton and Denton result is, however, the clearest indication yet that the race is between two populist parties of the right and the left. Reform UK and the Greens got close to 70% of the vote while the two traditional parties won just 27%.
Voters, I'm sorry to say, aren't yet ready to listen to reason.
