Ruth Alexander

speaker

4,250 appearances 120 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2011 last heard Aug 2018

Ruth Alexander’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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More or Less · UK Election Podcast 3 · 24 Apr 2015 podcast

But on closer inspection, he's also been doing some politician maths.

The SNP plan to borrow more than the current coalition government.

The Chancellor's added up the Treasury costings of this over four years and come up with a big number, £148 billion.

Now, this extra borrowing would mean higher debt interest payments.

The Chancellor has then added up the extra debt interest payments the Treasury says the S&P plans might generate, and that gets him a nice big number of about £6 billion over these four years.

He's then divided that number, not by the number of people in the UK, not by the number of households, but a smaller number than even that, the number of working households, to get himself a nice big final number, £350 for every working household.

But that's £350 over four years.

The yearly cost would be about £85, which is, I mean, it is less.

That's not a headline grabbing number, really, is it?

Well, not according to economists I've spoken to today.

For a start, there's no reason to believe that the costs of extra debt interest payments would be divided equally among working households alone.

Rhetoric from Labour and the SNP suggests that they might tax the rich the most.

Also, you can play with the Chancellor's numbers to tell a bit of a different story.

So if you take that £148 billion of extra borrowing and divide by the number of working households, as he likes to say,

You come up with £8,500.

Now, that's £8,500 more money per working household that the government would have to potentially spend on public services, libraries, schools, roads and welfare, like child benefit, working tax credits, disability benefits, housing benefit, all of which some working households receive.

So all this tells us that the voter has a real choice.

Would you like the UK to have lower borrowing and debt, which might maybe possibly save you £350 over four years?

Or would you be happier with higher borrowing and debt and an extra maybe £8,500 of public spending?

You know, if only there was some way to make your choice and have it heard like an election.

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