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Chapter 1: What factors contribute to the UK's economic credibility crisis?
Quick heads up on the podcast today, we're going to be talking about British credibility, British economic credibility against a background of maybe yet another prime minister. That would be seven prime ministers in 10 years in the UK. Political paralysis, the gilt market selling off. Where does it leave the credibility of British economic policymaking?
So it's all London, it's all Britain, and it's all coming up in a couple of minutes. And also, we're going to be talking to IBAC about what Irish businesses are seeing through the lens of Washington, London and Brussels.
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Just before we start, I have a little bit of news from Doki. We would like to congratulate Ramita Navai, whose brilliant documentary, Gaza, Doctors Under Attack, has just won a BAFTA for current affairs. If you want to talk to, to see, to read, to listen to Ramita Navai, check her out at dokibookfestival.org. To understand the economy, you have to understand human nature.
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How you doing there? It is time for the podcast. And this podcast, John, is going to focus on... The United Kingdom. State of the place. What's happening. It's 10 years after the Brexit, folks. It is 10 years. It's hard to get your head around that. Yeah. But it's obviously the UK is in the centre of a political storm.
That political storm is having a massive impact on UK gilts, which are UK long-term interest rates. That's the rate of interest on which the UK... government borrows and UK government borrowing is moving dramatically in the wrong direction. So we're going to look at all that and see, and of course you have a political scrap now. Keir Starmer is in a scrap at the top. Seems so unnecessary.
Seems so unnecessary. In actual fact, I've always looked at that guy and said, he seems all right.
Yeah. Like he doesn't seem like a bad bloke. But the thing for me about Starmer is, before we get into it, is the fact that he inherited a mess from, I know that's the old excuse, but he is trying to pick it apart. And it's not always working for him.
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Chapter 2: How has political instability affected the UK gilt market?
Oh, right, okay. So this gives you a sense of why the United States is in a very difficult position. But its position is nowhere near as acute as the position in the United Kingdom. So what we focus on is because the UK is in a political, well, there's a battle for starvation position, but there's also coming down the road more political instability in the UK.
And that's why people are thinking, hold on a second, what are these guys at?
But one of the plus points of Brexit that, you know, the UK public were told was that you'll have more independence when it comes to things like setting interest rates and stuff. Yes. So they have more control. As opposed to, say, Ireland, where we are kind of stuck with the ECB. Whatever the ECB say, we have to follow along.
But they have independence now to set their interest rates and therefore have technically more control over their inflation.
See, this is what... they don't get. So UK long-term interest rates are 5.1% today. Irish long-term interest rates are 3.8% today. So UK interest rates are substantially above Irish ones or German ones or French ones. And the question is, what has that independence given the UK? Because the UK was always setting their own interest rates. I mean, again, Sterling never went into the Eurozone.
The UK never, after the 1992 crisis, where Sterling fell out of the ERM, which is a long time, it's a long, long time ago, right? But it has affected UK policymaking. And what you find in the UK is that
The essential problem for the British state is that the economy cannot generate the growth it needs to generate the tax buoyancy to get them out of this brace, which is their consistently over borrowing.
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Chapter 3: What challenges is Keir Starmer facing as Labour leader?
So unless they come up with a trick You know, when I say a trick, a policy that generates growth for them, at least growth in revenue, they have this problem. And then you superimpose upon that the political turmoil, which is all related, right? So what you have is you have a game of musical chairs at the top of the Labour Party. The Labour Party are probably going to move to the left.
because what Starmer is fighting is the left wing within his party. The left always spend more. That's their thing. They'll promise more for education and more for health and all those sort of things. But at the same time, the centrist part of the Labour Party, Starmer's,
side, the people who actually won the election, right, what they promised the UK government, or the UK people was no new taxes, or no new big taxes on income tax.
Yeah, I remember when Rachel Reeves said that, it was kind of like, oh, really? Are you sure?
Well, again, to say no new taxes... those people with a long memory will remember that it was actually George Bush Senior, George Herbert Bush, who said, read my lips, no new taxes, just as the Americans went into another oil-dependent recession in the early 90s. And of course, Bill Clinton won the next election on the basis of, it's the economy, stupid. It's always the economy, stupid.
So what you see in the UK now is that Rachel Reeves and Starmer have been cursed by the fact that the UK electorate never really trusts Labour governments. There has been a history in the United Kingdom of Labour governments being undone by the financial markets.
Yeah, because the kind of the default government for the UK is the Conservatives. Has always been, yeah.
And you kind of forget that in our lifetime, because Tony Blair was such a successful prime minister, you forget that in actual fact, as you said, the natural government in the UK, it's a conservative country. It has always been a conservative country.
And the first-past-the-post system gives that party that is slightly or modestly ahead, it gives them this massive, what they would call thumping majorities. Now, the interesting thing with the thumping majority is... It's a very British one, isn't it? The thumping majority...
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of rising inflation on UK interest rates?
However.
Yeah.
They seem to have tied themselves in knots for the last 25 years. It's intriguing. How? I still don't get it. Too many economists spoiled the broth? I don't know. They're not that smart, clearly. No, but they have had... They can talk a game, but they can't deliver it. And that's one of the interesting observations that Simon Cooper had.
You know, Simon's been on this podcast about how the talents that get you to the top in the UK... the sort of Keir Starmer, Boris Johnson talents. They're both lawyerly talents. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Studying the classics, studying the law, right? So you're good at delivering an argument. You're good at getting up in the dispatch box and being able to construct an argument.
You're a bit of a buffoon, but you can actually, you know, it's what they call a slightly windbaggy approach, right? Yeah. Okay, from the Oxford Union.
Yeah.
Those people typically... can't do sums. And they certainly can't do hard sums, right? If you actually think lawyers and sums don't go together, right?
Yeah.
And they don't like the kind of engineering side of things, the technocratic stuff, the state capacity, the sort of stuff that builds societies. We contrast that with the French way. The French, of course, can build state capacity because they bias their education system towards engineering. So that's science po whole... conveyor belt of engineering talent that goes to build the French economy.
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Chapter 5: How does Brexit impact the UK's economic growth and policy?
Farage is on record as saying he doesn't really care about the Union. He's an English nationalist. I think that Farage in power... may well begin to treat the regions of the UK in the same way as Donald Trump treats his allies, as an irritant, something that they're not paying their way.
I would say a Farage government, if it were to come to pass, would be a profoundly different creature to anything we've seen. So over the last 30 or 40 years, the last 50 years, there's general social democratic views in the right of centre or left of centre, have largely been the anchor tenant in politics in the UK.
Yeah.
It seems to me that that era is over, well and truly over. And what you have now is the left of the Labour Party, who you would have thought had seen its day with Jeremy Corbyn.
Yeah.
But they're back in, right? Yeah. And a sort of a slightly Trotskyite... bent in the left of the Labour Party are this kind of what I call the golf club revolutionaries of reform. You know, the revolutionaries in blazers, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
With cravats and drinking gin and tonics in the afternoon. Talking about, you know, warm beer and sandwiches.
Yeah, yeah.
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