Skint: The Truth About Britain’s Broken Economy (Channel 4)
Do not adjust your set. There now follows a party political broadcast on behalf of the No More Parties, No More Politics campaign.
It’s an enticing idea. After six weeks of electioneering, most of us wouldn’t care if we never saw another weary debate or question-and-answer session.
But one of the solutions floated by Radio 4 economist Tim Harford, on Skint: The Truth About Britain’s Broken Economy (Ch4), took that idea literally.
A couple of his interviewees argued that the UK needs to do away with democracy altogether and go for a dictatorial regime like the one in Beijing.
Will, the boss of a bicycle manufacturing business called Brompton Bikes, said: ‘If we really want to deliver stability into the UK economy, we need to get our governments to set out a cross-party strategy, like China, for the next 25 years. We don’t just move from left to right due to the loud minority, we’re doing it based on facts. That would be great.’
Radio 4 economist Tim Harford’s documentary explores why Britain’s economy is struggling
Perhaps it’s understandable a cycle-maker fancies the idea of modelling the UK economy on China. I imagine it would be pretty good for fashion houses that specialise in blue dungarees as well.
But if Labour wins its threatened super-majority on Thursday, Britain could become a lot more like China’s one-party state than anyone foresaw. That won’t be as utopian as Will hopes.
Chilling though this prospect is, Harford’s fascination with statistics makes him a broadcaster always worth hearing. He wrote a devastating article in the Daily Mail four years ago, at the height of the pandemic, warning of the insane risks of lockdown.
At a time when most commentators were demanding even more stringent restrictions on our liberty, Harford pointed out that the national survival rate of Covid-19 was actually about 99.9 per cent.
The risk of death from coronavirus, he calculated, was on average three times more serious than taking a bath . . . ‘and the prospect of bathtime tragedies has never shut the country down’.
Harford wrote a devastating article in the Daily Mail four years ago, at the height of the pandemic, warning of the insane risks of lockdown
Any analyst whose conclusions are that robust deserves his soapbox, even if you decide you disagree with everything he’s saying.
Among his radical suggestions in Skint Britain was a proposal to build two million new houses in the countryside.
Dismissing the English reverence for the greenbelt as ‘near-religious’, he interviewed one campaigner for new homes who claimed that much of the countryside ‘has not got any environmental significance — or beauty significance either’.
That’s a view guaranteed to provoke people right across the political spectrum, from the Clarksons to the Packhams.
Charts, graphs and data zigzagged across the screen with often baffling speed. More explanation would have been welcome: for instance, analysis of Britain’s GDP showed each generation was twice as well-off as its parents’, until the banking crash of 2008.
Since then, prosperity has flatlined. But is it a bad thing if Millennials are no richer than their parents? Aren’t we always being told Baby Boomers had it easy?
