I had the (mis)fortune to listen to the BBC’s World at One while
returning home from a lecture yesterday. The second item
(20 minutes in) was about the new fiscal rule proposed
by Labour’s John McDonnell in a speech that morning. The item
contained three segments. The first was from a BBC political
reporter, the second an economist at the IFS, and the third from
Labour’s 2015 election campaign director.
The reporter, Ross Hawkins, described the zero lower bound knockout
as a ‘loophole’, and also talked about taxpayers
money. He then described how the knockout would work (the MPC would
decide), but went on to relate how a Labour press officer had
described his questions as being from a Tory crib sheet and had
walked away. The economist Carl Emmerson did a solid job of saying
what the rule would mean post 2020, although he had to respond at
least once that just because the ‘borrowing to invest’ idea was
not new did not make it bad. Then came Spencer Livermore to say
exactly that - as it was similar to Labour’s rule for the 2015
election, and as this had failed, Labour needed something new and
radical. He did not say, and was not asked, what this new and radical
fiscal policy might be.
It occurred to me afterwards that at no point did anyone ever ask
whether this rule was better or worse than George Osborne’s fiscal
charter. Carl Emmerson tried to contrast the two rules, but natural
questions like ‘should we borrow to invest’ or ‘does it make
economic sense to have a zero lower bound knockout’ were never
asked. Just think about that: the opposition proposes a fiscal rule
that is quite different from the government’s, and in 10 minutes of
radio no one asks which is better.
Livermore was not asked what his new and radical fiscal rule might be
because it was of no interest - all that was of interest to the
interviewer was that he was criticising his own side. That was not an
accident of the way the discussion went, but inherent in the way the
segment as a whole was constructed. If listeners had been looking for
any kind of discussion of the economic merits of the new rule they
would have been disappointed.
Unfortunately this particular programme was not an isolated case.
Channel 4 News took a similar line, interviewing Livermore again,
with no economist in sight. I once saw a chart somewhere that looked
at who talks about economics in the media, and less than 10% of the
time it was economists. This matters, because it is how we end up
with governments pursuing policies that sound good in soundbites, but
cause considerable damage to our economies.
