Adam Smith Institute

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Aditya Chakrabortty's quite right, money talks

One of the things we might fairly accuse the Guardian of, that left which is its readership and production team perhaps, is a failure to recognise what is as opposed to what they think ought to be. Which means that this about face is worth noting:

On the one hand, you have the self-inflating chaos at Westminster, the fever dreams of Jacob Rees-Mogg’s gang and the rehearsed rage of the Democratic Unionists. And on the other, you have the truth nailed by Philip K Dick. “Reality,” he wrote, “is that which, when you stop believing it, doesn’t go away.” So let’s remind ourselves of some reality.

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Even as politicians and the press fantasise about how Britain will leave Europe, big business is already at the departure gate. For Westminster, Brexit is months in the future; for boardrooms making plans, it is the present. Big carmakers have this year halved their investment in new models and factory machinery. The consultancy EY records a 31% slump in the number of foreign businesses setting up headquarters in Britain. Boris Johnson certainly makes good copy – but money talks much louder.

Leave aside the specific example here, that’s just rhetoric, and savour the underlying argument. There’s reality, in which money talks loudly, then there’s politics which can and often does become entirely divorced from that universe outside the debating chamber.

An excellent little point to make about the world. For example, there is no gender pay gap there’s simply a difference in the average manner that men and women organise life after the arrival of children. The UK has not one whit of poverty by any historical or global standard, we have some inequality. Such inequality has fallen in recent years by the standard measures and by proper and realistic ones - measures of consumption after taxes, benefits and government provision of goods and services - is at historical lows. Perhaps companies ought not to pay the management lots of money but they do and societal setups where they don’t have less efficient corporate sectors. Even, Big Tech doesn’t sell data, it just allows advertising to select demographics in exactly the same manner that the Guardian’s jobs page trawls the population that believes none of this paragraph.

All of which rather tells us why we’re not going to see this analysis - money talks, reality matters - spreading to the rest of The Guardian’s pages. For if it did there wouldn’t be a Guardian, would there?
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