 The reason I get James Meadway on when there's a big economic story is because he makes complex economic problems understandable to myself and to my audience. The BBC often struggle with this. So it seems to be habitual that, especially their political commentators, mystify more than they reveal when it comes to economic commentary. Someone who created some controversy on social media with her analysis, her explanation of economic fundamentals was Laura Koonsburg on Politics Live. We'll take a look at this. I'm going to get Ash's instant reaction to this afterwards. Oh, it's just enormous, Joe. I mean, it's just absolutely eye-wateringly enormous. And if you think of the debate that we had, really, from the late noughties all the way through to the 2015 election, you know, that was defined by, how is the country going to pay back what we had to borrow in the credit crisis? This is that and some. Okay, this is the credit card, the national mortgage, everything absolutely maxed out, enormous levels of the country basically being in the red. And as Faisal says, it's not really sort of a surprise. You know, we've all known that, seeing businesses shut, shop, shop, pub, shop, people stuck at home. The economy basically put into a deep freeze for months on end, but seeing it spelt out like this in black and white is really, really stark. It's really, really important. And it just seems to me that today in a sort of political sense is maybe a more scary equivalent of that moment when the coalition took over in 2010. And David Laws, the chief secretary of the treasury, leaked that note he'd been left from Lee Embarassing. There is no money left. This is Rishi Sunak standing and telling the country, for the next few years, there is really no money. And of course, that's going to mean hugely difficult decisions in the years to come, but also the point that Faisal, you were making this morning. We're not even through this, okay? No. The beginning of the economic emergency, perhaps the ending almost of the health emergency if the vaccines come good as people hope for, but this is really only the beginning of the second act and the third act, how we pay it back, isn't, it was still on way off. That was Laura Kuhnsberg sort of giving points which were further to the right than Rishi Sunak, she's saying that the country's credit card is maxed out, we're running out of money and this means that, I mean, essentially she's implying, this means that austerity is going to have to come around the corner pretty soon. Economists aren't saying that. So why is the BBC's political editor saying that, Ash? Well, look, I'm not going to make any sort of implication or inference about what her ideological leanings might be. What I will talk about is the structural role of this country's political journalists. They're not serious people and they're not serious about ideas. They're court historians and usually court stenographers, but court historians who prioritize access above all else. And so they're not really going to delve in that deep. They prefer the kind of pageantry and the contest of personality and they're equipped to commentate on that, but not very much else. So I think that she's a reflection of the severely limited fields that she finds herself in. She's got lovely taste in jackets though, fantastic hair, can't fault her. There's also a second problem and it's a deeper problem. And if there's thinking about this today about economic storytelling, because how you explain the economy lays down the parameters of the space you have in which to move, all right? So how you choose to describe what's going on is, as James was saying, wholly ideological. And it sort of struck me today that 40 years on we're still living in Thatcher's Britain. And the reason why I say about this because we have not escaped the world of metaphor, the world of illusion that she had constructed. Stuart Hall's writing on the language of Thatcher and the economy is very interesting because one of the things that he identifies that Thatcher did was played into her gender. So she would say, I've been accused of preaching the parables of the Hala, the Pala and the homilies of the housekeeper, but I'm a woman and I know something about prudent household management. And of course, a national economy is just like a household economy. And so the minute you tell that story of a national economy is just like a household economy, you can't factor in the idea of borrowing is very cheap. I can't get to grips with that. You know, I didn't do economics. It doesn't seem to be instinctively true because even my instincts has left us to go, oh, but I understand money and how much you've got and what you have to spend through my own household expenses. And that was a really powerful thing that Margaret Thatcher did. And that paradigm for understanding, right? That you can only spend what you have coming in and that was generated by the size of the economy has stayed with us all of that time. And I think that if the left or anyone progressive wants to make any kind of headway in that, staying in the kind of lefty think tank world, which can be very, very technical, very, very dry, isn't going to cut it. What you have to do is tell a different kind of story. And I do think that James's reference to World War II and the way in which that debt was managed is a very smart way of doing that. Cause you're appealing to something that is already, you know, so deeply wedged within the country's consciousness. You know, you're never more than two to a few points away from World War II when it comes to the national conversation. And I think that that can help you do that, can help you tell that different story because without that kind of story, which feels instinctively true, intuitively true, the left is going to have a very, very hard time building a kind of national case against austerity. I mean, what people might say there is that there was a austerity after the Second World War, they'll sort of say, you know, people had rations. So how do you sort of, what's your elevator pitch to someone who is convinced that Britain has its credit card maxed out and some sort of austerity is going to be needed? How do you debunk Laura Koonsberg in 60 seconds? It's a challenging task. The Second World War story is easy because we have a choice after the Second World War. You could either go, oh, my God, debt is now 200 or more percent of GDP, the highest it has ever been in this country. And you go, oh, my God, we must panic and do nothing except worry about how to repay the debt and don't set up the NHS and don't massively expand education, don't set up the welfare state. Or you can go, that debt was for an exceptional period of time, we're going to set up the NHS, massively expand education, set up a welfare state and they chose a latter and we still live with that. And we don't live with debt because we've paid off the debt over a long period of time because it doesn't matter that much. That's the situation we're in now. If we could do it then just coming out of a war, we can do it now in a much, much richer country than we were back then. I mean, just to me, that just seems fairly obvious. What I find spectacular that has touched on this. I mean, it's not just Laura Koonsberg, that there's a whole suite of, it's not really economics editors. I'd hope all the economics correspond to better than this. It's the kind of political journalists. There's a whole suite of them who are incapable of actually talking about what the economy is and how it works. Laura Koonsberg was not just wrong about how the government finances itself, watching that. She was even sort of factually wrong about what Rishi Sunak was doing. He didn't present a spending review that said, this is really serious, now we have to make cuts. He literally didn't say that. It's not even remotely true. Never mind that it's not true that the credit card is maxed out because there is no credit card. You don't find Robert Pester, someone who's supposed to know about these things, giving the most nonsensical, garbled account of how quantitative easing works. Now granted, quantitative easing is pretty weird, although in evidence it's fairly simple. The Bank of England issues electronic money and buys government debt with it. That's what it does. That's all you kind of need to say to get the basics. And it's completely garbled and these people are wandering around. Never mind whether they're being ideological or secret Tories, they're just not very good at this. They're getting the basics wrong. They're misinforming the public in really, really critically important ways. Now what I find interesting in the middle of all this is that some of the institutions, like the Institute of Fiscal Studies, which was a big support for austerity and people should remember that in the early 2010s. He's now coming back and saying, well, it was a bad time to do it. You find that the consensus has shifted. The consensus even in the Tory party, Boris Johnson says he doesn't want to do austerity. See how long he sticks to this. But that consensus has shifted. Now, why on earth isn't Laura Kuhnsberg able to recognize this as somebody who's supposed to be politically attuned to the world is a bit beyond me? It's not beyond me. It's not beyond me. And I think some of it is ideological affiliation, but I also think that the world of political journalism is stuffed to the gills with people who are there by virtue of their connections and their class and not their talent, quite frankly. And I think that you could throw a dart, hit any one of them and go, you're not here because you're good at thinking about things. I would say that that's the rule for that upper most echelon of political journalists. The good ones. And I'm not talking about ones which I deem good because I think we share values. There are plenty of ones where I think, you know what, you're a right-wing bastard, but my God, you've got a clarity, a deafness, a sharpness to you, which is just undeniable. That's the exception. That is absolutely the exception. Mostly that people who love scurrying around SW1, absolutely high off their own farts, convinced of their own importance, because they're constantly talking to important people. That's the sum total of their job and how they derive their self-worth.