As elections draw near, the discussion shrinks to one simple question: are you better off now than you were five years ago? Maybe we don’t need a TV debate after all. Other issues come out for an airing but in the end, no matter how passionate you are about the NHS, devolution, immigration or the environment, if you can’t talk competently about money, you’re nothing.
If instead, as Green party leader Natalie Bennett showed us recently, you go on the radio to outline your spending plans but have a brain fade or a touch of tongue-stroke or whatever it is she called that jumble of mouthfarts that came out as policy – if you do this, you’re cast to one side as an inadequate buffoon. This is no country for the uncosted.
Money is the root of all politics. It sounds so obvious it’s hardly worth writing down. Yet I was amazed by how shocked and surprised we were meant to be at that footage of Jack Straw and Malcolm Rifkind selling their services and talking hourly rates. The film made them look like two hungry foxes backed into a pile of brambles, a bunch of feathers in each mouth: but really, this was no different from what Rifkind and Straw’s bosses do all the time.
