A Perfection of Contrasts – Mike Wilson asks what the election turbulence might mean for the economy

by | Jun 27, 2017

Share this article

Facebook Open Graph

“The thing is,” said my old mate Dave as he helped himself to another glass of Prosecco, “this election result has been absolutely perfect. Couldn’t have been better.”

I nearly bit the top off my glass, I was so surprised. You see, Dave and his wife were staunch Remainers who had spent the last seven weeks campaigning vigorously for a Labour Party victory which nobody had ever expected them to win. (And which they duly didn’t.) All those house-to-house canvassing visits and all that surging hope and emotion they’d met on the doorsteps had culminated in – well, yet another boring old Conservative government. (Subject to confirmation at the time of writing.)

No, as far as Dave and his wife were concerned, even though we were still head-on for Brexit, boo hiss, the election had sent all the right messages to Theresa May about the country’s preference for a softer and more accommodative approach. And that, they thought, had put a welcome red shot of tincture into the PM’s Tory blue agenda.

 
 

The next day I got the other side of the argument, from Sam and Jane, who had voted for Brexit in 2016 and who still saw it as meaning hard Brexit – and no substitutes, please. The election result, they said, had been just about the worst possible outcome for the national cause. And although they agreed that “presidential” Mrs May had brought her disgrace entirely upon herself, it had fatally undermined her authority and her ability to deliver freedom from the tyrannical rule of Brussels.

The one-eyed leading the one-eyed

So the losers thought the result was great, while the winners were close to tears with disappointment. It should, according to my own view, have meant simply that democracy had spoken and that we’d moved away from the kind of ghastly tribal polemicism that still divides America. But passion is passion, and it would perhaps have been naïve to expect either of them to agree?

Which got me thinking. If there’s one thing a hard-left academic and a fairly traditional Tory have in common, it’s that they both spend a lot of time in the so-called ‘echo chamber’. That’s what you get from having your news filtered to your tastes by your choice of newspaper and also – increasingly – by your social media circle. In an age when younger people get 85% of their news from Facebook and the like – and when most of this news is coming from your circle of “friends” and contacts, rather than from a (nominally) impartial press, you are only ever likely going to hear from those who think the same way as you. Everything else will be filtered out.

 
 

The ‘fake news’ phenomenon in America couldn’t have taken hold anywhere else but inside the echo chamber. In the open world of free discussion we could quickly have dispensed with the idea that Barack Obama was a Muslim, or that he wasn’t born in the USA; but within the echo chamber it rang, and rang, and still rings.

And so, finally, to economics

What a good job, then, that we enlightened people don’t live in echo chambers. Do we? I’m not so sure.

There are some weird self-affirming echoes going on among those of us who believe in a low bank rate or alternatively a high bank rate; or in a cautiously balanced state budget versus a free-spending growth budget (and to hell with the debt); or in a proud strong national currency versus a weak one that boosts exports and brings in capital investment.

 
 

Or in the merits of keeping unemployment levels just high enough (boo) to keep wage costs down (hooray). Or whether rising bond yields are a blessing or a curse?

We all do it, all the time. The Centre for Policy Studies will never see eye to eye with the Institute for Public Policy Research, and neither will agree with the Adam Smith Institute. Forget about the Daily Mail versus the Guardian, the echo chambers are bigger than that. And they call themselves think tanks. And we are committed to their tribalism. Whether we notice it or not

Michael Wilson

Editor-in-Chief

IFA Magazine

Share this article

Related articles

Sign up to the IFA Magazine Newsletter

Trending articles

IFA Talk logo

IFA Talk is our flagship podcast, that fits perfectly into your busy life, bringing the latest insight, analysis, news and interviews to you, wherever you are.

IFA Talk Podcast - listen to the latest episode

x