With his viral video explaining debt-to-GDP ratio through the medium of biscuits, Gordon McKee is putting the ‘nom’ into economics. Since his election to the Commons last year, the Glasgow South MP has established himself as the Labour politician with the best social media game, a sort of Robert Jenrick of the left. His latest video sees McKee, mug of tea in hand, build a 3D graph of international debt-to-GDP ratios using custard creams and bourbon biscuits. Custard creams equal national wealth; Bourbons, government debt.
The 31-year-old stacks up bickie after bickie as he recounts the key points at which debt rose: Gordon Brown’s bank bailout; 14 years of the Tories; ‘some guy eats a bat in Wuhan and now nobody can go to work’. Over the last three decades, debt has gone from 30 per cent to roughly 100 per cent of GDP.
But Britain’s debt ratio is crumbs compared to France’s 113 per cent, the USA’s 120 per cent and Japan’s 240 per cent, which requires a tower of Bourbons almost as tall as McKee. Yet the UK pays more interest on its debt because of the rate at which it is piling up and the health of its economy, i.e. its reliability as a borrower.
Or, as he puts it: ‘Japan is your mate who’s always in his overdraft. America’s the guy who spends a lot but always shows up to work. Britain was the sensible one, but we’ve bought a dog, a car, and a hair transplant all in one month. We’ve pretended we’ve just had a big pay increase but, in reality, we’ve just got a credit card with a lot of debt.’
It is one of the most effective pieces of political communication I’ve seen, and McKee deserves praise for it. All of it except the line ‘When I was born in 1994’, for which he deserves a slap. The impact is especially useful on an issue that is urgently important but low down the hierarchy of public awareness.
This is the point at which cynical political journalists might accuse McKee of talking down to voters by employing tea biscuits as an instructional tool. First of all, there are few people less qualified to speak on the nature of the average voter than political journalists. The last time they encountered an average voter was by accident in the taxi queue at a conference hotel in some place called ‘Liverpool’, and they won’t make that mistake again. Second of all, political journalists might be conversant in servicing debt, bond markets and deficit spending, but much of the public is not, being busy living fulfilling lives, building meaningful relationships and enjoying other experiences unfamiliar to political journalists.
Far from patronising anyone, McKee has produced a video that engages the public directly and honestly about the scale of the financial challenges Britain faces. It’s more than Rachel Reeves has managed in 16 months. Voters don’t mind cutesy stunts, what they mind is the feeling that the Budget is a secretive conversation between the Treasury and the roughly 50 per cent of the press corps to which it has leaked some part of the document. The Chancellor isn’t talking down to the public; she isn’t talking to them at all.
This approach to politics, in which the primary audience for statements and decisions is not the public but other elites, is not long for this world. Government by gatekeeper group chat will not survive the ongoing democratisation of public communication. The politicians adept at engaging the voters directly rather than through leaks, press releases and media interviews will be the ones who prosper in a post-journalism democracy. Having suggested Coffee House readers keep an eye on ‘rising star’ McKee upon his election to Parliament in 2024, I get to do my little I-told-you-so dance, which I’m currently doing as I write this.
It’s not insignificant that McKee is a Labour MP. Labour, and especially No. 10, have proved shockingly poor at messaging, the one task they might have been assumed equal to. Then again, Starmer is an elitist’s elitist, his career path until a few years ago blissfully uncluttered by any sort of encounter with the ordinary punter. If Downing Street had any wits about it, it would fast-track McKee to some PPS or minister-without-portfolio role, and let him overhaul how the government communicates, with an emphasis on platforms such as TikTok, Instagram and Facebook, which warrant the same attention as the BBC, ITV and Sky.
Wait, though. What is McKee’s solution to the debt crisis? He’s a Labour MP, so what do you think it is? ‘Tax the rich’, of course. As well as trying to combat the rise of Reform, Labour needs to watch out for the Greens, and McKee’s video is aimed at Green-curious voters. If a general election were held tomorrow, Opinium polling shows one in ten people who voted Labour in 2024 would switch to the Zack Polanski’s party – a proportion that will no doubt grow as his message of economic populism gets more exposure. He is already cutting through with voters aged 18 to 34, one in five of whom intends to vote Green next time.
And economic populism has a sizeable constituency out there. More than half (54 per cent) of Labour voters and 65 per cent of Green voters believe the public finances and public services can be fixed ‘solely by increasing taxes on the rich’. Six in ten (63 per cent) of 18-to-24 year olds and 49 per cent of 25-to-49 year olds agree. It’s not just the young and the left, though. A majority of Britons (55 per cent) believes more revenue would be raised by taxing the ‘super rich’, and here’s the most important statistic of all: by a margin of 44 to 34 per cent, voters say that taxing the super rich is the answer even if it results in less revenue being raised.
Economic populism has a sizeable constituency
Which is why it is in Labour’s political interests to find a way to address these voters directly with messaging that appeals to their economic-populist instincts. Don’t direct all energies to luring back Reform switchers, many of whom have no interest in being lured. Instead, shore up the party’s soft-left and progressive voters whose departure to the Greens (or the Lib Dems or an independent) next time could split the centre-left vote evenly enough to give Reform help it doesn’t need or the Tories help they desperately need.
McKee’s communications style might not be for everyone but it will be for many of the sort of voters Labour needs to hold onto or tempt back from parties to its left. Targeting younger, lefter voters with punchy, populist messaging is a gamble but Labour should risk it for a biscuit.
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