‘Grow the pie’. Somebody thought ‘grow the pie’ was The Thing, that ‘grow the pie’ was it. That this knockout phrase would silence the army of doubters and bring millions of voters back on side. They were proud of ‘grow the pie’. They thought ‘grow the pie’ was a great idea that people can really relate to and get behind. The same kind of person who thought reviving The Generation Game with Mel and Sue, or that Crown paint advert with the dead-eyed cult singing about ‘Hannah and Dave’ were notions of genius. Grow the pie – biff bang pow, now what’s your comeback to that, eh?
Did they test it out on anyone else before Liz Truss’s speech at Tory party conference? And if so, did nobody point out that pies may rise, they may crispen, they may warm up – they may even be smooshed into the faces of children’s entertainers now and again – but that they never grow. Or that Truss might as well get out on to the conference platform and say ‘strangle the potato’ or ‘demolish the aardvark’, for all the sense it would convey on what was, let’s face it, the most crucial moment of her life?
In fact, growth – in its economic sense – is a concept that’s culturally unfamiliar to the British public. Certainly, it gets used a lot in the media and in politics, by people who know what it means (one hopes, anyway) and who assume that everybody else does too. But it’s a hard concept to comprehend, particularly as it is used only in those contexts. It’s a tricky, counterintuitive idea – that you can get something out of nothing, or at least add value to a thing to create more wealth to splash about generally.
The Light Brigade were progressive when they charged into the Valley of Death
Public understanding of macro-economics is limited, to say the least. This is how Rachel Reeves can get away with saying she’s sick and tired of hearing about ‘trickle down economics’. There are no TV dramas or films or songs about the miracle of wealth creation – while there are many, many TV dramas, films or songs railing fatalistically against profit and exploitation. ‘Everybody knows the fight was fixed/The poor stay poor, the rich get rich,’ croaks Leonard Cohen in one of his most celebrated numbers.
Such doomy, headshaking mantras are the mainstream stuff of the culture of the Western world, despite the briefest glimpse of the global stats showing that the exact opposite is the case. The publication Our World in Data found that people were shockingly ignorant of the massive, unprecedented decrease in global poverty over the last decades. That’s because the reality isn’t cool, and what’s more, because of our peculiar cultural miserabilism, it just doesn’t feel right.
When detractors decry economic growth as something that’s unsustainable and self-destructive they show they don’t know what they’re talking about either. Green politicians are as guilty as Truss of pie-ism, though they add the twist that the pie is going to explode.
Trying to sell the laudable idea of increasing growth in this environment is tricky, with the weight of the culture ranged against you, but there has to be a better metaphor. Explaining what growth actually is would be a start.
Truss is regrettably not alone among politicians using strange terms – things people would never say in an actual conversation – to try to sell what they’re pushing. Labour, the Lib Dems and particularly the SNP are very fond of ‘progressive’, another clapperless bell of a word. Progressing to what? The Light Brigade were progressive when they charged into the Valley of Death. And both ‘growth’ and ‘progressive’ are words people are unlikely to hear in real life from anybody but an oncologist delivering bad news about their cancer.
There are lots of these. ‘Vulnerable’ is the squeamish shorthand for poor. It doesn’t have the same ring though, does it? Jesus probably wouldn’t have caused such a big stir if he’d pronounced that ‘The vulnerable will always be with you’ or that ‘the disadvantaged communities shall inherit the earth’.
Keir Starmer is very fond of saying ‘working people’ in his curious half-Zippy, half-George voice. At least this is an improvement on the (presumably exclusionary) ‘hard-working families’, which is a relief, as that always made me picture a Swiss Family Robinson scenario, kids chopping wood with makeshift flint axes for mum to fashion a water wheel, granny emerging, smothered in dust, from a rude pit with a single lump of coal.
Truss has already achieved many things in her premiership; making it look as if she is responsible for people’s soaring mortgage repayments, paying everybody’s gas bill and making them resent it, and overcoming the public’s wariness against the somewhat striking claim that Angela Rayner will sort everything out.
I think much of this is because she is speaking another language. She is employing fluent nerd thinktank, which never goes well; Ed Miliband had the same issue, to an extent that frequently made him almost unintelligible. Also like him, Truss has a naturally awkward manner, and is committed to ideas that sound peculiar to already suspicious listeners. The last thing she needs is another barrier on top of that. She has to stop talking Westminster wonkese and start speaking English, quick.
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