Exhibit A (but there could have been others), is La Toynbee's article from 15th March.
The Prime Minister, you may recall, has just been to Washington to meet the US president. "Never mind the barbeque", begins Toynbee, "did David Cameron bring home an economics lesson from President Obama? While UK growth stagnates, Obama's US grows by 2.2%. While the UK economy has shrunk 3.9% since the crash, the US has recovered all it lost, and more. As our unemployment rises theirs falls. Stimulus works, austerity sucks out the air. . . Impossible orders to squeeze the lifeblood out of country after country is fantasy economics no one believes: Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy can never cut what they pretend to promise. Socially, economically and politically it's impossible – and dangerous to democracy to try. Even the Dutch, chief austerity police of the feckless south, are missing their own cuts target by miles. Germany has failed to make half the cuts it pledged. This is Ebola economics, Europe feeding on its own flesh".
So apparently Britain should be doing what the US is doing and stimulate its economy; imagining that austerity for the UK is the answer to ballooning deficits is fantasy, even Ebola, economics; we like the PIIGS countries are doomed as long as we go down this path.
Here's what's wrong with Toynbee's argument:
1. Stimulating an economy which has been running a deficit for ten years can only be achieved by borrowing (something Toynbee does not acknowledge). The US is much better placed to do this than we are because a) it is the world's largest economy, largely self-sufficient in energy needs and less subject to external shocks and b) the dollar is the world's reserve currency. Accordingly it is much more likely to retain the confidence of the bond markets than we are in the UK.
2. Austerity will never work for Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy because those countries are in the Eurozone. We are not. Those countries can only carry out an internal devaluation, with indefinitely painful consequences, whereas we can devalue externally because we control our own currency (in fact since the credit crunch the pound has devalued somewhere in the region of 25%).
There is an argument against Osbornomics, but comparing UK to the US on the one hand, and the PIIGS (or GIPSIs if you prefer) on the other is fatuous. You might as well compare cheese with apples.
Why does Toynbee persist in writing about economics? And more to the point, why does the Guardian continue to let her? The observations above (the dollar being the world's reserve currency, the UK having its own currency) are not recondite statistics available only to specialists. They are bog-standard facts capable of being learned by anyone who reads the papers every now and again. How could Toynbee, who writes on politics for a living, be unaware of them? How could she misunderstand their consequences so risibly?
I can't answer this of course, but here are two more facts to finish: Polly Toynbee failed the 11 plus and only managed one A Level.
