Where do you want to be shot?

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When ‘news’ papers have a space to fill, one common response is to report the results of some survey or other listing the world’s favourite **** (insert item of your choice here). The extent to which the findings are meaningful is an open question. Passing through Heathrow a few weeks ago, I spotted this advert urging people to vote for Heathrow as their favourite airport.

And there was a similar message (for a different airport, obviously) at the destination. Respondents are self-selecting (none of this demographic weighting stuff), and are not required to have actually visited any other airports – or, even, the one for which they are voting. And the appeal of the message is a clear one – vote for ‘your’ airport. More of a loyalty test than a scientific survey. It's a reminder that we should always be questioning the context and methods used in any survey, even professionally conducted opinion polls, before blindly accepting the headline summary.

Which brings me to a report in yesterday’s Sunday Times about a More in Common opinion poll which suggested that 67% would prefer the Chancellor’s budget this week to fill the fiscal black hole by cutting spending rather than increasing taxes on working people. It’s hardly a surprising result – as a general rule, people seem to naively believe that spending cuts somehow affect ‘other people’ whereas tax cuts impact them directly. But, in reality, it’s a bit like an assassin asking whether you’d prefer to be shot in the head or in the heart: it avoids the much more important question about whether you really want to be shot at all. The existence of Rachel Reeves’ black hole isn’t questioned, and nor is the need to fill it by balancing the budget. In effect, the reporting of a simple opinion poll (which I’m sure was conducted professionally in terms of its methodology) manages to confirm and reinforce the Overton window for debate around government finances, confining it to the assumptions made by the UK’s three right-wing parties (Tories, Reform and Labour), all of which are signed up to the ridiculous household analogy for government finances.

For all the leaks, briefings and speculation, we don’t yet know what Reeves will announce this week, but whether she opts for spending cuts, tax rises, or some combination of the two, the effect will be much the same: she will be reducing the purchasing power (and therefore the standard of living) of millions of people in pursuit of an ideological position which imposes upon her an entirely arbitrary set of rules which she herself has designed. And the post-budget debate will revolve around whether the totals she’s arrived at are correct and whether there’s a better combination to achieve the same outcome. But who will be asking whether we really want to be shot at all?