How many economists does it take to wreck an economy?

Friday-weekend blog

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a blog suggesting that the UK economy wasn’t actually growing as all our mainstream media journalists and economists claimed. Instead, I proposed that the UK was already in a deep recession. I rewrote this blog and had it published on the (IMHO) excellent Daily Sceptic website. Here’s link to my Daily Sceptic article:

https://dailysceptic.org/2026/09/26/there-is-no-economic-growth-were-in-a-deep-recession/

I’ll briefly summarise my argument.

Let’s assume there are two countries – Country A and Country B. Both countries have a GDP of say £3 trillion. And both countries have GDP growth in 2025 of 1%.

In Country A that growth comes from growth in private-sector business – manufacturing and services. Moreover, because the private sector is growing in Country A, more people are being employed and so government spending on unemployment benefits is falling while taxes from a successful growing private sector are rising. So, Country A doesn’t need to borrow any money from international bond markets.

In Country B we have an economically-illiterate and utterly incompetent Chancellor with a very dodgy CV. Let’s just call her Rachel. The (IMHO) useless Rachel cooks up a first budget which hugely increases taxes causing the private sector to contract and shed 150,000 jobs a year. This increases government spending on unemployment benefits. Moreover, Country B spends billions on 80,000 more illegal migrants, on an extra 260,000 NEETS (young people not in employment, education or training), on tens of thousands more people claiming they are disabled and hugely increases the number of people employed (I can’t write ‘working’) in the public sector while also giving the whole public sector an inflation-busting 6.3% pay rise. Given that the private sector in Country B is contracting, crushed by Rachel’s job taxes, how does Country B pay for the eye-watering increases in public spending? It borrows loads and loads of money at short-and-curly-tugging interest rates. This extra borrowing and extra spending results in an apparent increase of 1% in GDP.

It was and still is my contention that Country A was experiencing real economic growth. But Country B created the illusion of economic growth by borrowing and spaffing huge amounts of money on unproductive areas (illegal migrants, more unemployed, more fake disabled and more public-sector waste etc etc). So, I proposed that Country B was actually in a recession.

I sent the link to my article to the Sunday Times’s key economist, David Smith, asking how he and other economists could claim the UK economy was growing when the UK economy was basically rather unpleasanltly similar to Country B. I got a wonderfully rapid reply:

“It is because we know something about economics and economic statistics and that you are talking economically illiterate nonsense”

Not only is the Sunday Times’s top economist the ultimate professional, but he is also clearly extremely polite to the Sunday Times’s readers who pay his no doubt extremely generous salary.

I don’t know if economist David Smith has ever had a proper job where he has created wealth by providing goods or services and employing people. From the little I could see from his CV, he has written loads of stuff on economics. But I couldn’t find any evidence that he has ever actually run a business. But, hey, what do I know?

I have been fortunate enough to have worked in almost 100 public- and private-sector organisations in 15 countries in 4-5 different languages. But clearly, I know nothing about economics.

One economist who actually does understand economics is (IMHO) Liam Halligan and, from the little I have seen, he is the one economist who actually understands that the UK is going rapidly bankrupt. Most other ‘economists’ seem to believe that the UK economy is growing.

I did try to find out how many economists there are in Britain. But the only figures I could find were:

• UK Government: The Government Economic Service (GES) employs more than 3,500 to 3,700+ economists across over 70 government departments and civil service bodies, making it the single largest public employer of economists in the country

Given the dire state of the British economy, one might be forgiven for wondering what these 3,500 to 3,700+ public-sector economists do all day.

There would also inevitably be many thousands more economists working in financial services and throughout the private sector.

What I don’t understand his how the UK economy could be such a soon-to-be-bankrupt disaster when we have so many brilliant economists, like the gentleman at the Sunday Times. But I guess there are many things in this world which an uneducated, intellectually-challenged, economically-illiterate ignoramus like myself will never be able to understand.