17 April 2023 , 12:04
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To a very rich man, wealth is about maths. About adding, multiplying, compound interest, and sending the markets up or down.
That is how Rishi Sunak got rich. And it's therefore how he thinks you could also be rich, if you weren't so silly and poor and bad at maths, and that would make the country richer, too.
And if the country is richer, he's more electable because you'd all see he's got this sussed, so he's going to sit you down to do the sums because, as far as he's concerned, it all adds up to him being right.
"I am, but she wasn't! Eventually. Is that right?" (Getty Images)So let's do those sums, kids!
1. The Prime Minister wants everyone to do maths for an extra two years. The government has missed targets for recruiting maths teachers every year for the past 12 years. Even when the government cut the targets by 39% to be less embarrassing, it still couldn't hit them.
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How many maths teachers have we lost since Rishi Sunak has been in charge?
a) Um, lots?
b) No, loads
c) Well this doesn't make any sense, because it's just new recruits and fails to take into account the rate at which they're leaving the profession due to poor pay and retention, which is the topic of industrial action because they've been offered a desultory 5% rise having lost 11% of pay in real terms since 2010. Maths teachers are as rare as hen's teeth and more undervalued than a road mender.
"Yes, there's definitely a hole in my thinking" (PA)2. The nurses want a 15% pay rise. The junior doctors want 35%. The teachers want at least 10%, but the ambulance drivers have accepted 5%. The government says these are unreasonable demands that would cost several billions to fulfil.
During the pandemic, the government shelled out £13billion for PPE at inflated prices, with some suppliers later posting profit margins had tripled. Around £4billion of useless PPE was later burned. Is this:
a) A sign that the government will print more money when its mates are on the take
b) A sign that the government has no friends in the NHS
c) THEY'RE LITERALLY BURNING OUR MONEY WHY ARE WE NOT RIOTING
"Well, it's not my money, so it's the right thing to do!" (Getty Images)3. The economy was comprehensively buggered by a mad Prime Minister who tried to grow it by throwing it in a blender. Now a PM is trying to grow it by not paying people fairly, and making them do maths lessons instead. Which of the following statements is true?
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a) When you pay public sector workers more, the economy benefits by about 80p in every pound in terms of increased tax revenue, increased spending, and economic growth.
b) When you give tax breaks to billionaires, they spend it in a tax haven, and the economy shrinks because everyone else is paying more tax to make up for it
4. The NHS exists to save, extend, and improve the lives of millions of cash-generating units (AKA people). The cost of the NHS in England will cost £153billion this year, while the gross domestic product produced by all the CGUs cared for by the health service will be £2.2trillion.
Is the NHS:
a) A service that requires more money every year in large part because the government allows people to get sick when it could fix them sooner
b) An investment with a 90% annual return
To a man sitting on half a billion pounds, It's the poor and number-bored who have damaged the economy. Not the people sitting on half a billion pounds in this country and paying taxes on it in a different country; not the last lunatic Prime Minister, or the lunatic before her; not the years of austerity that starved and shrank Britain, its economy and its horizons.
To the man who's less popular than nurses, it is the nurses who are the problem. To everyone who waits in line for a nurse, rather than pay to see a consultant in Harley Street, the nurses are all that stands between us and DIY amputation.
Just because we stopped studying maths at 16, doesn't mean we don't do sums. Even those without a single GCSE have to tot up the shopping bill, put something back on the shelf when they're a few pennies short, and sit at the kitchen table tearing their hair out trying to bend the laws of physics so that a meagre income can stretch to cover the electric bill, the bus fare and the rent.
My grandmother kept a notebook in which she jotted down every penny spent. My mother has spent 50 years running the family accounts. I have sat eating cold tins of tuna, shivering, trying to save money so I don't lose the roof over my head, and now I make sure to save 10% of everything so I'm never that scared again. None of us are accountants, or maths whizzes, we're just normal. People raised on pennies do maths, all the time. That's further maths - the kind that really makes your head hurt, at times.
Men who get rich speculating on a collapse of the banking system, on the other hand, have never ached because they're 10 pence short at the end of the day. They tot things up, they examine the spreadsheets, they pile up the money, and they never, ever, have to do the really difficult maths.
If Rishi wants to halve inflation, grow the economy, reduce debt, cut waiting lists, and stop the boats, he needs a maths lesson to understand something truly fundamental that seems to have passed him by: to a rich man, maths is about multiplication. To a nation, it's about dividing the pi fairly.
Without us, there'd be no pi at all.
(The answer to all the above questions is: HELL YES)