I'm going to assume that you're familiar with Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart on the rest is politics and jump right in…

After an interview with Zack Polanski where they gave him a grilling on the economy without really attempting to understand what he was suggesting they released another episode with an mmt ‘explainer’ from Rory. This was full of contradictions and not at all the sort of thorough discussion that the subject deserves. So with that in mind I thought I’d give a quick review of the two main ways of looking at modern monetary theory and then jump right into explaining where Rory was wrong, where he might actually have a point and why he seems so reluctant to properly interact with the substance of MMT.

MMT as description and prescription 

Descriptive: MMT explains how the actual economic ‘plumbing’ functions. How money flows, where it is created and destroyed. It shows clearly that government spending occurs first, then taxation and bond issuance removes money from the economy later. This is all based on empirical evidence, following the flows of money in a real economy and describing it. Nothing here should be controversial.

Prescriptive: Given the above is true, how should we actually run the economy? Tax and ‘borrowing’ are not real restrictions on spending, we can simply use direct monetary financing for public investment. We could implement a jobs guarantee, bring public services into public ownership etc. These are the crucial political decisions we can make based on the knowledge that descriptive MMT gives us and our goals as a society.

As Rory said, even orthodox economists within the government accept the point that spending is done before taxation. Yet it is still incredibly common for politicians of all parties to hide behind the lie that “we can’t afford it” as an excuse for not going forward with a policy, claiming that the government is like a household in needing to balance its budget. Understanding how an economy works (which is all the descriptive part of MMT is) and being open about it challenges this lie directly and forces actual conversations over these political decisions.

Take the issue of lifting the 2 child benefit cap as an example (something now done by labour in the last budget). For years this has been described as something we simply cannot afford to do, we can't afford to lift 450,000 children out of poverty. We simply don't have the money unless we raise taxes or borrow more, which would break Labour’s fiscal rules. Except MMT explains that we can afford it. We could literally just create the money and spend it. 

So why couldn't we have that conversation? Why can't the government publish a policy assessment detailing the impacts of any given policy proposal including not just the cost, but who benefits, who loses out, whether or not it may cause inflation and if so in what areas? Then as our democratically elected representatives they make a decision that we are able to judge them on. Why would anyone be against that?

The contradictions

Contradiction 1: Rory started by saying that MMT is incredibly technically complicated and the sort of thing that even science graduates from our top universities would struggle to understand.

"These are completely incomprehensible points for 99% of the public… even a lot of graduates in science and arts from the top universities in the country are going to be a bit confused about this argument"

 He then revealed that after reading about it for 4 hours he understood it perfectly and could happily explain the details to us less enlightened and clearly intellectually inferior folk. 

"I spent probably 4 ½ hours yesterday looking into MMT and discussing the mechanics of MMT before I realised thats not the point."

A shamelessly transparent attempt to convince their core audience that MMT isn't worth their time and they should just trust Rory the expert.

Contradiction 2: Rory's show of apparent concern for poor old Zack led him to declare that if you are looking to make a radical overhaul to the entire economic system of the scale that has never been done before in the UK then you had better know the basics. 

"He is selling a very very out there vision of the British economy… something no government has done in Britain ever"

Fair point, but then during his explainer on what MMT means he claimed that it is nothing more than an accounting trick, a technical accuracy which changes nothing. 

"That technical point that no conventional economist would disagree on, its just a different way of viewing the same situation"

He is conflating the descriptive side of MMT which you can accept without having to actually change anything, and the prescriptive side which flows from that but is influenced by politics and ideology.

Currency devaluation 

The one actual argument of any substance he brought up was the entirely reasonable concern over currency devaluation. That for a country heavily reliant on imports (especially vital ones like food and energy) anything that weakens the pound will cause the price of those imports to rise and could be a significant problem. Careless government spending could absolutely do this which means it is a conversation absolutely worth having. 

How much will government spending affect the pound? Do certain types of spending affect it more than others? Can we do anything to minimise this as a concern such as being less reliant on external sources or energy and food? Is it worth having more expensive imports in return for proper investment in our NHS? Pushing through the transition to green energy? Building social housing? Because at the moment those conversations are not happening, instead we are organising our entire economy around what bond traders and markets prefer, not what our democracy decides it needs. Markets don't provide 'discipline' - they provide class discipline. They punish policies that shift power to workers and reward policies that maintain rentier wealth. Austerity, wage suppression, privatisation are all favoured by the markets, environmental protection, job guarantees and social housing are not. Which means we cannot rely on the current system to effectively deal with these or similar issues.

Rory's neoliberal perspective

Rory's resistance to MMT makes complete sense from his position. His entire political career, his conservative values, his social world - all built on the foundation that government finances work like household budgets. That careful money management is a moral virtue.

Accepting descriptive MMT doesn't just challenge a technical belief - it reframes every austerity vote as a political choice rather than economic necessity. Every time he said "we can't afford" disability benefits, social housing, or public services, he was choosing to prioritize currency stability and bondholder returns over those things. Those might be defensible priorities - but they'd need defending. The "can't afford it" framing let him avoid that moral reckoning entirely.

That's why the contradictions make sense. Dismiss it as "too complex" and "just accounting tricks" in the same breath. Acknowledge the descriptive accuracy but refuse to follow the logical implications. Focus on the real but manageable currency concerns while ignoring the fundamental question they raise: should bond markets or democracy set our priorities?

This isn't conscious deception - it's something harder to combat. When accepting a truth would mean reconsidering decades of choices that caused real harm, the mind finds ways to avoid that conclusion. Not through stupidity, but through the very human instinct for self-protection.

Motivated Reasoning 

The climate change parallel is instructive here. Climate science is descriptive: CO2 causes warming, here's the mechanism, here's the scale, here's what happens next. Climate policy is prescriptive: therefore we should decarbonize at X speed, accepting Y economic costs, prioritizing Z interventions. You can accept the science while disagreeing about the policy response - that's legitimate debate about values and tradeoffs.

But what you can't do honestly is pretend the science doesn't exist to avoid having the policy conversation. That's what climate deniers do: reject the descriptive reality because they don't like where the prescriptive implications lead. It's motivated reasoning - working backwards from "I don't want to change my lifestyle/business model/worldview" to "therefore the science must be wrong."

Rory's doing the monetary equivalent. He appears to accept the descriptive mechanics - that government spending creates money first, that "we can't afford it" is literally false. But he won't engage with what this means for his entire political career, for every austerity vote, for every time he shut down policy debate with accounting theater. So instead we get complexity theatre ("too hard for Oxbridge grads"), dismissiveness ("just accounting tricks"), and focus on the one legitimate technical concern (currency) while avoiding the fundamental question it raises: who should make these tradeoffs, democratically accountable politicians or bond market traders?

The science - both climate and monetary - is undeniable if you approach it with an open mind. But if your identity, your career, your entire social world is built on not believing it, you'll find ways to avoid the inconvenient truth. Not through stupidity, but through the very human tendency to protect ourselves from conclusions that would require uncomfortable reckonings with our past choices.

And sometimes, you just change the subject entirely:

"I spent probably 4 ½ hours yesterday looking into MMT and discussing the mechanics of MMT before I realised thats not the point. The point is do you want a much bigger state with much bigger government spending and much bigger government control of the economy or do you think its important to leave a big space for the private sector"

There it is. When the accounting doesn't support your position, pivot to ideology. When descriptive reality is inconvenient, skip straight to prescriptive disagreement - and hope nobody notices you've conceded the entire factual basis of your argument.

So the next time you hear a politician say 'we can't afford it,' remember: they're not describing an economic constraint, they're making a political choice. Make them own it.