What factors prompted Rishi Sunak's call for a general election ? | Vote 2024

Let me tell you a little bit of the history of

what

may have motivated this decision and just the state of the economy and some of the charts that I think could be very important when it comes to this

election

and let's start with this because it was the data that we obtained today and it was the data that the Prime Minister referred to in his speech inflation, we have had the cost of living crisis, that inflation rate and this is, we are talking about the rate at which prices are rising each year , the inflation rate went up to double digit levels and now it's down, look at it, that roller coaster went down to 2.3% across the board, so we got that number this morning at 7:00 and that's partly

what

drove the Prime Minister's decision, but here are the two providers with this, okay, first of all, it is definitely good news that it has come down around that kind of Bank of England target rate, that that pink area is where the Bank of England really wants me to be there, but two.

Here, first of all, I think when a lot of people think about inflation, they don't just think about that 2.3% figure, but what it means for them, what it means for their pockets and here I've taken basi

call

y the same data and I just looked at it and the terms of the level, so not the change every year but the level and you can see that the price level went up and up, that's the cost of living crisis where all of a sudden it was going up. slowly and then it went up very quickly and that 2.3% that the Prime Minister talked about that is the difference between there and there, but if I think for a lot of people, when they think about what is happening with their pound in their pocket, they think about the difference between there and some period here and when you look at that difference, okay, so if we look at the difference between here and here, that's 20 20%, okay, so the price is up 20%, we're all still adapting . that with this cost of living crisis salaries have also increased by around 10%, but even so it is a very discordant change.

The other condition is that inflation of 3.3% was not as low as many people expected. The bottom line is that this is fine, so the other thing I think the Prime Minister was hoping for is that inflation is down, that the economy is improving, but also maybe the Bank of England will cut interest rates. Okay, so before this decision, uh, before, or rather, before inflation. When the numbers came in, markets said there was a more than 50% chance of an interest rate cut in June; In other words, the professional could go to the July

election

s and the bank was already cutting interest rates;

So those figures turned out to be a little higher than expected and it seems that along these lines, the higher it is, the greater the probability of a cut in June. Look what happened to the line. Wow, it went down to less than 12%. The probability of a cut in June. In other words, it is very unlikely that there will be a Bank. of England's interest rate cut before this election that's pretty big, isn't it? But still, the

general

picture of the economy is that we are much better than not long ago there was a recession, those bars went down, that is GDP growth two two successive quarters of contraction that is recession, but now look, we are up to 0.6%, as the Prime Minister said before, that is one of the fastest growth rates that we can see in the G7.

You also have this more important question. Well, this is looking. household disposable income and you know what that question is, don't you, Sophie? Do you know if you feel better now than when you work? At the beginning of this, at the beginning of this Parliament and, indeed, for every Parliament going back to the 1950s, the answer to that question actually was yes, in terms of household disposable income, people got better, so it got better in the 1950s, it got better in the 1960s, it got better in this period, it got better here too under Tony Blair and slightly better, at least over the period before that. terms, but take a look at where this bar is for this latest Parliament.

I will have to bend down to show you what the bar is for this Parliament that we are in now, so the real disposable income of households according to the projections that we have. What I got from the OB is going to fall for the first time, the only time we've seen that in any Parliament going back to the 1950s, that seems quite difficult for Richy Sunak to handle, and then I think the bottom line. we really have the tax question, we're going to get a lot of things about this, about what's happening with taxes, about what the government's plans are with taxes, about what the Labor Party's plans might be with taxes, but the big picture of the tax burden, then how much? that we pay taxes as a percentage of GDP is that they have increased during the course of this Parliament to the highest level since 1949, the government will say that this is largely due to the pandemic and what happened to energy prices, but Even so that is very high, they have been a government that has increased taxes, although they may not like that fact and it is expected to increase even more.

The question, of course, is what happens next, what happens to the Conservative plans, what do we learn about Labour's plans. there will be so much data that we will have manifestos, we will have details on what the policies will be, hopefully we will have some details and we will bring all of that to you over the course of the next few weeks. So it's going to be really fascinating and hopefully we'll learn more about the path that these parties want to take this country on.