When democracy requires a physics degree

If someone who manipulates plasma at 100 million degrees cannot grasp how Parliament funds public services, what chance does the average voter have? And if voters cannot understand the basic mechanics of public finance, how can they hold their government accountable for fiscal decisions?

This is not about whether people support higher or lower spending. Those are legitimate political disagreements requiring judgments about priorities and values. This is about whether citizens possess the basic knowledge needed to evaluate the claims politicians make when justifying those choices.

Right now, they do not. And that ignorance is not accidental.

The Treasury's black box

Parliamentary sovereignty means MPs control the public purse. That is the constitutional foundation of democratic governance in Britain. The Crown cannot levy taxes or spend money without parliamentary consent. This principle, established through centuries of struggle, places fiscal power in the hands of elected representatives.

But constitutional authority means little if those representatives cannot understand what they are authorising. When MPs vote on spending measures, do they know that the vote itself creates the money? When they debate deficit levels, do they understand that government spending creates deposits before taxation drains them? When they worry about debt sustainability, do they grasp that gilts represent private sector savings rather than borrowed money in the household sense?

The evidence suggests many do not. Select committee hearings reveal MPs asking questions that rest on fundamental misconceptions about monetary operations. They ask how we will "pay for" spending programmes as if government must acquire money before it can spend. They worry about "running out of money" as if the UK could suffer the fate of a household or firm. They accept Treasury assertions about fiscal constraints without the knowledge needed to challenge those claims.

This creates an accountability gap. MPs defer to Treasury officials on questions they do not understand. Those officials arrive with views shaped by institutional culture and professional training that may not reflect the full range of policy options. The Treasury becomes the real fiscal authority, not through constitutional design but through knowledge asymmetry.

The public faces an even starker information deficit. Voters judge fiscal policy through mental models built from household experience. They believe government must tax before it spends, borrow when taxes fall short, and repay debt from future surpluses. Politicians reinforce these beliefs with household metaphors about living within our means and balancing the books.

These beliefs are false. They invert the actual sequence of monetary operations. But they serve a political function. They make spending restraint appear as prudent housekeeping rather than a choice with real costs. They frame investment in public services as profligacy rather than resource allocation. They treat unemployment as unavoidable rather than a policy failure.

When political debate rests on shared falsehoods, democratic accountability breaks down. Voters cannot judge whether their representatives are making good decisions if they cannot distinguish genuine constraints from manufactured ones.

Power through obscurity

The confusion is not evenly distributed. Treasury officials understand how the monetary system works. Bank of England economists understand it. Financial sector analysts understand it. What they understand is documented in central bank publications, academic papers and operational manuals that few people outside these institutions ever read.

This asymmetry concentrates power. When only specialists grasp the mechanics, only specialists can propose policy. When politicians rely on experts to explain what is possible, those experts define the boundaries of political debate. Technical knowledge becomes political leverage.

Consider how fiscal rules operate in practice. The government announces it must meet certain targets for debt or deficit levels. These targets carry no legal force. Parliament could vote to ignore them tomorrow. But MPs accept them as binding constraints because they lack the knowledge to challenge the Treasury's framing.

Or consider how spending decisions get justified. A minister announces funding for a programme and journalists ask "where will the money come from?" The question assumes government must acquire money before spending it. The minister, whether from confusion or political calculation, accepts the premise and points to projected tax revenues or spending cuts elsewhere. The actual monetary operation goes unexamined.

This pattern repeats across policy domains. Infrastructure investment gets rejected as unaffordable. Public service expansion gets dismissed as fiscally irresponsible. Full employment gets treated as economically dangerous. Each judgment rests on assumptions about monetary constraints that do not match institutional reality.

The assumptions persist because the knowledge needed to challenge them remains concentrated in specialist circles. Democratic debate proceeds from false premises, and the public lacks the tools to recognise this.

What informed oversight requires

Democratic accountability over fiscal policy requires citizens and their representatives to understand three things clearly.

First, the operational sequence. Government spending creates money by instructing the Bank of England to credit accounts. Taxation destroys money by deleting reserves. Bond issuance swaps the form of government liabilities. No prior tax collection or borrowing is mechanically required for spending to occur.

Second, the real constraints. Government spending is limited by productive capacity and resource availability, not by finance. If spending exceeds the economy's ability to produce goods and services, the result is inflation. This is a genuine constraint that monetary sovereignty does not eliminate. The policy question is whether resources are available, not whether money is.

Third, the political choices embedded in fiscal decisions. When government chooses not to fund a programme, that choice reflects priorities and values, not technical necessity. When it tolerates unemployment, that reflects a judgment about inflation risk versus employment, not an immutable economic law. These are legitimate areas for political disagreement, but the disagreement should acknowledge they are choices.

Armed with this knowledge, MPs could challenge Treasury assertions about fiscal limits. They could ask whether proposed spending would create inflation given current resource availability, rather than accepting claims about affordability. They could evaluate competing uses of public resources on their merits rather than treating all spending as presumptively problematic.

Voters could judge fiscal promises against reality. They could recognise when politicians use household metaphors to obscure genuine policy trade-offs. They could hold representatives accountable for unemployment and underinvestment rather than accepting these as unavoidable economic conditions.

This would not settle political disagreements about how much government should spend or what it should spend on. Those questions require judgments about values, priorities and acceptable risk. But the debate would proceed from accurate understanding of what is mechanically possible rather than from manufactured constraints.

A right, not a privilege

The fusion researcher at my talk works on one of humanity's hardest technical challenges. He applies rigour to complex systems. He knows that intuition misleads and that you must trace actual mechanisms rather than rely on folk wisdom. He brought that discipline to fusion research. He deserved the same clarity when trying to understand how his government finances public services.

So does everyone else. Monetary literacy should not be specialist knowledge. It is not more complex than fusion physics. It describes the legal and institutional arrangements that govern how Parliament exercises fiscal authority. In a democracy, that knowledge belongs to citizens.

The current situation serves those who benefit from concentrated authority over fiscal policy. It narrows political debate. It makes certain policy options appear impossible when they are merely unpopular with influential actors. It allows government to blame external constraints for choices that reflect political priorities.

We maintain this arrangement through education that teaches outdated models, political rhetoric that reinforces household analogies, and media coverage that treats fiscal policy as technical rather than political. We could change any of these. We do not, because clarity would shift power.

The physicist did not need specialist knowledge to participate in democracy. He needed his government to explain honestly how it operates. That is not a technical question. It is a democratic obligation.

Until we meet it, we have parliamentary sovereignty in constitutional form but Treasury dominance in practice. We have elections over fiscal policy conducted in a language designed to obscure rather than illuminate. We have democratic rituals without democratic control.

The fusion researcher deserved better. So do the rest of us.