An MP has used a novel way to explain the nation’s crumbling finances, using a favourite cupboard treat.
With traditional methods of political storytelling struggling to cut through and questions surrounding the Chancellor’s Budget last week, Labour has long been searching for new ways to connect with voters.
But Gordon McKee, who represents Glasgow South, has clocked up more than 3.3 million views on Tiktoks after reaching for the nation’s favourite biscuits to illustrate the current economic stagnation.
The Labour politician dug out packets of custard creams and chocolate bourbons to narrate the current crisis, including the nation’s rocketing debt to GDP ratio.
Presenting both types of biscuit in graph-like towers, McKee used custard creams to represent GDP, topped with a tiny union flag, and their cocoa counterparts to signify debt.
He continues his presentation by explaining that debt to GDP was around 30 per cent in 1994, but soon doubled to 60 per cent following the global financial crisis of 2008.
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McKee than goes on to show how debt to GDP climbed to 80 per cent by 2020 under successive Conservative governments, before ‘some guy eats a bat in Wuhan’ and thus triggering the Covid pandemic and lifting the figure to its current rate of 100 per cent.
The Labour MP also uses increasingly taller bourbon towers to show the comparatively higher debt to GDP ratios of other G7 countries, including France, the US and Japan, but who all pay less interest on their debt than the UK.
Keeping up with this flamboyant storytelling, McKee explains this difference is down to Britain buying ‘a dog, a new car and a hair transplant’ on a credit card in one month.
In a second clip, McKee explains how he would stop Britain crumbling, namely by taxing those with the broadest shoulders, on property rather than transferable assets, and by growing the economy.
McKee is not the only Labour MP to experiment with inventive videos.
Richard Burgon, who represents Leeds East, used a mountain of 200 packs of fusilli to demonstrate what £1billion looks like compared to the average UK salary of £33,000 – illustrated by just four spirals of the pasta.
In the clip, viewed more than 650,000 times on X, Burgon points to the enormous pile and says: ‘No one needs this amount of wealth. It’s absolutely sickening.’
It comes as Labour HQ is searching for new ways to grip the nation and sell its prospectus for a second term by 2029.
The party is looking to take a leaf out of right-wing competitors such as Nigel Farage and Robert Jenrick, both of whom have long made use of social media content to consolidate their large online following.
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