Big Numbers

I'll bet in every Media Studies course, there's a lecture entitled: Idiotic comparisons and how to use them.

You've seen these on the telly news, though they're so daft you may not have registered them. They look like this:

A young (usually female) presenter stands in front of a bridge and says: "This bridge is the height of 4 double decker buses."

Or the same young presenter stands in front of the same bridge and says: "This bridge is the length of 3 football pitches."

Myself, I never use buses or football fields to measure things. Mainly because I've no idea what a bus or a football pitch would look like when compared to a bridge. The comparison is just meant to be impressive, I think, or maybe there are people all over the UK who can relate to these descriptions and it's just me that's left thinking: Whit?

Then there's the unit of outrageous cost: An older, usually male, presenter stands outside Westminster or Holyrood and tells us: "This bridge/sewer/bypass will cost 4 billion pounds."

Is that a lot? Compared to what? How did somebody reach this total? Did somebody actually reach this total - or just pluck it out of the air?

There was a time when the word 'million' was impressive. Now it seems anyone south of Watford Gap who owns a house is worth a million - though only if they sell the house. Then they're just homeless (and usually moving to Wales or Scotland).

Now the buzzword is 'billions'. Companies are worth billions, as are business people (usually men). Billions are regularly wiped off the stock exchange (though for some reason is always recovers). Once in a while, a company is worth a trillion. That's just beyond my understanding.

When I look on IMDb to find out about the background of an actor I've just watched - say, Frances McDormand - because this happened when I watched her in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing - I'm quite disappointed to find she's only worth $30 million.

Being told that leaving the EU will cost £39 billion means nothing to me but it might mean a lot if I knew how much of that would keep the NHS or the police or schools running. But nobody is telling me that. There are some utterly outrageous costs that even I balk at: how much will it cost to replace Trident? £41 billion. What is the cost of HS2? £56 billion (and that's only to get it as far as Leeds). What's the cost of London's Crossrail? £14.6 billion, rising to £15.6 billion because it's overspent its budget.

Maybe this puts the cost of international aid into focus: £15.4 billion. As you know, that's the bit of the Westminster budget that the English xenophobes most want to cut, with the idiotic idea that cutting aid will encourage refugees to stay at home in their burned-out, jobless, school-less, war-torn homelands. Homelands where the UK has done its best to fan the flames of war by selling arms to the bad guys.

In UK terms, cutting international aid will not do a thing to reduce the number of homeless people on the streets or the families being placed in B&Bs because they've had their homes repossessed. It will not stop Japanese and German car makers leaving the UK as brexit kicks in.

Austerity - anyone remember that? - it's in its 8th year now - was imposed by the Tory government to reduce the national debt. How's that going? Let me quote 'official sources':

<<In Q1 (the first quarter of) 2018, UK debt amounted to £1.78 trillion, or 86.58% of total GDP, at which time the annual cost of servicing (paying the interest) the public debt amounted to around £48 billion (which is roughly 4% of GDP or 8% of UK government tax income).>>

That's double what it was when the present government took over.

Nothing to worry about there, eh?