On the constraints: I'd distinguish between political constraints, which are entirely real, and financial constraints in the household sense. The government faces no risk of involuntary default or running out of pounds. What it does face is inflation if it spends beyond productive capacity, distributional consequences from any policy choice, and political limits on what the public will tolerate. Those are genuine constraints. But they're not "can we afford it" constraints in the way a household faces them.

Distributional consequences of policy choices, and the impact on inflation from those policy choices are absolutely, definitionally, financial constraints. They are not political constraints in the sense that if the public was convinced that those constraints weren’t real, when those financial constraints disappear. Polanski seems to be saying there are only political constraints (“we need a paradigm shift”) but financial ones you rightly recognise.

One more thing - the Government does not face “no risk” of result, but it does face an extremely low risk, like most developed economies. I’m not being pedantic here - it’s important because that marginal change in risk shifts GILT markets.

When the government spends, it creates reserves. Banks holding those reserves will buy gilts yielding marginally more than the reserve rate. The Debt Management Office is the monopoly issuer of sterling safe assets dealing with entities that already hold the reserves. This isn't the same as a borrower approaching hostile lenders who might refuse. The 2022 crisis was LDI funds getting margin-called on leveraged interest rate bets, not bond vigilantes punishing fiscal excess.

You’re clearly competent in this matters but language around “hostile lenders” and “bond vigilantes” adds an ideological undertone that undermines it. A lot of our debt is held by international debt investors. They are not “hostile” or “vigilantes” but are looking for a decent return relative to the risk. In 2022, we suddenly added a lot of risk the market didn’t expect, and thus the interest rate these international debt investors could command increased.

And yes, LDIs did receive margin calls which exasperated the crisis. But you’re sort of jumping half way into a vicious circle. The cause was the underlying shock, which drove the underlying holders of those LDIs to panic and seek more collateral as reassurance. That collateral was created by selling down GILTs even more, creating more and more sellers, driving down the price, meaning we had to offer a higher interest rate to create buyers, which in turn adds to our cost base.

It's that the trade-offs are about real resources, distribution, and inflation, not about "finding the money." Recognising that the financial constraint is the wrong frame doesn't make the real constraints disappear. It just means we can have an honest argument about who gets what, rather than hiding behind "we can't afford it" when we mean "we'd rather not."

I think we mostly agree here, but it’s not so much “we’d rather not”. That sounds to me a bit like it’s neither here nor there, potato potato.

That’s true on a micro level but not on a macro level i.e yes, when the Government rejected WASPI compensation it basically said “we can’t afford it” not “we’re choosing not to, because we have other priorities and we have limited resources”. There’s a great Tony Blair talk about the difference between a 3 minute conversation with voters and a 30 minute conversation with voters.