Hello, welcome to the fourth episode in a special UK election series from the London Review of Books.

I am James Butler, and I've been taking an in-depth look before Election Day at some of the big issues in the campaign,

or issues that really should be big in the campaign, at least. And we're nearly there. It's polling day

tomorrow, and on the face of it the last few weeks

couldn't have gone much worse for Rishi Sunak. The only obvious change in the opinion polls

has been the increased support for reform at the expense of the Conservatives and Labour are

still on course for some kind of earth-shattering, record-breaking majority. The question really

only seems to be how large. One thing everyone seems to

have agreed on in this campaign is that the UK finances are in bad shape. There's been a recession,

inflation, higher interest rates, the cost of living crisis, and no promise from anyone that any of

this will get much better in the near future. But how have we got here? Is it down to COVID

and the war in Ukraine, or is it more fundamental? Are there structural problems with how the

economy has been run over the past 14 years? Are we still living in the age of George Osborne?

And what might Starmonomics look like? With just 24 hours left to make up your mind today,

we're talking about the economy.

And joining me to do just that is William Davies, a political economist at Goldsmiths and

frequent contributor to the LRB, whose most recent book is called This Is Not Normal, the Collapse of

Liberal Britain, and who has written in the latest issue of the paper

about the last 14 years of Tory rule. Hello Will. Hi, nice to be here. We're almost at the

very end of the campaign now and is there anything that has really struck you or surprised you

or really sparked your interest over the course of the campaign? Anything that you haven't expected, especially as we're now closing into the end?

I have to say, nothing that has pleasantly surprised me, I'm sorry to say.

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