As the Clacton by-election looms, someone has decided to crunch the numbers on Count Binface’s manifesto.
On Thursday, voters will go to the polls in Clacton to choose their next MP. Although there are a record 34 candidates, there are two clear front-runners: Nigel Farage and Count Binface.
Whilst Farage is the overwhelming favourite to reclaim his Clacton seat, Binface isn’t going down without a fight, and bookies give the intergalactic space warrior a 10% chance of winning.
READ NEXT: People can’t get enough of Count Binface’s brilliant answer to US interviewer
If he did pull off the biggest shock in British political history, Binface has grand plans to ultimately end up in Number 10 and has a few core national policies he’d implement.
These include nationalising Adele, putting a 99p cap on 99-flake ice creams and building one affordble house.
So, someone has decided that it’s about time Binface was given the scrutiny afforded to other politicians aiming to enter parliament.
Economist Thomas Pugh, from audit, tax, and consulting adviser RSM UK, decided to crunch the numbers on Count Binface and his policies – and it turns out they’d be quite expensive.
In a post on LinkedIn, Pugh wrote: “The UK faces another pivotal by-election this week – Binface vs Farage. So, just in case there is a big upset, we have, very, very loosely, crunched the numbers on the Count’s programme and found that he faces a surprisingly familiar problem: how to pay for it all.”
“On our admittedly back-of-the-envelope calculations, the Count’s policies would increase spending by more than three quarters of a billion pounds this year, while raising only around £1m. Even with intergalactic economics, that leaves a fiscal gap big enough to attract awkward questions.”
Some of the more eye-catching costs are £500m to nationalise Adele, £82m to implement the 99-flake ice cream price cap and £130m to have a referendum on whether Pluto is a planet.
But when you consider the cost of the Tories’ disastrous Rwanda scheme (around £700m), HS2 (up to £102.7bn) and the Test and Trace programme (£30bn), maybe the Count’s policies wouldn’t be the biggest waste of money the UK has ever seen.