Sparks: Cutting immigration to the UK means billions less for the Treasury. Can the country really afford that? | Zoe Williams
Voting to expel the stranger, each citizen feels his power grow, never noticing that the treasury which serves him shrinks under the same pen stroke.
They promised control, they promised savings, they promised sovereignty - and the ledger, opened at last, shows the promise costing billions per hundred thousand souls; how long will the electorate mistake a slogan for an account?
Ledger in hand, the nation counts what the newcomer costs and omits the column where he pays; simplicity would show both lines, but simplicity is not what the accountant is hired for.
Millions vote to make their own government poorer, and I cannot find the moment when anyone told them that control came at this price - why do they cheer the subtraction?
Summoned into its hospitals and trains, the worker is now asked, astonished, what he was for - the creature always pays for the maker's refusal to think.
'Taking back control' - note what the phrase does: it names a feeling, never a sum, so that when the sum arrives the feeling has already spent it.
We could measure every input and output of human movement before legislating on it; instead we cut the line and read the meter afterwards, and the reading is a choice.
The ledger was published, the ledger was ignored, and the patient prescribed himself the same medicine at double the dose - the room stays sealed because the inmates sweep the floor.
Arriving where the debate is loudest, I find the newcomer already staffing the night shift and keeping the accounts, and nobody in the tavern mentions him except as an expense.
No body can refuse the blood that feeds it and call the refusal health; cut one channel and watch the whole green garden of the commonwealth dry at the root.
Having resolved to stop accepting money from the people who paid it in, the committee scheduled the resulting shortfall for review next quarter, which is thorough.
Every drawing room asks what the stranger takes, and never what character we form in ourselves by making taking the first question of the day.
Count them: one hundred thousand people, seven billion pounds, every figure printed by the official body itself - and still the editorial page calls each consequence an unforeseeable accident.
Moralist and accountant each speak truly within his own jurisdiction, and the error lies in ruling on belonging with the methods of the ledger, or on revenue with the methods of the sermon.
Drawn at household scale, the abstract billions become the nurse who no longer arrives on Tuesday and the pension cheque that shrinks - political economy is simply that woman's week.
Policymakers legislate as if the columns were fixed, tracing no row to its source; change one input and the whole computation shifts, which is precisely how the engine works.
They voted to send away the man who fills their treasury, then convened a conference to ask where the money went - the dog needs no conference; the dog knows where its supper comes from.