Quick, someone tell Jeremy Corbyn about national insurance

In economics, as in medicine, we usually find out that things are connected. The shin bone is indeed connected to the knee bone and insurance benefits are closely connected to having paid insurance premiums. Sadly, in politics this essential interconnectedness of things is often missed. It could, of course, be some aspect of the political mindset that causes this but we think that it's essentially the ignorance of the political classes about the world they would rule. An example is this idea from Corbyn:

“I want our policy review to tackle this in a really serious way and consider opening up statutory maternity and paternity pay to the self-employed, so all newborn children can get the same level of care from their parents.

“Labour created the welfare state as an expression of a caring society but all too often that safety net is not there for self-employed people. It must be.”

The self-employed pay a radically different rate of national insurance than the employed. And they thus get rather different benefits from the social insurance schemes that we have. Thus such an "opening up" should lead to NI charges to the self-employed rising: a policy we think will be rather less popular than Corbyn might think.

We do however wonder what's going to happen when someone breaks it to Jezza that the self-employed don't get unemployment benefit either....