The politics of printing money

I’ll leave the economics of printing more money to those more qualified than I, but the politics of it seems appalling. Mike Smithson is right when he writes at Political Betting that:

“…the notion of “printing money” sounds quite horrific – something that simply won’t be understood, surely, by 99% of the electorate and something that the Daily Mails of this world can attach the imagery of what goes on in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.”

If the Bank of England does do this, I imagine that economic confidence would plummet. And—as Anthony Wells has shown—when economic confidence falls, Labour’s poll rating is the next thing to go.

P.S. By the Wells thesis, the Tory lead should grow this month. The significance of that would be that it would put rocket boosters under the conventional wisdom that 2009 will be the year when the government gets rumbled and the public turns decisively to the opposition.