PPE Personal Statementfor Oxford & Cambridge

The September 2022 mini-budget first interested me because it exposed a conflict I had not noticed before. On 23 September the government announced tax cuts, and five days later the Bank of England began purchases of long-dated gilts to restore market conditions. I came across the story in a Politics lesson, then read the Bank of England notice and the Institute for Fiscal Studies response to see why a programme presented as pro-growth had produced instability. What stayed with me was how quickly an elected government's choices ran up against institutions meant to protect credibility and stability. That tension made PPE feel like a way of thinking rather than three adjacent subjects. PPE appeals to me because it would let me follow one issue through three forms of reasoning instead of pretending that economics, politics and philosophy ask separate questions. I am most interested in how ideas such as freedom, welfare and legitimacy change once they meet real institutions.

Studying Economics and Politics has given me some of the language for that problem, but it has also shown me where the syllabus stops. In economics, ideas about inflation expectations and policy credibility helped me understand why borrowing costs and confidence mattered in 2022. At the same time, the word credibility started to bother me because it often sounded neutral when it was really carrying assumptions about risk, trust and whose interests count as stability. That pushed me to read Ha-Joon Chang's Economics: The User's Guide. His insistence that economics contains competing traditions rather than one final method made me suspicious of arguments that present market judgement as if it were a fact outside politics. Michael Sandel's Justice pushed this further. His criticism of the idea that markets justify themselves through efficiency alone helped me see that a policy can be economically stabilising without becoming politically persuasive or ethically fair. I wanted to test that argument in a longer piece of work, so I based my EPQ on whether economic expertise strengthens or weakens democracy. I compared speeches by central bankers with Institute for Fiscal Studies commentary and used Sandel and Berlin as frameworks for judging legitimacy. The most useful part of the project was discovering where my first draft was too tidy. I had treated experts and voters as rival sources of authority, but the evidence made that binary hard to defend. Democratic governments rely on expert institutions to act credibly, yet those institutions still depend on political consent and public trust. Revising the project also made me more attentive to terms such as stability, responsibility and credibility, because each carries a political argument inside it.

That line of thought led me into political theory. In Politics, liberalism had made me think about limits on the state mainly in terms of non-interference. Reading Isaiah Berlin's Two Concepts of Liberty made that harder to sustain. His account of negative liberty clarified why arbitrary power matters, but it also made me notice how incomplete freedom can become if the material conditions for using it are ignored. I started to read the mini-budget less as a simple clash between markets and the state, and more as a dispute about which institutions can legitimately discipline democratic governments. I explored that in an entry for the John Locke Institute Global Essay Prize on the legitimacy of independent central banks. My first instinct was to defend independence strongly. By the end, I was arguing for something narrower: independence is persuasive only when it is tied to clear mandates, transparency and scrutiny. That is the problem I want to keep working on at university. The mini-budget first drew me in as a policy failure, but it left me with uncertainty about authority. I still have not resolved who should have the power to restrain governments when democratic mandates collide with economic risk.