You all know a man who pretends to be unable to do basic household chores in order to avoid them and escape to his man-cave whilst his partner does the work: you might even be that man. This is a more widespread tactic than is generally appreciated. We can call it strategic impotence - using a claim to be unable to do something as means of pursuing one's advantage or cementing privilege.

We've seen an example this week when Rishi Sunak claimed to be powerless on the face of rising energy prices:

No British chancellor can stop what is happening in Asia or stop a nuclear power station going offline in Germany

This is true as far as it goes. Which isn't very far. As Sir Dieter Helm has pointed out, Chancellors could and should have spent recent years investing in greater energy capacity. And France is raising electricity prices by just 4%, in part by squeezing the profits of state-owned EDF. Sunak's professed lack of control over prices is thus an example of strategic impotence.

There are countless others.

- Legal defences. Claiming a lack of responsibility is a common plea of innocence or mitigation. One of the most famous uses of this was that of Ernest Saunders who, having been imprisoned for insider trading, was released early from prison after suffering dementia only to make a miraculous recovery.

- Corporate websites. Making it difficult for customers to cancel their subscriptions looks like bad design, but it's a way of maintaining income.

- Lady Macbeth. Lord Ashcroft's claim that Carrie Johnson is to blame for her husband's misdeeds denies his agency and responsibility. This follows a tradition of imputing Lady Macbeth-type spouses to powerful men in an attempt to deflect blame from them.

- Playing the victim. The right claim to be victims of "wokesters" who are suppressing free speech. This serves to efface the fact that it is the Tories who are the enemies of freedom, for example in criminalizing protest. In the same way, their claim to be victims of "EU bullying" is used to escape their own incompetent negotiations.

- Refusing pay rises. Bosses who reject requests for better pay and conditions on the grounds that they can't afford them are often telling the truth. But sometimes they are not. "My hands are tied" is the slogan of the strategically impotent.

- Admitting forecasting errors. David Viniar, Goldman Sachs CFO, said during the financial crisis that "we were seeing things that were 25-standard deviation moves (pdf), several days in a row". And in 2012 Vince Cable justified fiscal austerity in the face of low growth by pointing to the spillover effect of the euro crisis: "no one was expecting that the situation across the channel would deteriorate as much as it has done." It's true that nobody can accurately foretell the economic future, but claims such as Viniar's and Cable's are inadequate. A policy that is based upon a forecast of a particular outcome is wrong: policy must be based instead upon the range of possible outcomes. These are therefore examples of claims to impotence being used to avoid guilt and maintain power.

Perhaps the most important example of strategic impotence, however, lies in the public finances. The idea that we cannot afford increased public spending because of the state of the public finances is of course plain wrong. At current long-term interest rates, governments can borrow tens of billions and repay less in real terms. As Maynard Keynes said, "anything we can actually do, we can afford". The constraint on public spending is a lack of sufficient labour and materials, not of money. Denying this fact is strategic impotence. The claim that we cannot do something is used to hide the fact that we choose not to do so.

(We should not here that the BBC has been complicit in this lie, as we saw in Kuenssberg's talk of government borrowing being "absolutely maxxed out". Which touches on another example of strategic impotence: the BBC's claim to be impartial and a mere reporter of events is used to efface the fact that it influences public opinion.)

In speaking of strategic impotence I am of course echoing two closely related ideas. One is Lindsey McGoey's idea of strategic ignorance, whereby a lack of knowledge - sometimes genuine, sometimes not - is mobilized for political purposes. The other is capitalist realism, the idea that alternatives to capitalism have become unimaginable. That could be an emergent process (as much ideology is) whereas I'm thinking of instances where strategic impotence is used as a conscious strategy.

Strategic impotence, however, has a flipside. At the same time as the ruling elite deny their own power and agency, they overstate the agency of the poor. The government's threat to withdraw benefits from people who fail to seek jobs for which they are unqualified overstates the ability of people to find work. It echoes Tebbit's claim that the jobless could find jobs if only they got on their bike. In the same spirit, Kirstie Allsopp says young people can afford houses if only they stop going to the gym or move to where there are no jobs. (Yes, there is a contradiction there, but hey ho). That attributes to them more agency than they actually have.

The ruling class and its shills want to deny the obvious fact that there are huge inequalities of power and influence. Strategic impotence is one of the tricks it uses to do this.