AT LAST: A Downing Street lie that deserves to put the Prime Minister on the spot.
By John Ward January 24, 2014
THE CAMERLOT CON: There is an odd alliance that could stop the fanatics. Don’t hold your breath waiting for the Eds to exploit it.
The key members of this Government have become masters of the blithely asserted shibboleth. We have Jeremy Hunt committed to the NHS, George Osborne who is paying off Britain’s debt with austerity, Boris Johnson around the edges of it saying crime is falling, Michael Gove insisting that his higher education ‘reforms’ can only make our universities better, and now David Cameron saying that “the vast majority of workers have wages that are outstripping inflation”.
This last is the most astonishing bare-faced bollocks yet. Its carrier – the Barclay Brothers’ Maily Telegraph – ran a piece devoted to spreading the fiction yesterday, in which we had to wait only a few lines for ‘A new analysis of figures released by Downing Street has suggested that take home pay outstripped inflation for all but the top 10 per cent of earners last year.’
What analysis? What figures? I’ve Googled it every which way, and I haven’t seen any evidence anywhere that anyone but the Telegraph has even heard of these numbers. But to be tedious (and apologies to the regulars here who’ve seen this chart already) let’s just nail this once and for all:
This is from the ONS, and it’s the third time (to make different points) I’ve shown it this week. You have to go back to the summer of 2009 to find wages and prices even equal let alone deflationary. Britain did not have deflation in 2013 and 2012 or 2011 or 2010, and anyway only the figures for the first three quarters of last year are in yet: so HowTF can Downing Street have analysed figures about last year they don’t have yet?
More:
http://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2014/01/24/at-last-a-downing-street-lie-that-deserves-to-put-the-prime-minister-on-the-spot/