Tag Archives: interest rate

If rich people can profit from huge crises, why can’t the rest of us?

House prices: they’re high, despite interest rates also being high, because rich people have been given huge amounts of money by the UK’s Tory government. They’re using it to buy assets.

Gary Stevenson’s latest video discusses the reasons for house prices staying high even though interest rates have been high also. TL:DR – It’s because rich people have lots of cash to splash around.

The question raised in This Writer’s mind is: if rich people can take advantage of the crises we’ve suffered over the last few years to get richer, how can the rest of us manipulate events to make ourselves richer too?

There has to be a way, don’t you think?

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Here’s the video:


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Interest rates stay high so you’ll carry on paying more for less

The Bank of England: it’s keeping prices high.

Any questions?

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Economists please note: high inflation may be A POLITICAL CHOICE

This is fine: the image above was originally about climate change but it may be applied equally well to Rishi Sunak’s attitude to the economy. Political policy in the UK for the past 40 years and more has been to impoverish you, together with all the poor people who voted for him and his ilk, thereby allowing it to happen.

All the Tory talk about getting inflation down seems to have confused some people who have failed to consider that high inflation may actually be Conservative government policy.

Look at the usually-excellent Simon Wren-Lewis’s latest Mainly Macro piece, in which he takes issue with left-wing opinions about his current diagnosis of the inflation problem.

He reckons the answer is for private sector wage rises to come down, probably by way of reducing economic demand which will lead to a reduction in the workforce – and, thereby, a recession. This opinion appears to be shared with the Bank of England, whose continual interest rate hikes seem to be an attempt to force the UK’s economy to go backwards.

The problem with that is simple: ordinary working- and even some middle-class people are struggling to make ends meet. Many simply can’t and are going into debt. His solution to the inflation problem will bake that inability to afford the cost of living into the UK economy.

With the Tory government lying to us that workers’ wages are the cause of high inflation and the Bank of England doing as described above, there seems to be only one logical conclusion to draw:

High inflation is a Conservative government policy. It is intended to drive the UK’s lower-paid citizens deep into poverty so you cannot afford the necessities of life.

Just roll that around your mind for a moment.

Think about the real causes of inflation: huge increases in the prices of energy and food, and huge increases in the salaries of FTSE100 executives.

The government could, in theory, neutralise these inflationary pressures through taxation – but the theory fails in practice: as Professor Wren-Lewis notes, the energy firms are multi-national corporations whose profits are received overseas, so there is nothing the government can do about them.

Looking back through history, we see that the reason overseas shareholders have been able to take control of our formerly-nationalised utility firms (energy isn’t the only subject area to have been treated this way, of course; water springs instantly to mind) is privatisation.

The answer should be re-nationalisation – but the Tory government (and also Keir Starmer’s STP – Substitute Tory Party) won’t countenance that; it is against their ideology. This indicates, again, that high inflation that drives you into poverty is a political choice. Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer want you to starve.

In the private sector, we see that the salaries of FTSE100 executives have risen by an average of 16 per cent in the last year alone, despite the fact that there has been no real growth in production in the last 15 years since the Great Recession. The money for their pay rise has to come from somewhere and the logical source is the pay packets of employees; they are taking the rises that should go to you.

That’s if they haven’t increased the prices of their goods or services, of course. If they have then they are still taking the rises that should go to you, while also increasing prices so you can’t afford what your employer sells.

The answer – the way to stop this irresponsible upward drain of corporate funds into executive bank accounts – is to tax executive pay at a rate high enough to make this practice unviable. Again, both Rishi Sunak’s Tories and Keir Starmer’s Tories have refused to do this so – again – we must conclude that the executive wage inflation that puts us all into poverty is a political choice.

Professor Wren-Lewis rightly points out that, where employees have won wage increases intended to match inflation caused mainly by high energy prices, their employers have put prices up; this indicates that shifting the real-terms wage cut onto the profits of other firms won’t work and just generates more inflation.

Professor Wren-Lewis goes on to discuss the reason real wages in the UK have not grown in the last 15 years. As already mentioned above, besides the energy and food price hikes, it is the fact that productivity growth has been extremely weak. There have also been two large devaluations of the Pound.

The low productivity – and one of the depreciations – were caused by Brexit. This is another political policy of the Conservative government that is also supported by Keir Starmer’s STP and may therefore be seen as further proof that the party of government (and that of Opposition) intends to impoverish you as a matter of policy.

Brexit also makes causing a recession more attractive to the government and the party that wants to form a government. Neither of them want inflation to continue running rampant forever; it would eventually wipe out the gains they have made for their very rich friends, so they’ll want to bring it down.

The way to do that, according to Prof Wren-Lewis, is to reduce the demand for goods produced by most firms, as this will lead to a reduced demand for labour; firms then lay off workers, meaning more people are seeking employment, meaning in turn that jobseekers will be more likely to accept a job that pays lower wages.

Before Brexit, politicians could always rely on an influx of cheap labour from Europe. That isn’t available now, so they consider recession to be the only alternative. Remember: their future is safe.

Demand is already coming down because people simply can’t afford to buy as much as they used to, due to the real-terms wage cuts they have suffered. The Bank of England’s interest rate rises are hammering that change home.

We may therefore conclude that recession, job losses, further deprivation and misery are all policy points of the Conservative government, and of Keir Starmer’s STP.

Professor Wren-Lewis ends his piece by quoting Bertrand Russell: “Ask yourself only what are the facts, and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Never let yourself be diverted either by what you wish to believe, or by what you think would have beneficent social effects if it were believed.”

Sadly, he fails to follow his own (and Russell’s) advice.

The truth that the facts bear out is that privatisation, executive pay rises, Brexit, austerity (the other driver of the Pound’s depreciation) and interest rate rises are all intended to push the majority of UK citizens into poverty.

Other solutions besides reducing demand by causing a recession and mass unemployment are available – but the low-quality politicians with whom we have accepted that Parliament should be filled are not interested in them; their only concern is filling their own bank accounts.

Our concern must now be to put a stop to this.


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These new inflation figures should be awkward for the Tories

Inflation has dropped to 6.8 per cent – but this is not an endorsement of Conservative government policy.

The Tories have spent months claiming that they cannot pay the money they deserve to public sector workers (including the junior doctors who were on strike over the weekend) because it would worse inflation – but today’s fall comes alongside an increase in average pay.

Looking at the small print, we see that none of this pay rise has gone to people who actually need it; instead it has further fattened the bloated bank accounts of high-paid company executives and other friends of the Conservative government.

But that doesn’t matter; wages have increased and inflation still came down. The Tory lie has been exposed as – in the language of Peter Stefanovic – bollocks:

The clip includes a few other interesting take-outs:

Workers in the UK are £11,000 a year worse-off.

2022 was the worst year for wage growth in almost half a century.

Average real wages in the UK will still be lower in 2026 than they were in 2008.

So it is impossible for public sector wages – or any other wages paid to employees – to have had anything to do with inflation figures.

In fact, according to the extremely non-socialist International Monetary Fund, the largest contributor to Europe’s inflation over the past two years was rising corporate profits cause by companies increasing their prices by more than the costs of imported energy. Look at your own energy bill over the past few years and compare the increases with the costs of energy and you will see the factual accuracy in this.

Increases in private sector wages may increase the price of goods – because companies would factor those rises into their prices.

There is evidence of this in the new figures: strip away the cuts in energy and food costs and core inflation is one per cent higher.

But that doesn’t happen in the public sector where, for example, healthcare is free at the point of use.

And the public sector labour force is only 17 per cent of the total workforce, meaning its pay increases have a lower effect than anything happening with the 83 per cent in the private sector.

Of course, prices are still increasing, meaning that people will blame that on increasing wages and demand another interest rate rise from the Bank of England to curb spending by the little people (you and me, as opposed to the big bosses who have actually received the pay boosts).

I struggle to grasp the point of such a move as it is more likely to cause a recession than stabilise the economy. The precipitous rise in interest rates set by the Bank has not affected inflation at all, and conventional wisdom suggests we will not see the result until 18 months after the first one was imposed. With inflation already coming down of its own accord – as was widely predicted by people like economist Richard Murphy – this could be disastrous.

So when the Tories come out with outrageous nonsense like this…

… I am glad to see responses that put it into the proper perspective, like this:

Sadly, the message is unlikely to get through to the general public, thanks to the biased priorities of our right-wing social media platforms. Look at the number of views the Tory propaganda has received, in comparison with those collected by Clare’s response.

Finally: at least someone out there can laugh about it. Read this:

Sadly for the story, even though the Royals are technically working in the public sector, they are right at the top of it, so their pay rise comes in as equivalent to those of the fatcat company execs.

Still, I don’t see anyone talking about the inflationary effect of this massive increase, so it adds to the evidence that public sector pay does not affect inflation and the Tories have been feeding us bullsh*t since the public sector strikes started, if not before.

Try to remember this amid the barrage of inadequate and misleading reporting by the BBC and the rest of the Tory media.


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The Tories and the bankers are lying to you about inflation. Is this the reason?

It seems the Tories and the Bank of England are starving you of money with a lie – to cause problems for a possible future Labour government.

Take a look at this – and listen to the clip:

It’s true: driving down wages will do nothing to halt inflation because the only reason people want wage increases is so they can afford to pay prices that have already risen.

Wage rises don’t cause inflation – they are demanded because of inflation.

So what’s the real answer to the crisis – the one these rich Tories and super-rich bankers don’t want you to know?

Here’s Richard Murphy:

There’s your argument to put against twits like Victoria Atkins (above): for wages to be fuelling inflation, wage rises would have to have been above the rate of inflation – and they haven’t been.

In fact, wages have fallen so badly in real terms that teachers are said to have lost more than £65,000 in total since the Tories started cutting their pay.

That’s your answer in a nutshell.

But why aren’t the Tories and the bankers saying – and doing – this? Easy: they hate you.

So it’s perfectly fine for working people to have the pay rises they need, in order to make ends meet. Inflation will return to the normal level without any downward pressure on your pay.

So: greedy corporate bosses who are taking advantage of current circumstances to increase their prices beyond what is necessary are responsible for inflation.

They probably do; an election is approaching that the Tories do not expect to win. If they crash they economy and a Labour government has to deal with it, they’ll be able to criticise from the sidelines (especially if Labour honours its pledge to continue Tory economic policies until such time as the economy improves) and use Labour’s subsequent failure to sort out the mess to persuade voters to bring in another Tory government at the following general election.

So corporations are pushing up inflation so they can make a fat profit; they’ll still have that fat profit in the future when they use continuing higher revenues to pay higher wages, so their employees can still afford to buy the goods and services they need. The current inflationary cycle is a means for the already-rich to become even richer.

The claim that much of the pressure for wage rises is created by the Bank of England is supported by the fact that businesses will incorporate interest rate rises into their prices. Most, if not all of them, will have debts. Look at the privatised water firms: they have debts because they borrow to cover the costs of equipment and so on. This allows them to pay around 35 per cent of their turnover to shareholders – an enormous amount of profit.

But they must pay interest on the money they borrow and they add that amount into their prices so the customer pays more, not the shareholders.

The knock-on effect is to give us all another reason to demand pay rises.

So the Tory government and the Bank of England are deliberately engineering a recession that will probably harm the credibility of Labour, if Labour wins the next election.

To me, that seems a forlorn hope.

Mr Murphy has described a political struggle in which the Tories are using inflation now to attack a possible Labour government in the future.

The livelihoods of working people are merely collateral damage in that war. Nobody who can make a difference thinks you matter at all.

Half of renters fear they won’t be able to pay rent next year due to increases in the cost-of-living crisis

According to another article, “Just 250 people control wealth of £710.723bn, but 16.65 million people live in poverty”.

That could be the reason for the following:

Half of tenants are worried that they won’t be able to afford their rent next year, as 58 per cent have seen it rise this year amid the cost of living crisis.

Research from specialist lender Market Financial Solutions found that 49 per cent of renters were worried they would not be able to pay their rent in 2023.

At the same time, 48 per cent of landlords said they had increased rents on their properties due to rising interest rates and higher mortgage repayments.

In fairness, 56 per cent of landlords said they would allow their tenants some degree of flexibility when it came to making payments. Shame on the other 44 per cent!

The reason for the increases is higher interest rates from the Bank of England, meaning mortgage repayments have increased as well.

Economists have, of course, criticised the Bank for hiking the rates, because the ostensible reason – cutting inflation – is nonsense.

So why do it?

Why push up the level of anxiety in the UK when it is already critically high?

Is it some sort of co-ordinated effort to bankrupt the people of the nation and overload our already-under-resourced mental health services?

Source: Half of tenants are worried they won’t be able to pay rent next year, as 58% have seen rents increase amid the cost-of-living crisis

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Interest rate rise will affect YOU. Read this to understand how

The bank of England has just imposed the biggest interest rate rise in a generation – increasing the base rate to three per cent.

There’s no reason for it. The inflation we’re facing isn’t caused by any reasons that an interest rate rise can combat – and energy prices are falling back to normal levels. The hike in interest rates will not affect the cost-of-living crisis in any way.

Instead, it will prolong the recession that the Bank of England has already said will be the worst in many years – if not the worst ever:

And this will affect you – as Martin Lewis explained on Good Morning Britain:

Buckle up, buttercup! It’s going to be a long, hard winter – because the bankers (who, by the way, have had their ability to give themselves unlimited bonuses restored by the Tories) want you to suffer.

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Cameron’s global crash warning: He’ll do nothing about it

"Our long-term economic plan is working!" says Cameron - and the debt keeps rising.

“Our long-term economic plan is working!” says Cameron – and the debt keeps rising.

It’s more accurate to say he’ll do nothing right.

David Cameron is warning that another global financial crash is on the way. It’s an accurate warning – others have been forecasting it for a while but, seeing him saying it, didn’t you ask yourself who he’ll be blaming this time?

It can’t be Labour’s fault – Labour has been out of office for a few years and besides, Labour policies were sorting out the fallout left by the last right-wing-precipitated global financial catastrophe until the Tories lied their way into office and then twiddled their thumbs for four long years.

He reckons emerging markets that sustained the recovery (what recovery?) are slowing down but the British economy is growing and needs to be insulated from any crash. He says employment is up massively and new businesses are proliferating – but if you scratch the surface of that claim you’ll see that the number of hours worked is no higher than in 2010 and new businesses are being ‘run’ by people who are claiming tax credits as self-employed because then they won’t be hassled by the DWP while claiming JSA. There are new businesses, of course, but not nearly as many as Cameron wants you to believe.

Cameron’s article in The Guardian, if read properly, is comedy. It certainly isn’t to be taken seriously.

“When we faced similar problems in recent years, too many politicians offered easy answers, thinking we could spend, borrow and tax our way to prosperity,” he writes. Which politicians? Gordon Brown is the only Chancellor in recent history to manage a surplus, rather than a deficit; his policies brought the UK unexpected prosperity (which, unfortunately, led to the EU surcharge that has so badly embarrassed George Osborne); and his successor Alistair Darling introduced policies that knocked £38 billion off the deficit created by the right-wing bankers’ gambling binge.

Cameron must be referring to Conservative politicians in his own government.

Yes, look, here’s a bit where he writes: “It is more important than ever that we send a clear message to the world that Britain is not going to waver on dealing with its debts.” He could have cut that sentence down to read: “Britain is not dealing with its debts.” The national debt has more than doubled since the Conservatives started running the economy – from around £800 billion to £1.8 trillion by 2015, meaning George Osborne’s pitiful attempts to tackle the national deficit by cutting public services and selling off the country’s assets have achieved less than nothing.

“This stability is vital in attracting the business and international investment that delivers growth and jobs, and which keeps long-term interest rates low.” You couldn’t make this up. Interest rates are low because lenders know the UK has its own sovereign currency and will always be able to pay its debts, one way or another, even if it means printing more money (quantitative easing, anyone?) – remember when the UK’s triple-A credit rating went downriver despite all Osborne’s efforts to keep it? He claimed this meant the cost of borrowing would leap, but the effect has gone unnoticed.

There’s a lot more waffle and you can read it on The Guardian‘s site. It’s amazing a paper of its standing bothered to publish it.

For a more informed opinion, let’s go to Richard Murphy of Tax Research UK, pausing for a moment to wish him well in his recovery from recent surgery.

“His focus is instead on highlighting problems in Europe and on signing TTIP – the trade treaty that will require the privatisation of the NHS whatever he says now,” writes Mr Murphy – possibly from the recovery ward.

“This is a man who can see a crisis coming and who must know that his austerity programme can only make it worse (anyone but a fool can see taking money out of a failing economy, as he plans to do,  is bound to make it worse) but who is resolutely refusing to recognise the issues that will cause this next wave of economic collapse.

The wrong people have the money… The people who spend least of their incomes have had the biggest pay rises and are the only ones to enjoy effective tax decreases over the last few years. These people are the highest income earners in the UK.

“At the same time, cutting benefits for the poorest and increasing VAT (which together with deliberately enforced wage cuts have reduced the net disposable income of most people) and cutting taxes for the wealthiest, this has been the inevitable outcome. And we know this outcome has not happened by chance: this is deliberate.

“When there’s a shortage of spending in the economy to let the wealthiest get wealthier, [it] simply means that the imbalances within it get worse. And it’s imbalances that cause crises.

“Corporation tax cuts and reforms to our corporation tax system that means that multinational corporations based in the UK can, since 2010, find it much easier to make effective use of tax havens to cut their UK tax bills have also made the problem worse. I reckon these cuts are costing at least £10 billion a year. What these cuts do is transfer money that would have belonged to the state to companies in the hope that they will be encouraged to invest it as a result. But they aren’t doing any such thing.

“Companies are taking the tax cuts and banking them. They aren’t even giving them back to their owners. They’re just hoarding it. Like the wealthy (perhaps, unsurprisingly) large companies are simply sitting on their cash.

The tax gap is another indication of this. What really belongs to the government is in the hands of crooks and cheats, with massive economic consequences.

“What can be done? I’ve always pointed out that there are only four drivers of the economy: consumer spending, investment, net foreign flows and government spending.

  • “Investment is not happening; business will not do it: that’s why they havecash.
  • “Net foreign flows are broadly neutral: the trade deficit is dire but hot money still comes to the UK, although we cannot rely on that.
  • “Consumer spending is poor and may get worse: most people do not have the money.
  • “And that leaves the government to put matters right. It has to generate new economic activity.”

Mr Murphy proposes more quantitative easing – printing money and then investing it in a new, sustainable infrastructive (not the kind that Cameron is pushing); rebalancing tax by increasing taxes for those who can pay; and closing the tax gap.

You won’t see any of those under a Conservative government!

Get ready to batten down the hatches for another round of financial catastrophe, and this time, be prepared to put the blame where it really belongs – on Conservative politicians whose supposed reputation for financial competence is a myth and who should never have been allowed near the national economy.

And remember where the blame lies when you vote next May.

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Labour’s spending plan could humiliate the Tories

"There is an alternative" - and it doesn't have to cost more than we're spending now.

“There is an alternative” – and it doesn’t have to cost more than we’re spending now.

It seems some people are upset that Labour has announced it does not intend to increase public spending, if elected into office after next year’s general election.

This is a perfectly reasonable reaction, depending on the amount of information available to the person holding that opinion.

In other words, if you don’t know why Labour has made this decision, it is perfectly reasonable to assume that the former Party of The Left has turned Tory-lite.

That’s why we’re hearing that Labour will simply continue Tory policies; that the main three parties are “all in it together” (to overuse a hackneyed and devalued phrase).

But evidence is available to suggest that this is a big mistake.

To finance extra spending, Labour would have to borrow more money – but this would push up interest rates and create a potential disaster for people with mortgages and loans to pay off.

According to Modern Monetary Theory – an economic method that seems to have earned credence with all the main parties – government borrowing is not undertaken to finance its spending, but to maintain a target interest rate.

In times of recession, businesses borrow more and households find it hard to save money for a rainy day (as the saying goes). We have spent most of the last decade either in recession or in the slowest recovery in British history and the private sector simply doesn’t have the spare cash to pay higher interest demanded on loans in the wake of higher government borrowing.

Labour wants to safeguard those businesses; Labour wants to safeguard your homes.

The alternative would cost any government much more in the long run.

It’s as simple as that.

So Labour has set a spending target that is the same as the Conservatives’, ensuring that interest rates can be kept under control.

This doesn’t mean it will continue with Conservative-led spending plans. That would be a betrayal of Labour’s core voters.

Instead, it seems more likely that Labour will seek to stimulate the economy by taking funding away from wasteful areas – this blog would certainly wish to see less public money given to private contractors who pocket half of it as profit – and investing it in economic growth.

With more money flowing through the system and coming back to the Treasury in taxation, it will then become easier to relax restrictions on interest rates, which will help the government with its debt issue (this has to do with the way governments borrow money, issuing bonds at fixed rates of interest, and is a story for another day).

If Labour’s plan works, it will mean humiliation for the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, as Labour will have spent exactly the same amount doing it as those other parties have been spending for the previous five years – to little effect.

Do not misunderstand; it is perfectly possible that Labour’s spending plans could be entirely wrong-headed! Labour spent most of the last 20 years experimenting disastrously with neoliberal thinking that, continued and concentrated by the Coalition government, has led us to the current pretty pass.

In this case, it seems the Devil really is in the detail.

But the overarching strategy is sound and Labour should not be criticised for it.

Follow me on Twitter: @MidWalesMike

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The Coalition is creating serious problems and distracting you with phantoms

140124earnings

According to the beauty industry, women must now start deodorising under their breasts.

I kid you not – it was in The Guardian.

Columnist Jill Filipovic hit the nail on the head when she wrote: “I can already hear your objections: ‘But the area under my boobs doesn’t stink!’ or ‘What kind of marketing genius not only came up with the term “swoob,” but actually thought half the world’s population might be dumb enough to buy into it?’ or simply, ‘This is a dumb product aimed at inventing an insecurity and then claiming to cure it.’

“You would be correct on all three points.

“In fact, inventing problems with women’s bodies and then offering a cure – if you pay up – is the primary purpose of the multi-billion dollar beauty industry.”

The simple fact is that you don’t really need to worry about smells down there – a good old soapy flannel will cure any such problems.

That’s not the point, though. The aim is to get you thinking about it and devoting your energy to it, rather than to other matters.

Now let’s translate that to politics.

We already know that all the scaremongering about Romanian and Bulgarian immigrants storming the country from January 1 was a crock. That bastion of good statistics, The Now Show, told us last week that the total number of Bulgarian immigrants in the last couple of weeks was “around two dozen so far”, according to their ambassador. In the first three months after our borders were opened to Croatians, 174 turned up.

Yet the government wanted you to believe they would flood our immigration service in their millions, “taking benefits and yet simultaneously also taking all the jobs”.

My use of language such as “storming” and “flood” is not accidental. By far the more serious threat to the UK in the early days of 2014 was the weather – and, guess what, not only was the government unprepared for the ferocity of the storms that swept our islands, the Coalition was in fact in the process of cutting funding for flood defence.

This would have gone unnoticed if the weather had behaved itself, because we would all have been distracted by the single Romanian immigrant who was ensnared by Keith Vaz in a ring of TV cameras at Heathrow Airport.

Now the Tories are telling us that our take-home pay is finally on the rise for all but the top 10 per cent of earners, with the rest of us seeing our wages rise by at least 2.5 per cent.

The government made its claims (up) by taking into account only cuts to income tax and national insurance, using data leading up to April last year, according to the BBC News website.

This kind of nonsense is easily overcome – New Statesman published the above chart, showing the real effect of changes to weekly income for people in various income groups, and also provided the reason for the government’s mistake (if that’s what it was).

“The data used … takes no account of the large benefit cuts introduced by the coalition, such as the real-terms cut in child benefit, the uprating of benefits in line with CPI inflation rather than RPI, and the cuts to tax credits,” writes the Statesman‘s George Eaton.”

He also pointed out that other major cuts such as the bedroom tax, the benefit cap, and the 10 per cent cut in council tax support were introduced after April 2013 and were not included in the Coalition figures.

Once all tax and benefit changes are taken into account, the Institute for Fiscal Studies has shown that almost all families are worse off – and the Coalition also appears to have forgotten the five million low-paid workers who don’t earn enough to benefit from the increase in the personal allowance.

Skills and enterprise minister Matthew Hancock compounded the mistake in an exchange on Twitter with Jonathan Portes, director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR). Asked why his analysis “ignores more than four million people in work (the self-employed)”, Mr Hancock tweeted: “Analysis based on ONS ASHE survey of household earnings data”.

Wrong – as Mr Portes was quick to show: “Don’t you know the difference between household and individual earnings?”

Apparently not. ASHE (Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings) is a survey of employed individuals using their National Insurance numbers – not of households or the self-employed.

So the Coalition – and particularly the Tories – were trying to make us all feel good about the amount we earn.

That’s the distraction. What are we supposed to be ignoring?

Would it be David Cameron’s attempt to bribe councils into allowing shale gas companies to frack their land? Councils that back fracking will get to keep all the business rates collected from the schemes – rather than the usual 50 per cent.

He has also claimed that fracking can boost the economy and encourage businesses into the country, in a further bid to talk down dissent.

Or is it the growing threat of a rise in interest rates, which may be triggered when official unemployment figures – which have been fiddled by increased sanctions on jobseekers, rigged reassessments of benefit claimants, a new scheme to increase the number of people and time spent on Workfare, and the fake economic upturn created by George Osborne’s housing bubble – drop to seven per cent?

It seems possible that the government – especially the Tory part of it – would want to keep people from considering the implications of an interest rate rise that is based on false figures.

As Vox Political commenter Jonathan Wilson wrote yesterday: “If the BOE bases its decisions on incorrect manipulated data that presents a false ‘good news’ analysis then potentially it could do something based on it that would have catastrophic consequences.

“For example if its unemployment rate test is reached, and wages were going up by X per cent against a Y per cent inflation rate which predicted that an interest rate rise of Z per cent would have no general effect and not impact on house prices nor significantly increase repossessions (when X per cent is over-inflated by the top 1 per cent of earners, Y per cent is unrealistically low due to, say, the 50 quid green reduction and/or shops massively discounting to inflate purchases/turnover and not profit) and when it does, instead of tapping on the breaks lightly it slams the gears into reverse while still traveling forward… repossessions go up hugely, house prices suffer a major downward re-evaluation (due to tens of thousands of repossessions hitting the auction rooms) debt rates hit the roof, people stop buying white goods and make do with last year’s iPad/phone/tv/sofa, major retail goes tits up, Amazon goes to the wall, the delivery market and post collapses… etc etc.

“And all because the government fiddled the figures.”

Perhaps Mr Cameron doesn’t want us thinking about that when we could be deodorising our breasts instead.

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