The Coalition is creating serious problems and distracting you with phantoms

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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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How can unemployment be dropping at the same time as claims for joblessness are rising?

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avoidance, Bank of England, BBC, benefit, benefits, business, claimant, CPI, disposable, economy, George Osborne, government, haven, income, inflation, infrastructure, Irresponsibility, job market, jobless, Jobseeker's Allowance, living wage, Mervyn King, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, OBR, Office for National Statistics, Office of Budget, Olympic, ONS, people, politics, responsibility, RPI, spending, tax, The Guardian, Treasury, unemployment, Vox Political, welfare

Today, the government was very pleased to announce, on the BBC and in all the usual right-wing rags, that the number of people out of work in the UK has fallen to its lowest total for more than a year – 2.51 million or 7.8 per cent of the working-age population.

But the claimant count – which tracks the number of people receiving Jobseekers’ Allowance and is the most timely measure of employment – rose by 10,100 last month, the largest increase since September 2011, as reported by the BBC and The Guardian.

Both figures were released by the Office for National Statistics, which seems to be treading on territory that is practically owned by the Office of Budget Irresponsibility.

Are you as confused as I am?

How can unemployment be down when more people are claiming for it?

No explanation.

It’s interesting that long-term unemployment has increased by 12,000, meaning those out of work for over a year now number 894,000.

Part-time employment rose by 49,000 to 8.1 million, more than a quarter of the workforce and close to a record high.

The fall in unemployment has been attributed to a reduction in youth unemployment, but that still leaves 963,000 people, aged between 16 and 24, looking for work.

Most tellingly, average incomes rose by 1.8 per cent for the year to date, while inflation measured according to CPI is now 2.7 per cent. According to RPI, it’s 3.2 per cent. That means the spending power is falling.

Economists say the job market is worsening, possibly as people who were hired for the Olympics, and other summer events, come off firms’ books.

Bank of England supremo Mervyn King said the figures suggested the labour market was “pretty strong” but said it was hard to reconcile this with the economy’s weak growth.

I’ve got a pretty good idea about that, Mervyn.

The economy is growing slowly because the vast majority of people aren’t being paid reasonably by their employers. Wages have grown by almost (or more than, depending which yardstick you use) a whole percentage point less than inflation. People don’t have the money to spend!

If the economy is to enjoy real growth, then the government needs to launch a major attack on tax avoidance and tax havens, get that money back into the UK Treasury where it belongs, and then use it to invest in British infrastructure and British business. That way, firms can get back on their feet and will have no excuse not to pay a living wage to workers. Then working-class people – the vast majority of the population – will have a higher disposable income and therefore more spending power (they’ve hardly got any to spare at the moment). They will use that money; it will go around the system again, and the economy will grow again.

If I can see that – and I’m no economist – why can’t you? Why can’t Gideon George Osborne?

I think we all know the answer to that. He can.

But it suits his purposes to ignore it.

Inflation rise will increase the agony for those on benefits

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bedroom tax, benefit, benefits, bill, Brendan Barber, Chancellor, child, Child Tax Credit, Coalition, Conservative, Consumer Price Index, CPI, disability, duty, economy, energy, fee, food, fuel, George, George Osborne, Gideon, government, grocery. groceries, Incapacity, Income Support, inflation, Jobseeker's Allowance, living wage, maternity, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, Osborne, Parliament, pension, Pickles, politics, Poll Tax, retail price index, RPI, Tories, Tory, TUC, tuition, unemployment, university, Vox Political, water, welfare, Working Tax Credit

This is what ‘money’ looks like. Enjoy the sight because you’ll probably be seeing increasingly less of it in reality from now on.

How many different ways can the Coalition find to shoot itself in the foot?

Today, inflation is the cause of the embarrassment. Just one month after it dropped to its lowest level in three years, the pace of price rises leapt up by half a percentage point, which is well above expectations.

And what’s the reason for this unexpected turnaround? Why, it’s because of the sharp rise in university tuition fees!

They rose by 19.1 per cent after the cap on charges was lifted by the government to £9,000 from £3,375.

In response, the Consumer Price Index rose from 2.2 per cent to 2.7, while the Retail Price Index went from 2.6 to 3.2 per cent.

What does it mean for you?

Well, it’s still September’s rise that is the important one, because it is those figures that part-time Chancellor Gideon George Osborne uses to work out the rise in benefits, starting next April. He’ll announce the amounts in December, but he’ll be guided by the September CPI rate.

These include Jobseekers’ Allowance, Income Support, disability benefits, maternity benefits, Incapacity Benefit, Child Tax Credit, Working Tax Credit and Child Benefit.

With inflation rising again, those on benefits are likely to suffer an even greater squeeze on their wallets than is already expected – remember, the bedroom tax and the ‘Pickles Poll Tax’ are both being imposed on us in April 2013.

Energy bill increases, water bill increases, food price rises, and the increase in fuel duty that members of the Coalition dutifully and brainlessly supported only yesterday will add to the agony for the many.

Mr 0 has already announced an intention to squeeze Jobseekers’ Allowance, as he is keen for those in work to see greater reward than those on the dole. Notice that he doesn’t say anything about whether that reward will be adequate to their needs. The living wage is not a factor in this Chancellor’s thinking!

Even last month, when inflation fell, TUC general secretary Brendan Barber warned that real wage drops mean families have been getting poorer every month for the last three years.

It’s not all bad, though!

Pensions – which are drawn by those who are most likely to vote (and most likely to vote Conservative) – are protected by a government guarantee, and will therefore rise by 2.5 per cent.

How cynical.

Get your votes out, lads and lasses!

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Any Answers, Any Questions, benefit, benefits, Christmas bonus, Coalition, Conservative, Council Tax Benefit, Council Tax Relief Scheme, CPI, government, Jobseeker's Allowance, Localism Bill, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, NHS, Parliament, pension, pensioner, people, politics, RPI, student, Tories, Tory, tuition fee, TV licence, unemployment, Universal Credit, Vox Political, vulnerable, Winter fuel payment, Workfare, young people

The only power you have: Pensioners keep their benefits because they vote; youngsters are told they can’t change the system, so they don’t bother. They give up their democratic power and, as a result, are made to suffer.

Is the government is right to maintain benefits to older people, whatever their financial situation, while cutting benefits to more vulnerable people?

This was the popular issue on BBC radio’s Any Questions/Any Answers this week – popular because it highlighted the contrast between pensioners, who influence governments, and youngsters, who don’t.

The simple fact – nailed by a tweeter – is that old people vote more than young people. Therefore, it is the choice they make that can decide who forms the next government. Therefore any party (or parties) in power will pander to them and try to ensure that they take as few hits as possible during a time of cuts.

Remember the old adage that, if you don’t vote Tory when you’re old, you’ve got no brains? They try to look after their support base.

So pensions stop being linked to RPI and get linked to CPI instead, meaning a drop of 0.4 per cent in their annual rise (which was 5.2 per cent last year – well above average pay increases). They get a Christmas bonus. They get winter fuel payments whether they need them or not. Free TV licence.

Meanwhile, youth services are cut hard. Student tuition fees are tripled. The number of young adults out of work skyrockets and they are faced with crippling sanctions on their Jobseekers’ Allowance if they don’t comply with slave-labour Workfare schemes. The Universal Credit will cap the amount of benefit they receive to keep them in poverty. The Localism Bill will bring in county-based council tax relief schemes instead of Council Tax Benefit, which will push low-earners (traditionally the young) out of their homes to look for accommodation in less-desirable areas.

The government can get away with this because young people don’t vote – so they are no threat.

Of course, we’ve all heard the naysayers banging on that there’s no point in voting because it won’t change anything; whatever happens, you’ll end up with a politician representing you. We’ve all heard that sort of tripe. Their point – that politicians are no different from each other; that they’re all in it to line their own pockets, may seem valid. But just look at the evidence of the last century in Britain alone and you will see that it is not true.

Was Aneurin Bevan lining his own pockets when he set up the NHS? Of course not – but Andrew Lansley and many other MPs are lining theirs by breaking it up. And that’s just the obvious example.

So, young people of the UK – and in that I count anybody from 18 up to retirement age – it’s time to start thinking seriously about your situation.

Do you really want to be a Conservative politician’s helpless pawn? Do you want to be consigned to poverty, to a life of endlessly being shifted from one inadequate set of digs to another? From one Workfare placement to another?

Or will you take charge of your own political life and make it clear that you won’t be pushed around like that?

There are more of you than there are pensioners. You can choose a government that is fair; that actually wants to help you. Remember, the government that formed the NHS did it when there was supposed to be “no money left”, and in a time of far worse proportionate debt. And it wasn’t a Tory government. Or a Liberal Democrat one.

So get your votes out.