Osborne wants a ‘year of hard truths’. Here’s one: He’s HIDING the truth

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Swivel-eyed loon: This is the kind of man who listens to George Osborne’s comments about the economy. [Picture: Left Foot Forward]

It must be panto season because the Conservative Party’s very own Ugly Sisters have just wheeled themselves out to deliver another helping of hilarious family fun:

Even more cuts are needed, worth billions of pounds, and there are still huge underlying problems with the economy, said Sister George, even though he knows that cuts are not the answer.

The small upturn he managed to engineer last year came from a natural upswing in the economy and the artificial housing boom that he created by Keynesian means and was nothing to do with austerity cuts. As for the economy, he’s had three and a half years to fix it! It seems clear that if there is an underlying problem, its surname is Osborne.

We may also extract some bitter humour from his words. Only days ago, his cabinet colleague Michael Gove attacked TV comedy Blackadder Goes Forth for claiming that our leaders in World War One never learnt from their mistakes but merely repeated them, over and over again, at huge cost in the lives of the working-class people who had to suffer the consequences of their decisions.

Now here’s George, telling us that he’s following up his failed austerity cuts with… more austerity cuts.

So we will see another £25 billion cut out of the British economy after the next election if the Conservatives win, including £12 billion from social security, he told us, providing everybody with an income lower than £50,000 per year with a perfect reason not to vote Conservative in 2015.

Come to think of it, why do working-class people ever vote for clowns like him?

He’ll cut departmental budgets by £13 billion, starving already wafer-thin public services and paving the way for their takeover by the private sector – on the long-disproved premise that profit-making businesses can do a better job for less money.

He’ll cut housing benefit for young people (under-25) who are just trying to get started in work – but he won’t force under-paying firms to boost their wages in order to offer a decent standard of living!

He also said – no, wait, that’s all he had to offer.

George justified his plan by trotting out the now-classic justification line of this Parliament – that the deficit was down by a third since 2010. He has been saying this for the last two years, and in all that time, the deficit hasn’t dropped at all! Last year the difference was a fraction of one per cent.

This is because the drop was achieved by cutting capital projects and there aren’t any more to cut. Taking billions out of the economy with benefit cuts and investment cuts actually harms the economy – there is less money moving through the system and therefore less opportunity for the fiscal multiplier effect to take place, for profit to be made and for taxes to be taken.

George has always had a bit of a blind spot there.

Sister George said he supported universal benefits for the elderly as they will only save around £10 million – but Sister David has suggested cutting free TV licences, bus passes and winter fuel allowances. Pensions are also taking a battering – never mind what they’re saying about the triple-lock.

David also said he wanted to cut taxes for the poor before the wealthy – but planned to do so by raising the threshold at which they begin to pay tax. This means they will not pay National Insurance either, and will have to find a higher-paying job before they can expect to contribute to their own pension fund. This means some people may never qualify for the state pension.

So they’re starting 2014 by promising austerity cuts that will harm the economy, cuts in benefits for the elderly that will save a comparatively negligible amount but will cause misery, and cuts in government budgets that will open the way to further privatisation and corporatisation of the state.

Those are the real hard truths – but you won’t hear these two characters admitting them.

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Social mobility? The Coalition’s flag should be the ‘Old School Tie’

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academic, Alan Milburn, BBC, benefit, benefits, boss, Coalition, conquer, Conservative, cut, David Cameron, divert, divide, dividend, earning, education, election, government, making work pay, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, old school tie, pensioner, people, performance related pay, policy, politics, poverty, practical, price, reduce, salary, shareholder, social mobility, social security, special needs, teacher, Tony Blair, Tories, Tory, TV licence, universal, vote, Vox Political, wage, Winter fuel allowance, work, working parent

It’s not what you know – it’s who: This is the only ticket to upward social mobility in David Cameron’s Britain – an Eton tie.

Congratulations to Alan Milburn for completely destroying the Coalition government’s ‘Making work Pay’ policy.

It was always critically flawed, of course – how could it not be? It was based on the idea of reducing the money available to people on benefits, in order to make the amount taken home by working people seem like more.

Meanwhile, the real winners were company bosses and shareholders for whom the line ‘Making Work Pay’ is a complete misnomer. A shareholder takes home dividends after investing in a company. Such a person doesn’t do any work for that money at all!

Mr Milburn’s study focuses on working parents, according to the BBC’s report. This makes sense because social mobility is historically based on a child managing to achieve more than a parent.

For decades, Britons have been able to say, proudly, that each generation has been better-off than the last; now, the Conservative-led Coalition has reversed that trend. Working parents simply don’t earn enough to escape poverty and two-thirds of poor children are now from families in which at least one adult has a job.

Falling earnings and rising prices mean the situation is likely to worsen – and what the report doesn’t say (but we can infer), is that this is an intended consequence of government policy. David Cameron will not be thanking Mr Milburn for pointing this out.

Mr Milburn has recommended diverting money currently used to provide universal benefits to pensioners, so that the richest senior citizens would lose their free TV licences and winter fuel allowances, in order to relieve the burden on the poorest families.

But Mr Cameron, who knows that pensioners are more likely to vote than younger people (including working parents), won’t accept that. A spokesman told the BBC those benefits will be safeguarded until after the 2015 general election – in order, we can infer, to ensure that pensioners will vote Conservative.

At least this admission makes Cameron’s reasoning clear!

Some have chosen to lay the blame on Education. That’s right – with a capital ‘E’. Apparently, although Tony Blair was right to put the emphasis on education back in 1997, people just haven’t been interested in taking it up, along with the massive opportunities it offers to attain a comfortable life.

That just doesn’t ring true. Look at Yr Obdt Srvt. I left school with nine GCE ‘O’ Levels and three ‘A’ levels, went on to get a degree and then went beyond that to get a post-graduate qualification in Journalism (making me one of the few news reporters, these days, to have one).

I have never received more than poverty wages – even when I was editing a newspaper. But the effect I have on my surroundings is completely disproportionate to the money I have received – I recently wrote that when I left my last full-time newspaper job, that paper lost £300,000 per year as a result (according to my sources). This very site is currently rated 16th most influential political blog in the UK.

Yet I am as poor as a church mouse!

So Education is not the culprit – and putting teachers on performance-related pay is to chase Education up a blind alley. How would Special Needs teachers benefit from such a system? All pupils have a range of abilities and no two are the same, so how can performance-related pay ever be judged fairly? Suppose a teacher correctly realises that some pupils will never achieve academic excellence but that their talents lie in practical pursuits – should that teacher lose pay for trying to get the best result possible for those pupils? Of course not.

Once again we see government policy following the ‘divide and conquer’ pattern. ‘Take from the needy and give to the greedy’, as the slogan states.

And the flag of the conquering elite is the ‘Old School Tie’.

You’re on very shaky ground in Cameron’s Britain – if you weren’t at Eton.

Tory insanity outbreak: Now disgraced Liam Fox wants to harm pensioners

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Adam Werrity, benefit, benefits, capital gains, cheat, chris huhne, Coalition, Conservative, cut, debt, deficit, Democrat, economy, education, expenses, Free School, freeze, government, health, international development, Justice, Liam Fox, Lib Dem, Liberal, Michael Gove, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, NHS, Nick Clegg, Parliament, pension, people, pervert, policy, politics, public spending, school, speeding, tax, taxpayer, Theresa May, Tories, Tory, Vince Cable, Vox Political, Winter fuel allowance

Do not approach: Another Conservative goes feral. Pensioners – guard your assets!

There seems to be an increasing willingness among politicians to give high regard to disgraced ex-colleagues.

Only last weekend, Nick Clegg praised Chris Huhne, who faces sentencing today after being convicted of perverting the course of justice regarding speeding points on his driving licence.

Now Liam Fox has weighed into the debate on future Conservative Party policy. Dr Fox had to resign after being asked why a man who was not a part of the government had attended more than half of his official engagements including trips abroad, at the public expense.

His ideas are just as appalling as Theresa May’s plan to take away all of your human rights, as detailed in this blog yesterday.

He wants to freeze public spending for the next five years – that’s well into the next Parliament, no matter who wins.

He wants to spend the money this will allegedly save on tax cuts, notably capital gains tax – in other words, another nice little earner for the very, very rich. Odious, aren’t they?

Like Vince Cable of the Liberal Democrats, he wants departmental budgets that are currently ring-fenced to lose that protection – including the NHS, schools and international development.

The NHS is already the subject of controversy over its spending because the government has claimed budgets have increased, while the UK Statistics Authority stated categorically that they have dropped.

Most schools have been under-funded by Michael Gove, in favour of his ridiculously expensive ‘free schools’ project. Under Dr Fox’s plans, unless your child is privately-educated or has been cherry-picked to go to one of these new institutions, their education would suffer and their chances in life would be hugely reduced.

International development is hugely controversial as well. At a time when the UK is struggling to pay for itself, critics say, the country should not be giving cash away to foreign nations.

And he wants to end protection for universal benefits – such as the pensioners’ winter fuel allowance.

Pensioners: This Tory wants to take away the extra money you get to heat your home during the winter, and the Liberal Democrat Vince Cable wants to means-test or tax the pension for which you have spent your entire working life paying. Do you really want to vote either party back into power to do these things to you?

Fox is a leading member of the Tory right-wing, and this is clear from his demands. But his own past actions make his current intervention laughable. He wants to cut public spending by – according to his own calculations – £345 billion over five years, yet he himself is an expenses cheat who has overspent taxpayers’ money on himself and his friends.

In 2009 it was reported that he had claimed £19,000 on expenses for his mobile phone bill over the previous four years. He said he was looking for a cheaper tariff.

He overclaimed £22,476 in mortgage interest payments, which he was forced to pay back in 2010. Fox said he had decided to remortgage his second home to pay for redecorations, and claim the higher interest repayments on his expenses because this represented value for money – he could have charged the taxpayer for his decorating bill directly. This was not true, according to the judge dealing with the case.

A study of Parliamentary records in the Daily Telegraph showed that he was receiving rental income from his London home while simultaneously claiming rental income from the taxpayer to live at another residence.

And then there’s the big one, for which he lost his job: Fox’s relationship with Adam Werrity, who had lived rent-free in Fox’s flat, had accompanied Fox on 40 of his 70 official engagements, attended meetings with foreign dignitaries and had used official-looking business cards which stated his was an “advisor” to Fox.

Fox resigned in advance of publication of an official inquiry’s report into the matter.

What a shame he can’t keep his mouth shut.

The BBC: helping the Tories force-feed falsehoods to the masses

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benefit, benefits, Child Benefit, Coalition, Conservative, Department for Work and Pensions, disability, Disability Living Allowance, disabled, DLA, DWP, Employment and Support Allowance, ESA, George Osborne, Goebbels, government, Hitler, Iain Duncan Smith, Incapacity Benefit, Jobseeker's Allowance, Liberal, Liberal Democrat, maternity pay, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, Parliament, people, politics, sick, tax credit, Tories, Tory, unemployment, Vox Political, welfare, Winter fuel allowance

“Nation shall speak peace unto nation” according to the BBC’s motto. But it seems that same nation’s public service broadcaster shall speak lies unto its own people. Why?

I think we should all play a little game, based around the Parliamentary debate on the one per cent benefit cap. It’s called ‘Count the Tory lies’ and I’ve already spotted a few on the BBC website’s latest article: Iain Duncan Smith “said inaction would leave the UK ‘bankrupt’, and that ‘like Greece and like Spain… we’ll have huge borrowing costs’.”

Bankrupt, is it? The UK wasn’t bankrupt when its national debt was two and a half times its GDP, so there’s no chance of it now! This is clearly a lie, trotted out to scare people.

He went on to say that pensioner benefits like the winter fuel payment weren’t being capped because pensioners didn’t have the flexibility of being able to go to work – that’s actually untrue as well. I know of many people past pension age who still work. The reason it isn’t being capped is that pensioners are more likely to vote – and the Tories want those votes, so need to keep pensioners sweet. Young people don’t vote as much, therefore they get hammered.

“‘No-one is going to be demonised on my watch,’ he promised.” Except the sick, the disabled, the unemployed, people in work but on low pay…”

Mr Duncan Smith said welfare payments had risen by about a fifth over the past five or six years while incomes had increased by only a tenth over the same period.” Twisting the statistics. In fact benefits as a proportion of average incomes, have been kept at 1/6 of wages, which seems perfectly reasonable to me, especially since wages have been depressed severely over the last 20 or 30 years.

Just to hammer this misleading point home, the article restates it: “Mr Duncan Smith said welfare payments had risen by about a fifth over the past five or six years while incomes had increased by only a tenth over the same period.” Therefore I’m happy to re-state that benefits have remained at only one-sixth of average wages. The difference between the percentages has to do with the differences in amounts – a 20 per cent rise in benefits equals just £11.85, while a 12 per cent rise in average wages is £49. Perhaps that might make it seem a little less unfair to your readers.

“Legislation is needed to implement changes announced by Chancellor George Osborne in last month’s Autumn Statement.” Doubtful – and the BBC should not be pushing this as fact. Was it a Guardian article over the weekend that said the vote was being introduced to make Labour look like the party of slobs, shirkers and scroungers? Instead, Labour will come out as the party for strivers, as it is defending benefits that working people, and people who want to work, need in order to survive in these hard times.

People have been force-fed falsehoods by a government that is desperately trying to justify its unreasonable attacks on the poor and vulnerable.

The BBC should not be part of this. It should set the record straight where figures are available, otherwise its reports are misleading readers.

Let’s have a bit of factual accuracy in the run-up to this vote.

The benefit cap WILL happen – but we don’t need to believe the Tories’ Big Lie

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benefit, benefits, Child Benefit, Coalition, Conservative, Department for Work and Pensions, disability, Disability Living Allowance, disabled, DLA, DWP, Employment and Support Allowance, ESA, George Osborne, Goebbels, government, Hitler, Iain Duncan Smith, Incapacity Benefit, Jobseeker's Allowance, Liberal, Liberal Democrat, maternity pay, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, Parliament, people, politics, sick, tax credit, Tories, Tory, unemployment, Vox Political, welfare, Winter fuel allowance

Big liar: Iain Duncan Smith, last week.

A little while ago, somebody said: “The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.”

It’s a comment that could have been tailor-made for the Coalition government, in the run-up to tomorrow’s debate and vote on the plan to break the link between benefits and inflation, ensuring that those on benefits fall further into poverty as the years pass.

Why? Because ministers have been preparing the ground by demonising benefits claimants – getting the public to believe not only lies, but huge lies about the level of benefits and who gets them.

They’ll get what they want – the Coalition between Tories and Liberal Democrats creates a majority in the House of Commons. In theory they can do what they want. But they know that public opinion will swing against them – and stay against them – unless the people can be softened-up with a few juicy non-facts.

Vox Political has already uncovered some of these lies. More have been found by the Trades Union Congress in a recent poll which reveals some of the “myths” the public has been fed about those who rely on benefits.

So, as we go into the debate, let’s look at some of these myths. The people spreading them are the usual suspects – George Osborne gave us his story about “the shiftworker, leaving home in the dark hours of the early morning, who looks up at the closed blinds of their next-door neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits”; and Iain Duncan Smith has highlighted figures showing that, in percentage terms, benefits have risen by almost twice as much as earnings in the past five years. In fact, as demonstrated in this blog, this simply means that benefits as a proportion of earnings have remained at the same level. It’s a manipulation of statistics in order to mislead the unwary. Were you caught?

A YouGov poll found 42 per cent of people think benefits are too generous.

It discovered 59 per cent believe the system has created a culture of dependency.

But just give those people a few cast-iron facts and their beliefs change drastically.

The plan to cap benefit rises at one per cent was supported by 48 per cent and opposed by 32 per cent – but only because three out of every four people asked believed the “myth” that it was the unemployed that would take the hit. When told that 60 per cent of those affected will be low-paid workers receiving tax credits (fact), the move is opposed by a margin of 40 per cent to 30 per cent.

Only one in four believe benefits should rise be less than wages or prices, and 63 per cent want to see them linked to wages, prices or both (in other words, keep them as they are – precisely the opposite of what Herrs Osborne and Smith are pursuing).

The TUC poll found:

People think 41 per cent of the entire welfare budget goes on benefits to unemployed people, while the true figure is just three per cent.

They think 27 per cent of the welfare budget is claimed fraudulently, while the government’s own figure is 0.7 per cent.

They think that almost half the people (48 per cent) who claim Jobseeker’s Allowance go on to claim it for more than a year, while the true figure is just under 30 per cent (27.8 per cent).

They think an unemployed couple with two school-age children would get £147 in Jobseeker’s Allowance – more than 30 per cent higher than the £111.45 they would actually receive – a £35 over-calculation.

Only 21 per cent of people think that this family with two school-age children would be better off if one of the unemployed parents got a 30 hour a week minimum wage job. They would actually end up £138 a week better off – in other words, they’d have more than twice as much money. Even those who thought they would be better off only thought on average they would gain by £59.

Yes, you’ve been told lies.

Yes, they’re big lies.

What might surprise you is the amount of time the Tories, in particular, have been telling these lies.

I am indebted to skwalker1964, who pointed me towards the pro-Tory ‘research trust’ Reform. This organisation published a press release as far back as 2009, claiming that Britain had a welfare “dependency problem”.

It said benefit “gimmicks” – among which it numbered child benefit, winter fuel allowance, maternity pay and tax credits – were “benefiting nobody”.

And it called for an end to universal benefits (such as child benefit, which stopped being a universal benefit today) and the localisation of welfare (as demanded in a ‘blueprint for the next Conservative manifesto’ being promoted by 70 Tories including Michael Gove and David Willetts).

In 2009.

So you see, the person who made the comment at the top of this piece really knew what he was talking about. Who was he, again?

Oh, yes.

He was Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.

And he was paraphrasing his own boss, Adolf Hitler.

Cameron’s benefits bungling could cost you your home

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average, benefit, benefits, cap, Coalition, Conservative, Conservative Party, Council Tax Benefit, council tax bill, council tax support scheme, David Cameron, debt, earnings, families, family, government, housing benefit, housing benefit cap, landlord, Localism Act, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, mortgage, National Housing Federation, Parliament, people, politics, rent, rent cap, salary, Tories, Tory, under-25, Vox Political, wages, welfare, Winter fuel allowance, working, working class Tory

When Mr Cameron’s housing benefits cap takes effect, along with the increased council tax bill for those on benefits, how long will it be before working-class Tories find their representatives have forced them out of their homes?

It’s the kind of ignorance that could kill off the Working-Class Tory.

We all knew David Cameron had his head in the clouds (or where the sun doesn’t shine) when he asked what hard-working people were meant to think when they see individual families getting up to £60,000 of housing benefit. I believe the Conservative Party has yet to provide proof of the claim.

The fact is that a huge amount of new housing benefit claimants are in work themselves – so Mr Cameron’s argument was utterly defeated before he had even uttered a word of it.

Today (Monday) the National Housing Federation has stated that a failure to build new houses has led to an 86 per cent rise in working people claiming housing benefit between May 2009-2012, as rents and mortgages have soared.

An extra 10,000 new claims are being made each month.

The solution is simple; I’ve pointed it out in this very blog, many times – cap rents.

Instead, Mr Cameron said he was capping housing benefit, meaning hard-working families will have to tighten their belts and cut back even further on their other outgoings, just to keep a roof over their heads. They might not be able to afford to heat their home as well as last year (I doubt a working family qualifies for the Winter fuel allowance). They might not be able to eat as well as they did last year, as food prices are rocketing. But don’t worry – their landlords will carry on doing just fine, thank you very much!

(Until the family’s earnings can’t be stretched any further and they are forced out and – because the rent is too high for anyone else, the property becomes vacant and derelict. Landlords: Isn’t it wiser to make rents affordable and at least have some regular income from your property?)

In his speech to the Conservative Party conference, Mr Cameron said: “Because of our welfare cap, no family will be getting more in benefits than the average family earns.”

But it seems the average family doesn’t earn enough to stay off benefits! So what, exactly, was Mr Cameron saying, there? That he’s putting the average British family into an ever-decreasing recursive benefit loop?

The worst nonsense was the choice he said we give our young people today:   “Choice one: Work hard. Go to college. Get a job. Live at home. Save up for a flat […] Or: Don’t get a job. Sign on. Don’t even need to produce a CV when you do sign on. Get housing benefit. Get a flat. And then don’t ever get a job or you’ll lose a load of housing benefit.”

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Since people with jobs are on housing benefit, we already know this was a pile of hooey, but we also know that he’s capping that benefit, so people with jobs are going to lose a load of housing benefit as well!

“And we’re going to look at ending automatic access to housing benefit for people under 25 too.” So, if you’re aged under 25, Mr Cameron is pulling the ground out from beneath your feet, before you’ve even got on your feet!

And let’s not forget the threat of the Localism Act, which will add to the council tax bill payable on your home. If you are in a working family that receives housing benefit, you will most likely be in receipt of council tax benefit as well, and this means even more money will have to come from your tight budget, as of next April.

So here’s my question, for anyone who still thinks they’re a working-class Tory: When all these cuts and new taxes have done their worst to you, and you’ve moved back to live with mum and dad (or gran and grandad) simply to have a (rather overcrowded) roof over your head, and the next election rolls around, are you really going to tell me that you think David Cameron’s Conservative Party is your best choice?