The BBC has been hitting us hard in the last week with what is without any shadow of a doubt pure Labour Party propaganda about living standards, the minimum wage and ‘breadline Britain’….the central message at the heart of Labour’s election strategy
More on that later but as a run up to a more indepth look at the BBC’s coverage in which we are presented with ‘Jason from Stockport’ who has nothing to eat in his cupboards, you might like to hear what Stephanie Flanders, now off the leash, admits in the Sunday Times today……
The Treasury likes to point out that overall earnings figures make things look worse than they actually are, at least for people who have been in jobs for a while. On average, people in full-time jobs who have been in work for at least a year have seen their wages go up faster than inflation from 2012 onwards.
But…
It’s a lost cause trying to get people to admit that they feel better off than before.
A decade of reporting on the economy for the BBC proved to me that it was incredibly hard to get people to admit on camera to having become richer. That was true even in the boom years, let alone now.
I could be standing in a supermarket, surrounded by ‘lowest ever’ price signs, on the day wages werer rising at the fastest rate in a decade and inflation had fallen to a record low: everyone who talked to us would doggedly insist their grocery bills were heading through the roof and they were haiving trouble making ends meet. British people find it difficult to be upbeat on television.
So when the BBC wheels out those poverty stricken families and the ‘Jason’s in Stockport’ as evidence of ‘Breadline Britain’ it all needs to be taken with a huge pinch of salt. We are being very deliberately lied to and manipulated.
Flanders tells us that the economy is 15% smaller than it would have been had we ‘trundled along at our long-term average rate of growth since 2007.’
Bt that’s not the fault of this government….she tells us ‘we are not alone. Nearly every advanced economy is facing the same shortfall…[but]….we have handled this difficult new reality better than many.’
Flanders also tells us that….
Labour will want to play down Britain’s relative economic success to focus on the ‘crisis in living standards’. What it is easy to miss is that it’s the squeeze in living standards that as largely made that relative success possible by pricing British workers into work.
That fall in wages has one enormous beenfit; it helped make it affordable for business to keep workers and hire new ones, even in very tough times.
That made for a very different kind of recession and recovery from what we have seen before.
In previous recessions the pain of the downturn fell on the relatively small chunk of the population who lost their jobs. Anyone laid off saw their living standards collapse. Everyone else saw their earnings tick along much as before. Not this time.
This time we really were ‘all in it together’.
Lower wages have kept people in work and allowed more to be employed……..Labour and the BBC are pushing the line that benefits are higher because people are in low paid wages which conveniently neglects to say what the bill would have been if all those on lower wages had no wages and had to receive full unemployment benefit…never mind the effect on their standard of living.
Last week on Peter Allen’s show(11:10) we heard that the top 20% of earners had seen a large fall in income of 5.2% whilst the lowest 20% had seen growth of 3.5%.
We were told that the average UK disposable income level was £28,700….now the BBC’s Panorama told us a family who had an income of £29,000 including benefits were on the breadline…..as a result of this government’s policies…and yet average incomes have only fallen by 4% compared to pre-crash levels.
A fall of 4% does not suddenly put people into poverty as the BBC seems to be claiming.
That’s, as I said, just a warm up for the real exploration of the BBC’s coverage of ‘Breadline Britain’ as it pumps out material like this…
Low-paid Britons now number five million, think tank concludes
…on behalf of the Labour Party.



