The headline in the Independent, an online publication which was once a newspaper but is now a little read comic is clear: “Biggest rise in UK poverty since Margaret Thatcher was in power, experts claim”. In lefty bingo terms it gets better with a claim by the Indy that “The figures show the extent to which a combination of Brexit and government austerity is imposing a serious squeeze on living standards.” Thatcher, Brexit, Austerity – House! Of course it is 100% fake news
There is no data or facts behind this. Instead a lefty think tank, the Resolution Foundation, has taken the most recent data, from end 2016, and “with the help of statistical extrapolation and adjustment techniques for historical patterns” created what the Indy terms a “nowcast.” So by “figures” what the Indy means is “estimates”. And it uses that to say that “The incomes of the poorest households in the UK slumped last year.”
Er except that it goes on to admit that the numbers show that real incomes (i.e adjusted for inflation of 3%) in 2017/18 for the poorest households fell by £50-150 which actually means that the actual incomes will, in most cases have increased which is not the “slumped” claimed by the Indy.
The Indy, the sister publication of Channel 4 Fake News, says this slump (which is actually an increase) is down to benefit cuts. Whatever. It ignores material increases in the tax threshold which benefit the poorest families in work by the most and the fact that most benefits actually increased. It is, in other words, total bollocks.
And of course it is also based on how one views poverty. You and I think of absolute poverty as an evil to be eradicated. But the Indy and the lefty think tank and indeed the entire left define poverty as “those families living on incomes of less than 60 per cent of the median after accounting for housing costs”. So what happened in 2017 as in 1989 is that the economy is doing rather well ( remember the Lawson boom?) and thus after a period wage restraint with employment hitting multi year highs wages are increasing across the board as part of a catch-up process.
So poverty – as defined by a lefty goes up – when more and m ore people earn more and more money. And now the Government is promising three groups of folks earning well above average wages inflation busting pay increases: teachers, NHS staff and the Old Bill. That, of course, will increase poverty by even more if you are a lefty which the Indy and its cretinous economics editor Ben Chu will then be able to blame on Brexit, the wicked fucking Tories and austerity while evoking the memory of the dark one, aka Britain’s greatest ever Prime Minister.
No doubt Channel 4 News and the BBC are preparing a follow up expose of this fake news as I write.