This morning, the Office of National Statistics (ONS) released its “Analysis of real earnings: January 2018”.
Those statistics showed that our earnings in real terms – levels adjusted for inflation – are significantly lower than they were in 2010 before the Tories entered Downing Street.
Real-terms wages in 2010 were already depressed, after years of the effects of the financial crash, compared to pre-crash levels:
The same applies even when bonuses – which in any case are likely to benefit higher earners – are factored in:
In almost eight years of Tory or Tory-led government, the Conservatives have not even brought us back to being as well-off as we were in the throes of the global financial implosion.
Comment:
Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour calls austerity ‘a political choice’. It’s also clearly failed in terms of its impact on ordinary men, women and children of this country. Real-terms wages are lower than they were – and low-paid, part-time and insecure work has proliferated.
When the Tories crow about their economic performance, the economy they’re creating is not benefiting the many.
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The Labour offer is simple to understand.
Privatisation, austerity and deregulation have caused an imbalance in our economy which has led to wage stagnation and increased private and public debt. The few have benefited vastly at the expense of the many.
Labour seeks to correct that imbalance by returning to a mixed economy model. The mixed economy delivered increased wages and living standards in the UK in the post war period. It is arguably the most successful economic model ever created.
Mixed economies work for the many, not the few.
It’s just common sense really.
And this doesn’t even factor in those poor souls having to subsist on the capped, or even reduced, benefit rates….
Yet another nail in the coffin of discredited austerity dogma! The amazing thing is not that austerity has been so completely discredited by any reasonable measure of economic success. It is rather the silence of the establishment in calling out this fact, considering that it is also impacting them negatively – albeit to a lesser extent than an average worker. The other amazing fact is the establishment’s vitriolic attack on any idea that proves that or anyone that says austerity is a choice – not an economic necessity. Yet Nobel Prize winning economists like Joseph Stiglitz and Thomas Piketty have confirmed this, not just ‘communists’ like Corbyn and McDonnell.