Analysis

Maths-fail Labour botches attempt to hit Tories over cost of living

Labour’s sums just don’t add up – so much for ‘competence’

An attempt by Keir Starmer’s Labour to create a ‘household bill’ meme to hit the Tories over the ‘cost of living crisis’ – in reality a manufactured emergency enriching the Tories’ corporate backers – backfired after Labour couldn’t even write add up five lines of numbers.

The party’s Twitter account posted a photoshopped image of a shop receipt that it said added up to an additional cost to households of £3,500 – but the problem was, it didn’t:

Labour’s attempt was a feeble one even without the failure to perform basic arithmetic: Starmer and his awful Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves are only offering to freeze prices at the same catastrophic levels they are at now – they even admit they have no real interest in significant change – so, as in so many ways, they are just as bad as Sunak’s dire gang.

Lacking vision, policies, principles and a backbone, the only thing Starmer’s supporters can claim he offers is some notion of dreary competence – but this and many other blunders and stupidities show they don’t even have that.

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53 comments

  1. Two possible explanations:
    -Reeves is unable to perform basic mathematics without a calculator at hand?
    -Decided that most of the electorate cannot perform basic mathematics and decided to round it up?
    I don’t know which explanation is worse. It will depends, do most of the electorate likes to be treated as simpletons unable to add?

    1. Yes Maria well said. This vaguery- at best – doesn’t make a would be chancellor look good.

      1. Or maybe, like you, they just have woeful arithmetic skills.

        £13.5m turning into a £4.8m deficit in under three years. Tsk!

      2. Says the beaut that repeatedly tells us Corbyn LOST members, despite INCREASING the numbers throughout his tenure.

        If I’m wrong, explain to everyone what the numbers were when Corbyn became leader; and the numbers when left the post.

        No? Ok, how about that time you told us more people DIDN’T vote for brexit than DID?

        How is 17.4m LESS than 16.1m, mmm?

        You’re best off keepin quiet, lad. Let alone accusing others if idiocy.🤦

  2. Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves over spent by £4000 on her IPSA expenses card how can you trust her with the economy she can’t fucking count

    1. Doug – In the unlikely event that Labour don’t win the next general election with a substantial majority. then you are more than welcome to come back and tell me ‘I told you so’.😏

      1. He says with certainty, knowing that he will still be working for the Establishment when the next GE comes around!

      2. Allan – In the unlikely event that Labour don’t win the next general election with a substantial majority. then you are also more than welcome to come back and tell me ‘I told you so’.😏

  3. 264
    There is not a snowballs chance of Starmer and Red Tories WINNING the next GE
    Like all bullies, dictators and Fascists they will disappear at the first sound of gunfire
    Name a single policy that will sustain them

      1. I think you are being optimistic for Labour to get an outright victory. They don’t have the 50 odd seats in Scotland that Blair relied upon and it’s not how many votes you get but where you get them that determines the number of seats yo u

      2. felixross – Unlike you I have every confidence that Labour will win the next general election outright.
        I of course accept your point that it isn’t just the numbers that count which is precisely why we also have Multilevel Regression with Poststratification (MRP) polls which are much larger polls and are specifically designed to predict things at constituency level https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_United_Kingdom_general_election#Seat_predictions

      3. Was it a Multilevel Regression with Poststratification poll that gave you a 264 seat MAJORITY
        For the Love of God try breathing the same air as the rest of the human race
        Has anyone informed MSM and toilet papers that’s what Red Tories are privately predicting
        I’m tempted to give Paddy Power a call to get a price, but I know what their response would be
        GTF

      4. Jeremy Corbyn could start a new party but does he have the friends or the funds?

        According to you, Keef’s supposedly got >430k members,

        Care to tell us all how he’s turned a £13.5m reserve into a £4.8m deficit in under three years, when he’s supposedly got so many members all paying in? 😙🎵

      5. Toffee – Oh dear, you’re getting confused again. 😟
        I have however pointed out on numerous occasions that in Nov19 (when Jeremy was in office) that number of members had fallen by 20% in the previous 2yrs to 430,359 and that this along with the loss of 60 seats and the resultant loss of ‘short money’ was causing Labour some cash flow problems. Why are you obsessing about this when you left the Labour Party over a quarter of a century ago and have contributed SFA since.

      6. Whatever method is used in opinion polling represents merely an interpretation of a snapshot of an instant response at a particular moment in time.

        And we have already definitively established, courtesy of the link provided by steveH, that the Electoral Calculus site bases its figures on an aggregate of polls rather than anything more sophisticated.

        As a result any conclusion based on such a model is fundamentally flawed in that it is basing its conclusion on a static system and extrapolating the results as a cast iron guarantee of what will happen in the future.

        Human, along with natural, systems being dynamic rather than static ones would suggest that anyone relying on such a static model is little different from an impulsive gambler who thinks they can beat the house in a casino.

        Indeed, Skid row is full of them.

      7. When you are reduced to playing the man rather than the ball it tells everyone that you have nothing of substance to offer steveH.

        The point made about the static nature of polls – which you are studiously and desperately avoiding – is that it applies both ways. Corbyn’s polls ratings were not good in the run up to the 2017 election yet those polls were, once again, found wanting.

        A further point you ignore because it suits your dishonest approach is that of polls going up or down – ie changing because the world, despite your delusional protestations, is a dynamic rather than static one as a result of both argument and the manipulation of opinion by vested interests. Not to mention wider contextual events in the outside world.

        I suggest you deal with the substance of the points made rather hiding behind this kind of infantile bluster which does your credibility no good whatsoever.

    1. Doug: Name a single policy that will sustain them

      SureStart? Sure, it’s not actually a Starmer-labour policy yet, but it soon could be – the very second the third-wayers resurrect triangulation and resource thingumy groups of middleengland / Daily Mail readers to fulfil the role that Conference had once served in Labour’s pre-enterist past

      Of course, the vile Knight is bound to WEF/Trilateralise it. Maybe ‘SureFire’? (In private, Sir Eeyore probably thinks P+O were onto something good. ‘At last’, he thinks, ‘a New Age business showing real Internationalist aspiration. I’ll show them raving trotskyists that used to be in my party…’

      ~#Things can only get better….~# No thank you. For the Many, not the Few.

  4. I all honesty, it wouldn’t surprise me if this was on purpose.

    Everything to look as if they’re trying to win without trying to win.

    1. It occurred to me too, Ben. Neither of the two main parties seem to be serious about winning public support. It’s as if they’ve seen the billionaires Narrative and know that our betters have decided that now they’ve neutered the Corbyn Challenge (to them), it’s ordained that the “second eleven” have a go.

      The second eleven will do more harm to the working classes than any Dave, Theresa, Boris or Sunak ever could.

      1. qwertboi – Surely this must be an act, nobody can be that stupid.

      2. Surely this must be an act, nobody can be that stupid.</I

        Oh, I dunno… You gonna explain how a reserve fund of £13.5m is turned into a deficit of £4.8m within three years?

        And without any assistance from truss or kwarteng…

  5. Toffee – I’ve explained this to you many times before, it isn’t my fault that you are playing at being wilfully stupid, That’s your choice.

    1. What’s happening is, you are too cowardly to answer the simple question.

      And that IS your fault

      You know just as well as everybody else just who’s responsible for that <b lost revenue…And it isn’t Corbyn.

      1. The guardian explains where the party funds have gone , and praises Starmer, thisd from Anne McElvoy – who previously wrote in the Times : While the uprooting of the hard left is a huge internal achievement that has taken considerable legal nous and organisational slog.

        Starmer is uprooting the left from their own party and nearly all members supported Corbyn’s policy platform. Starmer only joined the party in 2015, Why? As a favour to the same establishment he served with a series of cover-ups at the CPS. Just how much of a corrupt lying bastard is this man?

      2. Toffee – Don’t be a numpty. Which bit of “I’ve explained this to you many times before, it isn’t my fault that you are playing at being wilfully stupid, That’s your choice” did you have difficulty in understanding?

  6. Anne McElroy was a guest columnist in today’s Observer.

    Apparently, even members of the shadow team acknowledge how nothing is really going to change under Starmer:

    “The net effect, as one shadow frontbencher jokes, is that ‘Jeremy Hunt will remain chancellor under a Labour government'”

    This is a very sick joke because it shows that there is really no point in voting Labour at the next election especially now that Rachel Reeves has ruled out increases in Capital Gains Tax.

    If taxes on unearned income were levied at the same rate as taxes on earned income, as they were when dangerous leftie Nigel Lawson was in charge of the country’s finances, government revenue would now be around £16 billion a year higher. Inequality would also be less.

    Just think about that for a moment. We have no interest at all in there being a Starmer-led Labour government. Making Britain better forms no part of his agenda.

    1. Tony

      There are a few select ‘chosen’ journos who seem to float around the major broadsheets spending time at each before moving on, or freelancing, like McElvoy : Telegraph; Times, guardian/observer, all serving up the same type of centre-right, pro-Blairite pap. Andrew Rawnsley is another – Observer regular – as you mention, for whom McElvoy was standing in for today. Another is Matthew d’Ancona he went from the guardian to the Times. Kath Viner, the guardian editor in chief, recently got a big pay rise bringing her salary up to a staggering £500,000 pa. No wonder they’ve no time for left-wing columnists. I’m just amazed Will Hutton has bought into the hopeless, ill-defined economic horse manure, Starmer and Reeves are peddling as ‘miracle growth’ for the economy.

      Toffee

      On Labour’s depleted party funds : are the unions funding the outrageous Southside driven legal action against former Staffers over the leaked report? If unions like Unite and Sharon Graham are contributing to this action against leftist former staffers what the fcuk is she and Unite playing at?

    1. Toffee – Not at all, I’ve answered the same question from you on numerous occasions, are you now suffering from memory recall issues as well as your escalating bouts of confusion?😟

      1. No – you haven’t answered the question.

        Stop lying. You’ve just repeatedly called me a “numpty” for trying to get a clear, concise answer out of you.

        So, AGAIN.

        From £13.5m surplus, to £4.8 deficit in under three years.

        Who’s responsible for that?

        I’ll remind you that you’re only too quick to blame Corbyn for supposedly “losing” 20% of the membership (he didn’t, they left under keef, or at least while Corbyn was holding the reins until keef shithoused his way to the leadership)

        Is Corbyn at fault for this £4.8m deficit – is that what you’re telling us?

      2. SteveH

        The party is running up huge legal fees pursuing their factional vendetta against the left, whom they to view as unworthy of democratic representation.

        A leaked report in the public interest. All sorts of questions arising from the Al Jazeera report seemingly refuting slurs made in that Panorama programme. The left has been treated hideously by this lying leadership and adding insult to injury; this persecution of the left continues using union funding.

      3. Andy – Didn’t the leaked dossier refer exclusively to events that took place during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership and haven’t all the senior officials who’s malfeasance was exposed already left Labour’s HQ staff (some of the more infamous are now senior Union officials) and bearing in mind that Milne was a member of this WhatsApp group how long were Corbyn and his team aware of what was going on before they took any action.

      4. SteveH02/04/2023 AT 6:33 PM
        Toffee – Your stupidity is your problem.

        Your cowardice and the infallibility you have bestowed upon your idol is a FAR bigger problem for you, than your claim of my stupidity could EVER be for me.

        That’s before we get to your woeful innumeracy, illiteracy, and basic comprehension.

        You haven’t even got the stones to admit that the losses are down to keef and his administration, when EVERYONE else knows it.

        For complete fucks sake, you point-blank refused to believe that keef had reneged on any of his ten pledges until I had to prove it to you that he’d admitted he had..

        Hiroo Onoda at least had some sort of excuse. You haven’t. .

      5. SteveH, you have NEVER explained how Starmer managed to lose nearly £40,000,000 in less than three years, I’d have remembered. Falling membership and extravagant spending, no? Then please explain.

  7. Let’s take a look at what came up when I googled “labour party £4.8 million deficit…

    In the interests of neutrality, I clicked on the guardian link.

    https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/politics/2022/aug/17/labour-48m-in-deficit-after-losing-91000-members

    Third paragraph: “The party treasurer’s report, logged with the Electoral Commission, declared Labour had 432,213 members as of 31 December 2021, compared with 523,332 the previous year.

    The previous year being 2020. Keef shithouses the leadership on April 4 2020.

    But I guess all those members did the frank in the four months while Corbyn was holding the fort until keef was *ahem* “elected”, eh, wee gobshite? I suppose not a soul left (or was expelled) in the following 20month period, oh no.

    But I digress….Next paragraph:

    Labour’s membership increased significantly during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership to more than half a million, and it remains one of the largest in Europe – although large numbers of members left after Corbyn’s resignation, some disillusioned with Keir Starmer’s leadership.

    LARGE numbers left AFTER Corbyn’s resignation, but only SOME disillusioned with smarmer’s leadership???..There’s being kind and there’s taking the piss.

    Ok…back to the article in the graun…

    b>The accounts stated membership income was “comparable with 2017 and 2018”, at the height of the Corbyn-inspired membership boom, but said the party was facing increasing costs, including redundancy payoffs for large numbers of staff.

    The report said the severance scheme was the main reason for the deficit this year, which had required using cash reserves, noting that the party remained debt free

    So, the income was “comparable with 17 & 18 was it? But the smarmerist party want to blame staffing levels?

    Hmmm. There was a general election in 2017 wasn’t there?? The membership didn’t drop by 90-odd thousand in 2018 so there was still that income to stick in the leger, making the claim that I come was comparable (from membership numbers) a load of old BOLLOCKS.

    Furthermore, it only took until the next paragraph to completely bollocks up their own claim…

    “But there was also a drop in income from membership fees, the accounts showed. In 2021, Labour said it had received about £16.1m in membership fees, compared with £19.3m in 2020. It raised almost £10m in donations.”

    There’s £3.2million (for 2021 alone) gone south.

    And WHO was leader in 2021? That’s right…The very same slimeball that became leader in April 2020 when there was anywheres up to 91,000 more members, all paying their dues.

    And now -with even less members – they won’t be pulling in £16.1m

    But it’s Corbyn’s fault, because:

    Last year, a member of Labour’s national executive committee (NEC) said the party was spending millions on legal fees to fight cases concerning a leaked report into antisemitism that contained private WhatsApps from members of staff.

    Them bloody pesky lefties, eh? Just who the fuck do they think they are, defending themselves from accusations from the dear leader? Bastards ought to be grateful they haven’t been expelled for sod-all.

    Still, it’s a few more quid for the party while they’re still allowed to be members, innit?

    You REALLY are a total and utterly incompetent lying smarmer-obsessed gobshite.

    Now go away.

    1. Toffee – Thanks for all your hard work but given that there was a leadership election in 2020 it really shouldn’t come as a surprise that there was a temporary boost in the membership numbers (114k joined between Corbyn announcing that he was stepping down and 5pm on the 20/01/20) what are you trying to prove, or are you still trying to work that one out.

      This was published in July 2019
      “Labour’s membership has dipped below half a million after tens of thousands quit the party, PoliticsHome can reveal.
      Official figures put the total at just under 485,000 – down from a peak of 564,000 at the end of 2017.
      That includes around 35,000 supporters whose subscriptions are in arrears, meaning the party now has around 450,000 fully paid-up members.
      The 14% drop in membership comes against a backdrop of dissatisfaction by many in the party at Jeremy Corbyn’s approach to Brexit and anti-semitism.
      A senior Labour MP said the party’s budget was based on an assumption that the number of paying members would not fall below 500,000……..
      …………”It’s the biggest annual fall in our history – admittedly from a huge base – and it will only get worse.”
      Glen O’Hara, Professor of Contemporary History at Oxford Brookes University, said: “The decline in official membership is very big – 14% or so in just 18 months……

      https://www.politicshome.com/news/article/excl-labour-membership-dips-below-half-a-million-as-tens-of-thousands-leave-party

      ps, Have you forgotten that it was Jeremy’s incompetence that created the liability to the participants in the Panorama program.

      1. No, the participants in the BBC programme were starmerian sociopaths that were providing Wade with overwhelmingly false information (all verifiable in two of the in Al Jazeera’s four-part ‘The Labour Files’ series), with which he created the Covid-level propaganda programme for Panorama.
        The decision to pay these reprobates several million pounds (£6m?), was the knighted donkey’s, Sir Kieor Starmer – despite party lawyers telling him he should not.
        So clear are these facts that Wade dropped his legal action against Jeremy Corbyn who, knowing that he, the instigator, would lose, thereby drawing attention to the conspiracy theory which Jeremy had to endure as leader of Labour.

      2. Yeah, thanks for your hard work. Doesn’t make a blind bit of difference to what I posted.

        So….£13.5m to £4.8m deficit. Corbyn’s, or keef’s responsibllity?

      3. and rumour has it that JC’s Wade dropped his action against Jeremy the very day he learned of the content and detail of the still-to-be broadcast “Labour Files”. As part 4 of the series , the interview of Martin Forde, showed – even a leading KC who had lead an Inquiry into starmer’s rottenness in Labour, was impressed by the quality of Al Jazeera’s journalism.

      4. ps, Have you forgotten that it was Jeremy’s incompetence that created the liability to the participants in the Panorama program.

        Oh, you mean those discovered to have lied through their fucking teeth?

        Have YOU forgotten it’s keefs’ petty vindictiveness and agenda to rid the party of any dissent from the left that has cost the party fucking £££Millions in spurious legal claims – INCLUDING your goldbricking panorama twunts that keef immediately paid out to – DESPITE going AGAINST legal advice?

        Oh, I forgot…Keef KNOWS the law doesn’t he?

        What a knob head.

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