Four times in six months the Office of Budget Responsibility and the UK Statistics Authority have publicly corrected Cameron and IDS for mis-using statistics

Cameron and Welfare Secretary Iain Duncan-Smith decide to check their facts...

Liebrary: "If it isn't hurting, it isn't working". How Austerity works for the few by hurting the many.

An earlier Tory chancellor during an earlier crisis claimed "If it isn't hurting it isn't working". This, together with the fib from a later Tory prime minister "We are all in it together", is used to convince the majority of us ripped-off Britons to keep taking the painful poverty pill while the elite take the opportunity to reinforce their positions. 


As Lord Young, former Tory minister and advisor to David Cameron, said  "a recession can be an excellent time to start a business...Factors of production such as premises and labour can be cheaper".  Young just said it as it is: bust businesses leave empty buildings and sacked employees who can be got on the cheap.

It was ever thus: when a ship sinks although all the passengers start off 'in it together' it is the passengers in the lower decks that drown first. The water eventually reaches the middle class, creeping up so they don't notice until it is too late. Giving the upper class time to float away in the lifeboats, taking their luggage and hampers, rowed by their more essential servants.

The sinking of the UK economy is made apparent by a release in May 2013 from the OECD and the Office of National Statistics. This shows that austerity has not improved our position relative to our competitor countries. In the period from 2005 to 2011 the disposable income per head in the UK has fallen from fifth to twelfth place in the OECD. France, much criticised for eschewing austerity, in the same period moved from four places below the UK to four places above.

Equally telling from these figures is the fact that in this period the UK disposable income grew by just 7%, compared with 22% in France and 19% in Germany.

Whistleblower says Britain's biggest out-of-hours private care provider Harmoni routinely jeopardises safety to cut costs

KJ, Chris and Fee have a brilliant idea...

Rip-off News round-up. Our pick of the last week's media (Thu 16th May)

Cameron threatens to prosecute oil bosses for fixing the price of petrol
BP and Shell’s London HQs have been raided for evidence by the European Commission. They are investigating claims that prices were rigged for more than a decade. It could have had a "huge impact" on the price of petrol at the pumps "potentially harming final consumers". Four months ago the UK’s Office of Fair Trading (OFT) ruled out an investigation into petrol price fixing after finding "very limited evidence." TELEGRAPH
(Oh no, not another EU initiative that tells us what to do. We Brits do things differently! Errr... we do nothing.)

Iain Duncan Smith caught exaggerating benefit cap figures

The Work and Pensions Secretary said that his new benefit cap was having "the desired impact" because 8,000 people who would have faced a benefit cut had been incentivised to get jobs. But the UK Statistics Authority, the statistics watchdog, said his figures were simply "unsupported by the official statistics published by the department". For the third time in just six months, the head of the UK Statistics Authority has written to ministers to warn them about their misuse of statistics. BBC NEWS

(However, their sister regulator, the UK Lies Damn Lies Authority, once again gave IDS its full support...)

100 of UK's richest people concealing billions in offshore tax havens
An unprecedented global investigation is now under way as HM Revenue and Customs acts on a 400-gigabyte cache of leaked data. George Osborne, the chancellor, warned the alleged tax evaders and a further 200 accountants and advisers accused of helping them cheat the taxman: "The message is simple: if you evade tax, we're coming after you." HMRC declined to name any of the individuals, advisers or companies it is investigating. GUARDIAN
(“...And why should we? A quick look at the list of Tory party donors should tell you all you need to know,” said HMRC...)

One nurse for 250,000 patients: whistleblower reveals nurses are replacing GPs to cover entire counties 
The revelations about Britain's biggest out-of-hours private care provider Harmoni come from a whistleblower GP. Harmoni makes £100million a year from NHS contracts. The GP has made a number of other startling allegations about how Harmoni is routinely jeopardising safety to cut costs. They include:  

• Terminally-ill cancer patients made to wait eight hours for a doctor to visit them at home and administer pain relief 
• Foreign doctors with a poor grasp of English being used to plug gaps in the rota
• Locum doctors flying in on easyJet from Europe, or driving from elsewhere in Britain, to work back-to-back shifts round-the-clock without sleep 

DAILY MAIL
(How about Easy Group cuts out the middle man and launches its own “no-frills” out-of-hours private care provider. Call it easyNHS?... easyGP?... easyMoney!!!)

UK Uncut exposes Goldman Sachs’ £20m tax dodge deal with HMRC, struck “to save Government embarrassment”

Cameron interrogates Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs...

Liebrary: The truth according to the Office of National Statistics (ONS) behind the Public and Private Sector pay differential

The government gets regularly rapped by its own statistics body, the UK Statistics Authority, for making up stuff to support government policies. In May 2013 the Secretary of State for Works and Pensions, Iain Duncan-Smith, was put on the naughty step for fibbing about the number of people enthused into getting a job as a justification for his draconian policy of cutting benefits. 

Duncan-Smith's claim that the statistics "clearly demonstrates that the cap is having the desired impact" was quickly shot down by the UK Statistics Authority. The Authority declared the statistic "explicitly states that the figures are 'not intended to show the additional numbers entering work'". The decrease in claimants was actually due to policy changes that reduced the number being counted. Andrew Dilnot, Chairman of the UK Statistics Authority, wrote:

"We have concluded that the statement attributed to the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions that ‘Already we’ve seen 8,000 people who would have been affected by the cap move into jobs. This clearly demonstrates that the cap is having the desired impact’, is unsupported by the official statistics published by the Department on 15 April.

The release Ad-hoc statistics on JobCentre Plus activity, from which the 8,000 figure appears to be drawn, explicitly states that the figures are ‘not intended to show the additional numbers entering work as a direct result of the contact’. The release Ad-hoc statistics on households identified points out a number of policy changes that occurred between the publication of the 56,000 and 40,000 numbers, as well as caseload changes ‘due to normal caseload churn, reducing those potentially in scope for the cap’."

Politicians rarely allow truth to get in the way of policy. 

£80bn for Help to Buy 'bubble' could push house prices up by 30%... How about building some houses!

KJ and a banker discuss...