What has changed in the past seven and a half years?
Next time someone tells you that the Conservatives have not managed to achieve anything positive for ordinary people over the years since 2010, some figures for them. And note that a higher minimum wage, higher employment, and higher tax free allowance particularly help the least well off in society.
Comments
Unemployment figures are always false, simply change the definition of unemployment and the problem cures itself. (much like they changed the definition of inflation)
The tax free allowance is a good one, thats one to be proud of.
deficit, so still after promising to balance the books before the next parliament back in 2010, you are still 43.1 billion in deficit????? and that is good????????? Do you know how big a number 43.1 billion is??
and that is just what we are adding to debt (which a lot of people dont realise is so much different to deficit). It should by now be well in surplus.
teacher gives you D- for this, more work needed, pull your socks up.
The NHS budget is higher in real terms. Managing that at a time of great austerity was also a considerable achievement. The demand for NHS services is increasing massively and there are still major issues to be faced, but the myth that the Conservatives are cutting the NHS needs to be confronted as the falsehood it is.
I have written reams on this blog about the National Living wage and am not going to rehearse the whole argument here, but let's not pretend that there is anyone who able to do one job but only able to do one job.
There IS a risk that if the minimum wage was set at a destructively high level that it would price workers out of the market and create unemployment.
One of the many, many reasons that I think electing a Corbyn government would be a really bad idea is that they would probably do exactly that.
However, it is totally unreasonable to make that argument when businesses have successfully created three million extra jobs, (most of them full time permanent jobs, not just temporary jobs or on zero hours contracts).
Arguing with a particular change in employment figures is one thing, but the reality is that there are millions more people in work than there were in 2010.
As at the most recent set of figures which came out last month and captured the position in late 2017, there were 32.21 million people in work, which is 102,000 more than for June to August 2017, 415,000 more than for a year earlier and three million more than when Labour were in power.
It's also the joint highest employment rate since comparable figures started to be collected 41 years ago.
That comes from the statisticians who recently told off the Foreign Secretary, BTW, so they don't appear to be in the pocket of the government.
Anyone who disputes that the rise in employment is a good thing and is genuine is, in my humble opinion, on the wrong planet.
GDP has risen 16% from £410 billion to £471 billion in real terms. Another positive thing.
Increasing the Tax Free Allowance was a policy originally agreed by both parties in the Conservative and Lib/Dem coalition government but has been continued since then by the Conservatives.