THE CAMERLOT CON: There is an odd alliance that could stop the fanatics. Don’t hold your breath waiting for the Eds to exploit it.

The key members of this Government have become masters of the blithely asserted shibboleth. We have Jeremy Hunt committed to the NHS, George Osborne who is paying off Britain’s debt with austerity, Boris Johnson around the edges of it saying crime is falling, Michael Gove insisting that his higher education ‘reforms’ can only make our universities better, and now David Cameron saying that “the vast majority of workers have wages that are outstripping inflation”.

This last is the most astonishing bare-faced bollocks yet. Its carrier – the Barclay Brothers’ Maily Telegraph – ran a piece devoted to spreading the fiction yesterday, in which we had to wait only a few lines for ‘A new analysis of figures released by Downing Street has suggested that take home pay outstripped inflation for all but the top 10 per cent of earners last year.’

What analysis? What figures? I’ve Googled it every which way, and I haven’t seen any evidence anywhere that anyone but the Telegraph has even heard of these numbers. But to be tedious (and apologies to the regulars here who’ve seen this chart already) let’s just nail this once and for all:

This is from the ONS, and it’s the third time (to make different points) I’ve shown it this week. You have to go back to the summer of 2009 to find wages and prices even equal let alone deflationary. Britain did not have deflation in 2013 and 2012 or 2011 or 2010, and anyway only the figures for the first three quarters of last year are in yet: so HowTF can Downing Street have analysed figures about last year they don’t have yet?

I am not a Labour voter, I’m just a bloke like millions of others who wants the lies to stop. Please. And while I’ve said this umpteen times now, where is the Opposition when this not even subtle mendacity is served up to a mathematically dyslexic media pack? When he was Minister for Children, Ed Balls failed miserably to address the issue of child sex abuse. When he was Gordon Brown’s gofer he messed up the CoOperative…his own sponsor. Now he’s Shadow Chancellor up against a Government whose lies can be deconstructed by any moderately intelligent primate in a matter of minutes with a minimum of explanation. But Teddy Testicles can’t even land a punch. He’s supposed to be Harvard trained and sh*t-hot at this sort of thing: where’s the beef?

However, there is one analysis that was hidden away in the FT this week, and as the Ed Milller Band hasn’t got the brains to spot what it really means, I’ll spell it out:

It’s a misleading graphic this one, but then the FT specialises in them. The heading talks about pensioners “being protected”, and contrasts the ‘fall’ in poor pensioner homes with the ‘rise’ in poor Dinky homes. The problem with the graph is that it’s comparing two completely different sets of aspiration in two completely different eras.

Pensioners in 2012 simply aren’t the stoics of 1979, happy that a daily pint at the local and a packet of fags can still be afforded. Pensioner expectations have been raised by a changing world, and many of them got a bit of redundancy along the way, or perhaps even bought and then sold a council house profitably. Just because 85% of them have an income over two thirds of the average wage, it doesn’t mean they feel protected and happy. These folks have been crippled by rising local taxes alongside shrinking services. They’ve been Zirped now for nearly five years. They’re traditionalists and – be they Left or Right – City spivs and Etonian lightweights are not necessarily their cup of Darjeeling, or even skinny-latte.

Equally, the young worker of 1979 with a regular, union-protected wage and maybe a building society savings account bears no resemblance at all to the often irrelevantly educated Thatcher’s child we see struggling today. Brought up to strive rather more than their predecessors, they’ve suffered more unemployment, more job insecurity, and nastier employers than their predecessors. The spectacle of buying a property keeps moving agonisingly further into the distance. They’re more disconnected from the political process, and yet far more cynical about politicians. They work harder and their entertainment costs them proportionally far more than it did 35 years ago. Their adult lives thus far have been a steady diet in the media of appalling banker behaviour and aspiration to celebrity.

The one key thing the FT graphic gets right is the idea of putting them together at all. For they do have one very important commonality: they’re frustrated with a society that doesn’t put them anywhere near the centre of events.

Hear a politician glibly talking about ‘a rise for pensioners’, and you’ll hear a pensioner snort. Hear another MP wearing out the tired old ‘hard working families’ cliche yet again, and you’ll see young cohabiters throw something at the telly. When the Chancellor says “We’re all in this together”, both groups switch off. For various and often different reasons, the poorer pre-kids young and post-kids pensioners the FT identifies feel alienated, frustrated and cynical. Nobody is offering to involve and engage them with an inspiring idea.

Osborne’s help-to-buy insanity may win a few of the young over, but I remain convinced that the Chancellor’s cynical bribe will backfire before May 2015. If Labour had obviously sincere and decent one-nation people at the top (rather than focus groupies talking but not walking) the Party would have these two key voter groups in its pocket. It is a measure of the Ed Miller Band’s dire failure that they don’t. Tom Watson, I think, is somebody thought to be cool by both groups. But Tom is back on the back benches now.

This is curious because, having less to lose, the two groups also have another shared outlook: they’re far more likely than the busy child-rearers and cautious rich to respond well to fresh ideas. And although this may seem a bit folksy, by and large younger people and grandparents get on better than parents and their kids do. There is often mutual tolerance and espect, I find, between the energetic grin and the indulgent smile.

There is a unifying and potentially motivating way to both increase share of these voters and the likelihood of them voting at all, and that is on the appeal of ‘a real chance for the young and some real respect for the old’. It would have to be more than empty rhetoric, but its promise (if backed up with innovative, practical change) would present the image of an Opposition no longer Unioncentric standing up to a Conservative Party no longer concerned with those being left behind.

I don’t think there’s a hope in Hell of Labour grasping this one, but be clear about one thing: the votes of these people en masse are the only way for the foreseeable future that we will ever get a single-Party majority government again. We have topline figures from two days ago of the Tories on 34%, Labour 38%, LibDem 9%, and UKIP 13%. And we have the strong likelihood of 45% not voting at all. The appeal I’m talking about would steal from the Cleggies and the Faragistas, and bring in more of those persuaded by Russell Brand that there’s no point in voting – a view, by the way, I will share until our Party system changes.

Personally I see it as a no-brainer. But the Opposition’s leadership remains, like most of the Left, still spouting the syntax of tribalist politics. We are, I am increasingly convinced, heading for another stalemate, neutered House of Commons in May 2015.