Look into those mince pies, and all you’ll see is pork pies

One of the more staggering stats that came out of the Election was that 80% of all the “new jobs” haha had been created in London. But now this morning the Rowntree Foundation observes that only 1 in 3 Londoners have what is defined as “a decent standard of living”. The Slog continues its series on blatant lies that won the General Election.

After the Big Lie about the UK fiscal situation (see earlier Slogpost) the second Biggest Lie we were told by the Conservatives was that the economy must be in good shape, because jobs were being created. One wonders what these might have been – downstairs parlour maid, maybe? – but the one thing we know for sure is that (a) almost all of them are low-paid and (b) over 77% of successful job seekers said, when asked last summer, that the job did not have enough hours for them to make ends meet.

The other takeaway from this data, however, must surely be, “What in God’s name is it like everywhere else to the North of London if only 25% of Capital jobs were supplied?”

It’s a fair question. And the Office of National Statistics (ONS) offers some disgraceful answers in its new release out today.

Almost a third of the UK population experienced poverty in at least one year between 2010 and 2013, equivalent to approximately 19.3 million people. The average figure for this so-called ‘occasional’ poverty across the EU is 25%.

But this is what George Osborne said in his last Budget speech:

“Today, I can confirm: in the last year we have grown faster than any other major advanced economy in the world.

Five years ago, millions of people could not find work.

Today, I can report: more people have jobs in Britain than ever before.

Five years ago, living standards were set back years by the Great Recession.

Today, the latest projections show that living standards will be higher than when we came to office.”

Now, unless there was a job-creation miracle between 2013 and 2015, Georgy Porky was telling pudding and pies. And indeed he was: 780,000 new jobs were created in 2014 but only 2.5% of them were for jobs offering fulltime employment.

In fact, since the banking collapse (2008-14) a net 670,000 fulltime jobs have disappeared….and show no signs of coming back. What the Tories have done is replace well-paid real jobs with crap jobs….and bunged in the self-employed folks whose job discovery was nothing to do with the Government.

A staggering 60% of new jobs were desperate people turning to self-employment.…and given the averages for that sector of the economy, in the first three years some 11% of those will fail – while a further 25% will do no more than break even.

But it gets worse.

Almost 40% of those aged 65 years and over in the UK experienced poverty at least once between 2010 and 2013. Think about that: in a self-styled civilised First World country, 2 in 5 pensioners have experienced poverty since the Coalition came to power.

Want to go one worse than that?

60% of those living in single parent households were in poverty at some point over the period.

I was doing a little tot-up this morning – just based on my own circle of friends, family and followers with whom I have some degree of contact – of the number of single parents I know. Not a single one of them is lazy or feckless, but they’re all in what the ONS calls ‘persistent poverty’. And the vast majority are single parents because the bloke buggered off but Blair’s make-em-pay scheme was an unmitigated disaster. Others include divorced women and blokes still tied to the house by dependent children and/or ageing relatives who can’t find (or don’t want) a place in the crummy Aged Care homes we have in Cruel Britannia.

Who is to blame for this? Hmmm. How long have you got?

* Neoliberal Friedmanite theories

* Braindead bankers

* The Tabloid Tory outlook on life

* Smug Middle England

* A British Left unwilling to engage

* The Ed Miller Band and its risible metropolitan focus on minority issues

* LibDems who colluded with hard-right Conservatives during the Coalition

* A media set happy to back up bigger and more commonplace lies from the Government – and hide the truth during the Election

* The decent segment of Brits who paid little or no attention to the realities…and in the end did nothing.

* David Cameron, George Osborne, Jeremy Hunt, Michael Fallon, Theresa May, Nick Clegg, and all the other corporacratic whores happy to wave their private parts at anyone with Big Munnneeeee.

It seems we need a rephrasing of the old adage about lies. There are liars, damned liars, and George Osborne.

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