SIR – French people in Britain must have been screaming ‘mon Dieu!’ if they were listening to George Osborne’s latest budget speech. For, in it, the Chancellor claimed thanks to the Government’s stewardship of the economy “more jobs have been created in Yorkshire than in the whole of France”. Fantastique!
But hang on ‘une minute’! It appears Mr Osborne wasn’t talking about ACTUAL jobs created but something called ‘net job creation’ – or the number of new jobs created minus those lost!
It seems that because unemployment has been rising in France any part of the UK that created more than one net job would, in the Chancellor’s words, have “created more jobs than the whole of France”! Not quite so ‘bon’!
But, Mr Osborne also boasted new projections from the Office For Budget Responsibility show living standards in Britain in 2015 will be higher than when the Tories first gained power in 2010. That must be right, surely? Well...NON!
The Institute for Fiscal Studies has revealed Mr ‘O’ was actually referring to Real Household Disposable Income per capita, a measure they described as “flawed”.
They instead pointed to their own more comprehensive study of household incomes since the financial crisis, released earlier this month. These results revealed that average incomes in 2014/15 are in fact still 2 per cent BELOW where they were in 2009/10.
David Hornsby, West View Avenue, Wrose
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