Porkies and half truths - 1

This is one of a series which comments on claims made by Gordon Brown which vary from downright lies to statements that are dishonest unless they are qualified.

1) "Inflation now, at 2.1%, is lower than when we came to power."
Do I need to comment? Everyone has rumbled him. He is comparing unlikes. The 2.1% is the price index he chose to use - CPI, for whatever reason, which seriously underestimates the real rate of inflation. It omits most housing costs, including Council Tax and energy!

Economists calculate that for some groups, e.g. pensioners, their effective inflation rate could have been as high as 8 or 9 percent. For everyone, the rises recently would be better represented by the RPI, which has been over 4 %

The CPI was not published in 1997, but someone has recently calculated from data available that in 1997 it would have been 1.6%. If he had compared like with like, inflation is higher now. He claimed the reverse by comparing unlikes.


2) "We have had years of unbroken growth, in excess of the growth rates of our neighbours in Europe."

Again, it depends what you compare. If your compare our national output, then it has grown, but a large part of the reason is the vast inflow of foreign workers. He can't take much credit for this.
If, however, you compare changes in output per head of population over the 10 years, then our performance has been, to say the kindest, very average.

In fact. our productivity, or output per worker, used to lead Europe, but now we are well down the league. It is most definitely not that the foreign workers are lacking in skills or commitment. Rather it is that they have found work very often in manual jobs where it is difficult to boost productivity by investing in capital goods.