Wednesday Whoppers
Fraser Nelson 1:56pm
Cameron said it should be called Prime Minister’s U-Turn, not PMQs. I disagree. It should be renamed Wednesday Whoppers or – as we say here in CoffeeHouse – Brownies. A new one was minted – involving a claim that 600,000 is “almost a million”. Plenty of Brownies aired. Let’s get stuck in.
Brown’s PMQs now start with a Labour backbencher asking the most poisonous question of the day, in hope of denying the Opposition the chance to do it. Cameron just asks what he wants even if it is a repeat. But this lets Brown make his peace with backbenches before Cameron gets stuck in.
Hilariously, Brown started by trashing the 10p tax band he introduced – unfair, he says, 85% of the benefits go to the richest. He is just making himself look stupid. Most in that chamber remember him introducing this new band with much fanfare. Why did he do so, if it’s so regressive?
Cameron went on the “massive loss of authority” Brown has suffered in his farrago. “So can he tell us – is he making this changes because he thought he’d lose the vote next week?” Brown answers with a straight face “We have said for some time we would do more to help people in low income.” Priceless! So, entirely random timing – elections next week and all (thought: aren’t we supposed to be in purdah? Isn’t this an issue playing rather large on the doorsteps?)
The rest of it was pure Brownies. “We are taking more people out of poverty than any previous government,” he said. If that’s so, then why has the DWP delayed the latest child poverty figures until 2 May, the day after the local elections? I hear they’re pretty grim.
Brown then rightly quoted Cameron saying he wanted to simplify income tax. The Tories are inconsistent on this issue. “That is not the party that cares about a poor” says Brown. A poor? “That’s a party that puts more people in poverty” he finished. As I blogged earlier, it is Labour’s dependency culture that’s hurting the poor.
More garbled sentences. “Why does he not admit that ... admit that ... that as a result of as our tax credits, which we opposed” – if only Labour had opposed them and concentrated on taking the poor out of tax altogether.
Then a shopping list of his self-acclaimed greatest hits, which must look so much better on a spreadsheet than it sounded in the chamber.
1) Two million pensioners because of the pension credit £40 a week better off since 1997
2) A million pensioners taken out of poverty
3) Nearly a million children taken out of poverty
4) Three million more jobs created.
5) Nearer to full employment than any time in our history
Woahhh! Here is one a new, whopping Brownie. A few weeks ago the Treasury said that 600,000 children had been “lifted out of poverty”. Since when was this “nearly a million?” Like the 3m employment figure, Brown is rounding up the nearest single digit! It is a breathtaking tactic, designed to exaggerate and mislead. But I consider the “full employment” claim the most monstrous Brownie for reasons I outlined here.
Of course this is all an arbitrary definition of “poverty” ie, 60% percentage of the median income. Choose a different percentage – 65% or 55% - and the picture changes utterly. The Tories choose 40%, ie “deep poverty,” and say 600,000 more children are in this type of poverty since 1997. It’s a joke.
To me, this encompasses the shallow materialism at the heart of Labour’s failed anti- poverty strategy. There are so many better definitions of child poverty than whether your parents get extra tax credits. Exposure to violent crime, sink schools etc. Instead of trying to improve lives, Labour has been massaging statistics – all so Brown can stand up and rattle off these figures as he did in PMQs today. But Brown’s problem is that he is transmitting, but the nation isn’t receiving. No one believes him anymore.
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Ray
April 23rd, 2008 2:23pm Report this commentThe man is a pathological liar. The only difference between Brown's lying and Blair's is that at least Blair at the chutzpah to pull it off.
salieri
April 23rd, 2008 2:33pm Report this commentIt's been said before but this tiresome cliché of 'lifting children out of poverty' is both meaningless and self-perpetuating, when the measure of 'poverty' is purely arbitrary. Raising income levels generally means adjusting the average below which people are deemed to be 'in poverty'. Once you have a new average, it follows that more or less the same number as before will still be below it.
Worse still, if 'poor' people find themselves worse off because the Treasury is run by innumerates, there will be more people to be 'lifted out of poverty', not fewer.
Is this claptrap or have I missed something?
Ethan Hurlington
April 23rd, 2008 2:48pm Report this commentI noticed exactly the same mistake when he said Labour had opposed the tax credits. He was clearly flustered, but PMQs is meant to be the main forum for him to set out clearly the thinking behind his policies. If the diving into the bolthole of massaging the figures doesn't turn the electorate off, surely his inability to set out his thinking clearly will finalise it. Why can't the PM express himself... surely that is one of the major 'musts' of the role? He has obviously been told pre-PMQs what he needs to feed to the electorate, his main line of spin, but is unable to even express it clearly. If he is this bad at the simple tasks as PM, how bad must he be about the more difficult ones, which we never hear about: decisions, diplomacy etc etc etc
Chris
April 23rd, 2008 3:09pm Report this comment>The rest of it was pure Brownies. “We are taking more people out of poverty than any previous government,” he said. If that’s so, then why has the DWP delayed the latest child poverty figures until 2 May, the day after the local elections? I hear they’re pretty grim.
Um, purdah? You can't have it both ways, you know. (Not that I disagree with your assessment of the gobblin' king, but...)
Fraser Nelson
April 23rd, 2008 3:27pm Report this commentChris, you'd be right but the HBAI data was due well before purdah began. I hear they've delayed it till June now because a 2 May bombshell on his so-called "child poverty" agenda would have looked too obvious.
John
April 23rd, 2008 3:51pm Report this commentIt IS claptrap - and he is the most useless PM this country has ever seen on EVERY task. The man is not just a pathological liar: he is a dithering fool, innumerate, you name it. The only thing you can say in his favour is that by now he must know (he must, mustn't he?) that his bluff has been called, that nobody in the country believes him, that everyone is laughing at him, that he's blown it and that his lieutants know this as much as anyone and have the knives out and sharpened. He is simply going through the motions so he can continue to draw his salary.
Slim Jim
April 23rd, 2008 3:54pm Report this commentRay is correct. If ever a politician lived up to the phrase, ''you can tell he's lying because his lips are moving'', it's Brown the Traitor.
Trafalgar
April 23rd, 2008 4:34pm Report this commentThe key point here is that Brown's definitions and mangled statistics fail to convince the public.
People's every day experiences of inflation (food, fuel, mortgages) and fear of crime do not tally with Brown's. The Tories really don't even need to challenge him on this - being subjected to a constant barrage of statistics only serves to wind us up and increases the feeling that this govt is completely out of touch.
This feeling did for the last govt and will do so for this one.
Perry
April 23rd, 2008 4:36pm Report this comment‘ . . Child Poverty . . . ‘ ? . . . . Oh Pah-Leese, as some folk say.
I s’pose it has occurred to this control freak and his baggage train that the Causes might be worth a look.
He might discover that, apart from the tragic few, many cases have their origin in the very measures he and his buddies promote.
There again, as the guy is clearly blind to any but his own agenda, no gain there.
It’s all so . . . . Noo-Lie-Bore.
DW
April 24th, 2008 10:42am Report this commentWell said, Fraser.
Serious question - how widely read is this website?
Fraser Nelson
April 24th, 2008 11:01am Report this commentDW, not very widely. But The Spectator only sells 75,000 and it is still (I would submit) the best magazine in England. CoffeeHouse does have a good following in what Americans call the "Gang of 500" - ie the poiticos, journalists and others who influence the narrative in UK politics.
TrevorH
April 24th, 2008 11:59am Report this commentThe point about 'deep poverty' is well made, but needs far greater exposure.
Browns artificial constructs - created as acts of self justification - need exposing for the bogus statistics that they are. They serve his purpose as props to keep his own side befuddled. We need to knock these props away.
BTW my definition of artificial construct is that which is "well-known to be structurally unstable"
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