Political Myth Busting: The "always cleaning up Labour's messes" narrative

The myth that the Labour party are profligate with public money, and that the Tories go around cleaning up their messes is one of the most pervasive political narratives in the UK. It is thanks to this myth that even after four years of breathtaking economic incompetence from George Osborne, the Tories are still considered more trustworthy on economic issues than Labour by the majority of the public.

Regular readers will know that I am no fan of the New Labour party, however I'm completely sick of listening to delusional Tory tribalists mindlessly churning out their counter-factual "always cleaning up Labour's messes" narratives in order to defend George Osborne's record of economic incompetence, exactly as they have been programmed to do by the mainstream media.

It's not just delusional Tory supporters who repeat this myth either, even high profile Tories love to churn out counter-factual rubbish and outright lies.

Here's an example of George Osborne spreading this narrative from November 2008, before he came to power and proved himself the most incompetent man to serve as Chancellor of the Exchequer in almost 200 years (some feat considering his recent predecessors include Gordon "PFI" Brown and Norman "Black Wednesday" Lamont):

"As has been the case so many times before, it's the next Conservative government that will have to clean up the mess left by a profligate and irresponsible Labour Party. We will have to establish a credible framework for bringing the public finances under control. That means creating a target of a balanced current budget and falling debt at the end of the forecast period, policed by a powerful and independent Office for Budget Responsibility." [source]

In this article I'll first provide evidence to fatally undermine the Tory narrative that they are the party of economic competence in the opening sentence of this quote, before then critiquing the rest of the quote in order to demonstrate George Osborne's appalling economic incompetence.

A quick look at the actual evidence reveals that only two Labour governments have ever left office leaving the national debt higher than it was when they came to power, all of the others have lowered the national debt as a percentage of GDP.

On the two occasions that Labour oversaw increases in the national debt there were the mitigating circumstances of huge global financial crises. The Ramsay MacDonald government of 1929-31 coincided with the Wall Street Crash (they left a 12% increase in the debt to GDP ratio), and the Blair-Brown government of 1997-2010 coincided with the 2008 financial sector insolvency crisis (an 11% increase). The other Labour governments all reduced the scale of the national debt, Clement Attlee's 1945-51 government reduced the national debt by 40% of GDP despite having to rebuild the UK economy from the ruins of the Second World War. Harold Wilson's 1964-70 government reduced the national debt by 27% of GDP and even the Wilson-Callaghan government of 1974-79 managed to reduce the debt by 4% of GDP.

The majority of Labour governments have ended up reducing the national debt, and the two that didn't coincided with the biggest global financial crisis of the 20th Century and the biggest global financial crisis so far in the 21st Century.

In order to put this "cleaning up Labour's mess" narrative to the test, it is useful to look at George Osborne's own record as Chancellor of the Exchequer. In his first 3 years as Chancellor George Osborne managed to add more to the national debt than the supposedly "profligate and irresponsible" Labour party did in the 13 preceding years. In fact, in just 4 years George Osborne has increased the national debt in real terms more than every Labour party chancellor in history combined!

By George Osborne's own estimates, the national debt will have grown by 26% of GDP between 2010 and 2015. In the last 200 years of economic history there have only been three periods of debt accumulation worse than George Osborne's tenure as Chancellor of the Exchequer: The First World War (+110% of GDP), the Second World War (+100% of GDP) and the tenure of Tory Chancellor Nicholas Vansittart 1812-1823 (+64% of GDP).

Not only has George Osborne added more to the national debt than any Labour government in history, he has also spectacularly missed all of his headline economic predictions. By the time the current parliament ends in 2015 Osborne will have borrowed £207 billion more than he claimed he was going to in 2010 in order to make the UK economy £128 billion smaller than he said it was going to be. He has also had the UK stripped of their AAA rating by the Credit Rating Agencies for the first time since the 1970s and overseen the longest sustained decline in wages in economic history.

Returning to George Osborne's 2008 quote we can see just how much of a failure he has been in his own terms. "We will have to establish a credible framework for bringing the public finances under control. That means creating a target of a balanced current budget and falling debt at the end of the forecast period". the Tories now admit that George Osborne's promises of a balanced budget and falling debt by the end of the 2010-2015 parliament are now impossible pipe dreams.

As for his supposedly "independent" Office for Budget Responsibility, George Osborne's pet economics quango have provided spectacularly inaccurate economic forecasts over and again. They willingly rubber stamped all of George Osborne's ludicrously over-optimistic projections based on his economic fairy stories about how the economy could be saved by drastically cutting expenditure across the board, without bothering to even evaluate the projected returns on investment on the infrastructure projects and services to be culled. One of the first steps for the the new government in 2015 should be to abolish the OBR, or at least rename it more accurately as the Office for Budget Recklessness.

The remarkable thing is that despite George Osborne's abysmal track record of failure, Tory tribalists still wheel out the "always cleaning up Labour's mess" narrative as if increasing the national debt by 11% of GDP in 13 years (as New Labour did) is somehow significantly worse than George Osborne's record of increasing the national debt by 26% in just 5 years.

What is even worse is that the mindless Tory tribalists now have another grotesquely counter-factual narrative about "the economic recovery" to blether on about. They seem intent on talking up the fact that the UK has now recovered to the pre-crisis economic peak, despite the fact that the UK was the last major western economy to do so, and that this so called recovery shows that the UK economy has grown by an aggregate 0% over the last seven years!

The reality is that the GDP of the UK is now pretty much exactly the same as it was just before the economic crisis, however the economy has been massively rebalanced, with a huge increase in the share of the wealth in the hands of the top 0.5%, and a large reduction in the living standards of the majority due to wage repression, severe cuts in in-work benefits, rampant inflation in the costs of transport, fuel, housing and food, and George Osborne's hike in VAT.

The majority of us are significantly worse off after four years of ideological "Osbornomics", the national debt is much higher than Osborne claimed it would be, and the economy is much smaller than he projected it would be. The sad thing is that there will be just as many delusional Tory tribalists hawking their absurd "economic recovery" narratives they've rote learned from the mainstream media as there are credulous Tory supporters invoking the ludicrous "always cleaning up Labour's mess" fairy stories.

The Tory "cleaning up Labour's mess" narrative just doesn't stand up to the evidence, however, when it comes to Tory politics, facts and evidence are much less important than the creation of simplistic narratives to feed to a dumbed-down and credulous public. It doesn't matter what the evidence says, because the typical political tribalist isn't remotely interested in searching out the evidence and fact-checking things. All they require is a nice simplistic narrative that confirms their prejudices, and allows them to go around thinking that they are an expert due to their complete understanding of their simplistic explanation, despite the fact that they know next to nothing about the much more complex reality.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

More articles from
ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE    
    
George Osborne's economic blunders
       
Margaret Thatcher's toxic neoliberal legacies
  
The "New Labour are left-wing" myth

The JP Morgan vision for Europe
     
The Office for Budget Recklessness
           
     What do Tory donors get for their money?

Who is to blame for the 2008 financial sector insolvency crisis?

An entirely "Osbornomic" recession
      
The Great Neoliberal Lie

What is wage repression?
             

The Tory ideological mission

Nobody should be surprised that the Tory party serve the interests of the wealthy minority.

The fact that the Tory led government is packed full of millionaires who buy into the "greed is a virtue" philosophy of neoliberalism is one strong indicator that the serving of wealthy establishment interests should be expected. Another, even stronger indicator is the fact that the Tory party is funded by a rogues gallery of tax-dodgers, banksters, private health interests and landed gentry.

The Tory party is absolutely crammed with people suffering a smug sense of superiority over the masses. These people believe that they are special and a cut above the rest, because they're rich, because they've been Eton & Oxbridge educated, because they were born into establishment families, or perhaps (like Iain Duncan Smith) because they suffer a misanthropic hatred for most of humanity. This sense of superiority and entitlement that pervades the Tory party allows them to believe that the "lower orders" are just a gigantic hoard of pig-ignorant cretins that can be abused, lied to and easily fobbed off with the most implausible nonsense.One example of this assumption of absolute stupidity is the way that the Tories have been constantly talking up their so-called "economic recovery" as if us "lower orders" are far too stupid to realise that we are far worse off than we were when the Tories snuck into power in 2010.

The Tories seem to believe that if they point to some cherry-picked and grotesquely manipulated statistics (GDP figures, headline unemployment rate, house price inflation figures) us plebs are so damn stupid that we'll forget all about their unprecidented campaign of wage repression, their massive cuts to in-work social security, their defunding of our essential services, their attacks on our labour rights and our rights to express dissent, their ideological destruction of the justice system, their disgraceful sell-offs and give-aways of state infrastructure for far less than it's actually worth and their campaign of psychological torture against the disabled.

They really do think that they are so smart and superior, and us ordinary people are so stupid and gullible that they can tell us that we're all benefiting from this so-called "recovery" and we'll all simply believe it and flock to the polling stations to vote for them.

One of the most obvious problems with this "recovery" narrative is that there has been absolutely no "recession" or "austerity" for the rich, whilst the cuts and austerity measures have been borne by the poor and ordinary.

• The banks (that bankrupted themselves with their reckless gambling) have benefited from an estimated £1 trillion in bailouts (which are hidden outside the official national debt figures), by far the largest state subsidisation scheme in British history. [source]

• Since the financial sector collapse in 2008 the banks have paid out more than double the amount in bonuses than they've paid in corporation tax. [source]

• Staff at RBS (which is 82% owned by the taxpayer) were handed £607 million in bonuses in 2013, despite the bank losing another £5.2 billion (which brought their post crash losses to £34 billion). [source]

• The 5% of wealthiest families have received 40% of the economic benefit of the Bank of England's £375 billion Quantitative Easing money creation schemes. [source]

• The rate of corporation tax on large corporations has been slashed by 40% from 28% in 2010 to 20% in 2015. [source]

• Since the Tories came to power the directors of the FTSE 100 companies have enjoyed an unprecedented period of wage inflation, which peaked in 2011 with an average annual wage rise of 49%! [source]

• The average worker has suffered the longest sustained period of wage repression since records began. [source]

• Private health companies that donate to the Tory party have received £1.5 billion worth of contracts since the Tories carved the NHS wide open for privatisation (like they promised that they wouldn't). [source]

• The UK loses an estimated £120 billion per year to tax-dodging, yet the Tories have opened up even more tax loopholes for British companies and worked tirelessly to create the ludicrous narrative that welfare spending is to blame for the crisis, not reckless financial sector gambling and rampant tax-dodging. [source]

• In the very same week that the Tories introduced "Bedroom Tax" to financially penalise some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in society, they handed the 13,000 UK based income millionaires an average tax break of £100,000 per year! [source]

These facts blast the Tory narrative that "we're all in this together" out of the water. They rely on the hope that the "lower orders" are too stupid and too ill-informed (thanks to the complicity of the mainstream media) to understand what is really going on. The super-rich establishment class haven't suffered austerity and wage repression, and in fact, they've been making themselves richer than ever before.

In the words of Mark McGowan "This isn't a recession, it's a robbery".

There is an absolute mountain of evidence out there that the Tories (assisted by their odious Lib-Dem sidekicks) have been up to their usual trick of making the rich minority richer and everyone else poorer, yet some delusional people still continue to vote Tory. It seems that the Tories can do whatever they like, and some 30% of regular voters will still vote for them and their agenda of deliberately widening the poverty gap in order to serve the interests of the tiny establishment minority.

I'll conclude with a prediction: After four years of helping the tiny super-rich establishment minority enrich themselves at a faster rate than ever against a backdrop of brutal Tory austerity for the poor and ordinary, the Tories will take their foot off the necks of the "lower orders" (in the form of a rise in the minimum wage, a cut in VAT ...) in the months before the 2015 election in the hope that they can create an artificial "feel-good factor" to win them the next general election. The idea being that the "lower orders" will be so relieved to be able to breathe properly for a while, that they'll forget who has been standing on their neck for four years, then flock to the polling stations to vote for their oppressors.

I hope you won't be one of them ...

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

More articles from
 ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE 

               
The Great Neoliberal Lie
                  
What is ... Wage Repression?
           

David Cameron's internet censorship plans
     

The economic case against tax-dodging 
   
George Osborne's economic blunders
                    
The Tory "War on Justice"

             

The JP Morgan plan for Europe
         
The "unpatriotic left" fallacy
                
The "All in This Together" fallacy

The mainstream media oligopoly
           

The "Water cannons would have resolved the August 2011 riots" fallacy

This is a quick follow up article to my article about the Tory agenda to deploy water cannons against political protests in order to:

a. Intimidate people (especially the elderly, the disabled and those with children) from using their legal right to peaceful protest.

b. Turn peaceful protests into riots through the inflammatory effect of deploying water cannon against them.

Here is my original piece on water cannon deployment.

After trying to publicise the issue and ensure that more people actually understand what is going on, a number of right-wing apologists for the militarisation of the police have deposited very similar emotive arguments to suggest that water cannons would have helped control the August 2011 riots. Here is a typical example:

"Judging by the [opposition to water cannon deployment] on this thread I'm guessing nobody that opposes the use of water cannons was a victim of the UK Riots in 2011 when business, homes and institutions were being burned to the ground by rioting thugs?"

The first thing to note about this argument is that the apologist for the militarisation of the state has utterly failed to acquaint himself with the facts of the issue. Had he bothered to read the article at the top of the thread in question, or acquaint himself with the basics of the issue, he would have known that ACPO (the privatised police quango that are demanding the Home Office let them deploy water cannons against politcal protests) openly admitted that water cannons would have been ineffective in halting the "fast, agile disorder" and "dynamic looting" that took place during the August 2011 riots.

Even the organisation that is doing the most to build the case for the deployment of water cannons against peaceful political protests admits that water cannons would not have resolved the August 2011 riots, and had the water cannon enthusiasts bothered to check their facts, they would have known this.
 
The next thing to note is that aside from being completely ignorant of the facts, the above argument is a transparently emotive one, putting "victims" on one side of the debate and "thugs" on the other. The complete abandonment of traditional debating tools such as reason, facts and evidence, in favour of a blatantly emotive argument is typical right-wing fare. The wielders of empty emotive arguments assume that people in general are so stupid that they will allow their anger at the facile ("victims" vs "thugs") justification narrative to completely override their critical faculties.

The right-wing thrives on the production of anger inducing narratives ("scroungers", immigrants etc) in order to rile people up so that they are too angry to actually consider the actual facts and evidence properly. Unfortunately the public have allowed themselves to be played like this time and again. If this kind of emotive scapegoating tactic hadn't proved successful, then the right-wing (and their supporters amongst the corporate mainstream media) would have dropped it in favour of some other form of propaganda. That they persist with this emotion over evidence strategy is a clear demonstration that it works. 
 
These emotive argument strategies have become so familiar to those of us capable of reading between the lines, that we've come to expect very little else but empty and ignorant emotive arguments from right-wing types - such as those that approve of Tory plan to militarise the police so strongly that they openly propagandise for it on public forums.

Another Angry Voice is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only source of revenue for Another Angry Voice is the  PayPal  donations box (which can be found in the right hand column, fairly near the top of the page). If you could afford to make a donation to help keep this site going, it would be massively appreciated.

Note: Don't forget to read the original article on water cannon deployment (if you haven't already)
 

More articles from
ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE
     
The Tory militarisation of the police
          
What is ... a Justification Narrative
                   
A rogues gallery of dodgy Tory party donors
            
David Cameron's austerity to infinity speech

      
Why dissent is positive
          
Can the Atos administered WCA regime be considered psychological torture?
             
George Osborne's economic extremism

        

How the Lib-Dems are just as bad as the Tories when it comes to welfare

                    
Iain Duncan Smith's retroactive "I'm Above the Law" legislation
                  
The JP Morgan vision for Europe
         
The "Protection of Corporate Lobbying and Silencing of Legitimate Political Debate" Bill
                                          
A fascistic Tory redefinition of rights

                                            

More articles in the political myth busting series

Axing the official death rates, more Tory double standards

In August 2013 a leaked copy of a Public Health England report revealed an alarming 23,400 spike in the number of deaths per year in 2012, with the over-80s being the worst affected by this increased death rate. It hardly seems like a coincidence that just days after this damning report was leaked, Public Health England decided to announce that they will stop collecting the data.

Many people have speculated about the possible causes for this 5% spike in the death rate. Proposed contributory factors include the desperate underfunding of the NHS, (especially emergency care), cuts to local government elderly care services, a colder than normal winter and increasing levels of general poverty. Labour MPs and other opposition groups called for an inquiry in order to determine the causes of this spike in mortality rates, but the Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt ignored them. Now it turns out that we won't just not be getting an investigation into the cause of over 23,400 extra deaths, but that the collection of the specific death rate statistics will be discontinued too.

Anyone that is familiar with the machinations of the DWP under Iain Duncan Smith's "leadership" will recognise this technique. If the official statistics show that over 10,000 people are dying, then the obvious solution to this problem is not to investigate further, it's to just stop collecting the data!

The Tory party have defended both the decision to avoid an investigation into the causes of these extra deaths, and the decision to cancel the collection of these death rate statistics. In a remarkable statement a Department of Health spokesperson stated that:

"it is scaremongering to suggest a link to poor care and support before there is any evidence to support such a claim."

So, any attempt to offer potential explanations for this deeply concerning rise in the death rate is to be derided as "scaremongering", yet the government are determined that no inquiry will be held to determine the actual causes! The government won't conduct an inquiry to establish some verifiable evidence of the causes, and any effort to consider potential causes in light of this refusal to provide the evidence is to be derided as "scaremongering". They won't give us the evidence and then deride as fearmongering propagandists anyone that talks about the subject without the evidence they they are deliberately withholding!  

Essentially this quote can be taken to mean that "nobody is allowed to talk about the subject without concrete evidence, and since we are determined to withhold the evidence, everyone might as well go home and watch X-Factor and stop worrying their pretty little heads about this!"

When it comes to this quote, another comparison with Iain Duncan Smith and the DWP is in order.

Iain Duncan Smith has been reprimanded on several occasions by the UK Statistics Authority for his blatant misuse of statistics, and the culture of statistical misrepresentation at the DWP. In July 2013 Ian Duncan Smith decided to go on the counter-attack in a rambling and self-righteous interview on Radio 4. This strategy was hardly surprising, given that the rambling and self-righteous counter-attack seems to be Iain Duncan Smith's only debating strategy.

When it came to his made-up statistical evidence that his welfare policies were working the defence he came up with was frankly laughable,"you can't disprove what I said either ... I believe this to be right, I believe that we are already seeing people going back to work who were not going to go back to work".

So when it comes to a Tory blatantly misusing statistics to create shockingly misleading "success narratives" that are presented to the public as concrete facts, it's perfectly acceptable because of nothing more than his stated belief that his explanation is right, and the onus is upon the opposition to disprove his claims.

But when it comes to the opposition talking in purely speculative terms about the potential contributory factors to an alarming spike in the national death rate, they are guilty of "scaremongering" and the onus is upon them to them to prove their own claims with evidence!

Thus, Tories can make up the facts as they go along and are under no obligation to prove their claims with evidence, but the opposition must never speculate about the potential causes of a situation, and must provide evidence to back their assertions (evidence that is unlikely to come to light given that the Tories are refusing to hold an official inquiry, and the statistics in question will no longer be collected).

If you can't see the double standards at play here, you're probably the kind of person that thinks David Cameron is an honest trustworthy sort of chap aren't you?
        

 Another Angry Voice  is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only source of revenue for  Another Angry Voice  is the  PayPal  donations box (which can be found in the right hand column, fairly near the top of the page). If you could afford to make a donation to help keep this site going, it would be massively appreciated.

More articles from
 ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE 
             
Libeling the truth: The Iain Duncan Smith fallacy
          
David Cameron's debt reduction lie
         
What is ... a justification narrative?
    
Iain Duncan Smith's callous contempt for the dead 
                   
Iain Duncan Smith's lame Workfare propaganda
            
A letter to fans of Workfare

           
A coalition of Lying Thieving Bastards

                     
The "making Work Pay" fallacy
         
The case for ... Evidence based policy
                                          
The warped Tory redefinition of rights

                                            

Scrounger narratives explained

If you haven't noticed the propaganda war being waged against the unemployed by the government and the right-wing press you must have been living in a vacuum. 

To anyone with the slightest clue about what mass unemployment is, the sound of government ministers and the baying right-wing press deriding the unemployed as "idle", "lazy", "skivers", "dossers" and "scroungers" is revolting. For the vast majority of people suffering worklessness, unemployment is not a "lifestyle choice" as the right-wing crowd would have us believe, it is the result of failed (or even deliberately destructive) macroeconomic policies.

Firstly I'll give a quick explanation of what I mean by the term justification narrative.

Put simply a justification narrative is a simplistic propaganda story aimed at the creation of political memes; little "soundbytes" of propaganda that allow the reactionary or cognitively impaired or downright stupid individual to believe that they have an expert understanding of political and economic issues because they have a collection of simplistic narratives and idioms to explain away complex political and economic phenomena. (I've written an article defining justification narratives in greater detail which can be found here).

The Tories love to create the justification narrative that the unemployed are largely idle and feckless layabouts "sponging" off the hard working people of the UK. It helps them to divide society by stoking resentment amongst working people, that those without work are living "a life of luxury" on benefits. This is a classic example of a political distraction technique. Those responsible for the economic meltdown and the ongoing unemployment crisis are the corrupt self-serving politicians, the reckless bankers, the something-for-nothing property speculators and the corporate fatcats. Yet the Tories and the right wing press would have us believe that the crisis was caused by the poorest people in society. They are directing us to blame the victims of the crisis rather than the perpetrators. They are directing us to blame the symptoms rather than the disease.

Neoliberal financial sector deregulations and reckless financial sector activity caused the economic crisis, but the Tories and the right-wing press believe that the public really are gullible enough to blame the poorest people in society, many of whom have lost everything they valued (their job, their income, their home, their self-esteem, their family) and are now surviving on subsistence welfare payments.

The Tories and their cheerleaders in the right-wing press really believe that they can easily con us into blaming the victims, rather than blaming those who made themselves fat with their reckless property speculation, dodgy expenses claims, corporate kickbacks, brazen profiteering, corruption, derivatives gambling, insider trading, tax-dodging, money laundering and Libor rigging.

Under the coalition government the corporations and millionaires who created the crisis have received huge tax cuts, whilst the poor and disabled have been abused as "feckless scroungers".

The idea of the scrounger narrative is to create a simplistic justification narrative that the unemployed are worthless scroungers, in order to justify ideological attacks on the welfare state. The most effective justification narratives rely on stoking emotional responses, and one of the most powerful is the sense of injustice. The emotional response is important because people tend to allow their anger to override their critical faculties when they are confronted with a perceived injustice. 

The injustice that they are presented with in this case is : "Why should you have to work hard for what you've got, whist those on benefits don't?". This kind of narrative is often backed up with extreme individual cases, cherry-picked statistics or outright lies.

An example of how terribly misinformed the public has become about welfare issues is that on average, the public estimate the amount of fraud in the benefits system to be £24 in every £100, when the real figure from the government (hidden on page 36 of this government report) is just 70p in every £100 of benefits spending. This means that, thanks to the barrage of scrounger narratives from the government, and in the pages of the right-wing press, the public tend to over-estimate the level of benefit fraud by a mind-boggling factor of 34!

Once the reactionary thinker has had their head filled with scrounger narratives and falsified claims, they then go around spreading scrounger narratives of their own, combining the misleading and inaccurate bile that they've read in the right wing press or heard from a Tory spokesperson, with their own anecdotal evidence. People don't seem to realise that by spreading these anti-unemployed scrounger narratives they are actively fighting the Tory party propaganda war them.

Perhaps the most notable thing about this right-wing anti-unemployed rhetoric is the fact that it so transparently inaccurate. Looking to the brazenly manipulated headline unemployment statistics for answers is notoriously naive, given that over the course of decades successive governments have found countless new ways to rig the headline unemployment figures downwards. However, clear indicators can be found that the UK is undergoing a mass unemployment crisis in the long-term and youth unemployment statistics. 

Since the Tory led coalition came to power in 2010, long-term unemployment rose by 115,000 for those out of work for longer than one year, and by 167,000 (+58.8%) for those out of work for longer than two years.

 The general level of youth unemployment has rose by 87,000. The long-term youth unemployment figures are even worse. 18-24 year olds out of work for longer than a year rose by 102,000 to 257,000 (+65.8%) and those out of work for two years or more has risen from 67,000 to 107,000 (+59.7%). (figures calculated from the June 2010 & March 2013 ONS Labour Market Statistics).

When we consider these statistics it is important to remember that the tens of thousands of people who have been coerced onto Iain Duncan Smith's unlawful Labour party approved Workfare schemes are misleadingly excluded from the calculations, and that DWP management have been setting secretive targets to strip people of their benefits (the league tables of these benefits sanctions are here).

It would be shocking enough that long-term unemployment and long-term youth unemployment have skyrocketed by 60% in three years, even if the Tory government and DWP were not also engaged in such transparent efforts to manipulate the figures downwards. It's clear that the real scale of the problem is much worse than the manipulated official figures admit.

The fact that long-term and youth unemployment have skyrocketed under the Tory led coalition, despite their best efforts to "juke the stats" in their favour should be evidence that neither their economic policies, nor their welfare reform policies are working. They keep up the rhetoric of "ending benefits dependency", "making it pay to work", "strivers vs skivers", but the fact is, that the macroeconomic policies they are imposing on the nation are making the unemployment situation worse. If they define the long-term unemployed as "feckless scroungers" the number of "feckless scroungers" has risen by 60% since the Tories came to power!

The idea that such huge increases in long-term unemployment are due to hundreds of thousands of people suddenly deciding to put their feet up and claim benefits because they can't be arsed to work, and deciding to do so during the most prolonged financial crisis in living memory is lamentable gibberish. But yet, that's what the Tories would have you believe; that mass unemployment is caused by contagions of laziness, rather than by financial crises.

They want you to believe the outright lie that there are plenty of jobs out there, but that the unemployed are just too lazy to do them.

Perhaps the most brazen aspect to the Tory scrounger narrative technique is that it is used in conjunction with the "we must cut benefits to make work pay" narrative. Firstly, it must be pointed out that the most obvious way to make work pay, is to increase the National Minimum Wage to make it a living wage, not to slash subsistence benefits. However the most shocking aspect is the fact that the caricature of the feckless scrounger is being used to justify benefits cuts that actually have more impact upon the working poor. The benefits that the Tory government have cut in real terms include in-work benefits like Working Tax Credit, Child Tax Credit, Housing Benefit, Child Benefit, Income Support, Council Tax Benefit, Maternity Pay, Paternity Pay and Statutory Sick Pay, all benefits claimed by the working poor.

The number of working families affected by these real terms benefits cuts is much larger than the number of unemployed people affected, yet thousands of tabloid thinking reactionaries can't be bothered to give a damn about the implications for the working poor. They're too busy celebrating the further impoverishment of the so called "scroungers" to care about the much greater number of working families taken out in the crossfire.

By using scrounger narratives and empty rhetoric to justify these attacks on the working poor, the Tories openly demonstrate that their claims that they are trying to "make work pay" are lies; just so much empty rhetoric that is directly contradicted by what they are actually doing. You don't "make work pay" by inflicting real terms cuts on the incomes of working people!

The Tories and the right-wing press really do believe that the British public are so gullible and reactionary that they can be tricked into supporting attacks on the working poor through the invocation of scrounger narratives and other pathetic propaganda techniques.

Judging by the sheer number of people who turn up on my Another Angry Voice facebook page to spew angry scrounger narratives of their own, perhaps the Tories and the right-wing press are right about the ease with which they can hoodwink the public?

Perhaps the working people of this country really are so credulous that they can be tricked, by the invocation of a few simplistic scrounger narratives, into actually fighting the Tory propaganda war against their own labour rights, social security entitlements and financial interests for them?

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