STUFFING IT TO THE PROPAGANDA MERCHANTS
The great thing about the on-line community, where you can exchange rants and gripes with friends who are as politically frustrated and angered as yourself is that we act as a kind of communal radar, picking up what stray ammunition we can find to point up our arguments in a severely dumbed-down world. As a supporter and contributor to the pressure group 38 Degrees I was pleased today that our campaign to get the power companies to reveal how much corporation tax they'd managed to dodge has begun to pay off - N-Power have been exposed as having siphoned away £60m of their profits offshore in Malta. What happens when these huge corporations dodge tax is that we - the ordinary Joes - have to take up the slack by paying yet more tax. Another popular Daily Mail bar-room argument is about how much benefits cost the country, and the gripe that we're 'swamped' by immigrants. Thanks to my e-chum Stuart Booth down in Dorset, he's sent me the following set of statistics which will come in very handy next time Ukip's Brownshirts start mouthing off.
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| 'Forget the arthritis and get rid of the wheelchair - you're fit for work!' |
Some popular UK political/financial myths debunked
Wednesday 24 April 2013
It's true that the Department for Work and Pensions is the biggest-spending government department in the UK, spending £166.98bn in 2011-12. Of that huge sum, £159bn was spent on benefits– an increase of 1.1% on the previous year. That's 23% of all public spending.
But ask people where that money goes and the assumptions are that it's on unemployment or incapacity benefit. In fact, 41% of people think that the entire welfare budget goes to unemployed people, according to a recent TUC poll. In fact, half of UK benefit spending actually goes on state pensions. That is £74.22bn a year, more than the £48.2bn the UK spends on servicing its debt.
It's followed by housing benefit of £16.94bn and disability living allowance of £12.57bn. Jobseeker's allowance is actually one of the smaller benefits – £4.91bn in 2011-12. That is 3% of the whole benefits bill.
'Benefit fraud costs us billions'
The British public reckon benefit cheats are a massive problem: a recent opinion poll showed UK citizens typically believed 27% of the welfare budget is lost to fraud. Given the public also think benefits are considerably higher than they really are, that all adds up.
The reality, though, is much less dramatic. The DWP publishes official estimates of fraud in the welfare system. The most recent publication estimated overall fraud at 0.7% of the benefits bill. At £1.2bn, that sum might – just – be said to count as "billions". But we should remember benefits can be underpaid as well as overpaid – and last tax year (2011-12), those underpayments (arising from errors by either officials or claimants) added up to £1.3bn– more than the cost of fraud.
'A third of the British population are immigrants'
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| Perhaps the picture of the mathematical Ms. Vorderman gives the paper's 'statistic' more credence? |
Ask people in the UK how many immigrants there are and people tend to reply around a third – or, to be precise, a foreign-born population of 31.8%. This figure is from a huge international survey of migration perceptions, by Transatlantic Trends, which asked people in Britain, the US, Germany, Italy, Spain and France what they think about immigrants.
It also finds that people in the UK are more likely to believe "there are too many migrants" and that migrants are more of "a problem than an opportunity" than any of the other countries surveyed. And the figures don't change – more than half of the British population (57%) think there are "too many immigrants", a figure that has stayed nearly the same for the past four years. And that is higher in the UK than any other country.
In fact, that 31.8% figure is a wild over-estimate; in 2011, some 11.3% of the UK population were foreign-born.
'NHS spending is protected'
It's a manifesto commitment of the Conservatives – that the coalition would never slash the budget of the NHS. Prime Minister David Cameron reiterated that in March in a speech where he promised: "We made a very clear promise before the last election that yes, we were going to have to take difficult decisions, yes, we were going to have to make some very difficult and painful cuts, but we wouldn't cut the NHS budget. I think it's really important for people to know that."
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| True human heroes- our NHS staff. Compare the salaries of these surgeons to Wayne Rooney's or leading Bankers and ask yourself which of them are more value per pound? |
So, have they stuck to it? If you look at the raw numbers, there has been a slight increase. In 2010-11, NHS spending was £94.57bn, and £95.96bn the year after. But that doesn't take account of the rising cost of living – inflation – which was 2.38% over the two years.
It's partly tricky to work out because government spending is confusingly split into two halves: departmental expenditure limits (DEL) and annually managed expenditure (AME). You would have trouble getting someone in government to explain what that actually means but, in practice, DEL is the money that a department can predictably spend, such as its administration budget, while AME is less controllable, such as benefits or rising health costs.
So, when ministers talk about cuts in spending, they often just mean the DEL portion of the pie. And just that bit is up by 0.02% after inflation – or steady.
But if you look at totalspending (which is basically both bits added together), then spending on the NHS is down by 0.9% in real terms, with cuts of 1.17% in primary care and 1% in dental services.
In fact, the chair of the UK statistics authority Andrew Dilnot, following a complaint by shadow health secretary Andy Burnham against health minister Jeremy Hunt, said he "concludes that expenditure on the NHS in real terms was lower in 2011-12 than it was in 2009-10".