According to an ONS release today the mythical average household is £31 better off after taxes and benefits are taken into account. Think about all the complexities of tax collection collection and benefit calculation, the bureaucracy and time wasted. It really is time for a lower, flatter, simpler, single income tax…
The statistics also confirm that after 5 years of “we’re all in it together” that Osborne has raised taxes on the richest 20% and reduced the burden on the poorest 20%. The bottom quintile are net recipients of just over £10,000 in welfare transfers from those who actually pay taxes. Will no one stand up for the wealth creators?
Numbers have never been a strong point for the left. Hence why Owen Jones and his new mate Charlotte Church were pushing the quarter of a million figure for Saturday’s march in London. It’s nonsense.
Even lefties are sceptical:
Saturday's anti-austerity march was impressive but you can't get 250,000 – 3 Wembley crowds – in Parliament Square! pic.twitter.com/oqR3EdorpM
— Kevin Maguire (@Kevin_Maguire) June 22, 2015
While the police will not publicly give a figure, a source tells Guido this morning that Parliament Square can hold around 20,000 people. With a bit of overflow, the working estimate is around 25,000…
250,000 would fill not only Parliament Square but Whitehall and Trafalgar Square too. Twice over.
In order for the comrades to have achieved 250,000 people on their march, 5,000 people would have to have left the starting point at Bank every minute – almost 100 per second – in the time they claimed to have achieved this fantasy number. “A tight military formation couldn’t even do that,” Guido’s public order numbers bod derides.
Are the lefties really saying they had the same number of people who marched on Washington in 1963 at the height of the Civil Rights movement – put at between 200,000 and 250,000:
Is Owen Jones really saying he is a bigger draw than Martin Luther King?
250,000 was also the figure given for Obama’s famous speech in Berlin in 2008:
Notice a difference in the size of the crowd?
This is what 250,000 people looked like when Paul McCartney played in Mexico in 2012.
Shall we look at Saturday’s picture again?
Looks about a tenth of the size… pretty shoddy journalism for the papers to just regurgitate the number given by the People’s Assembly Against Austerity without so much as a raised eyebrow.
Comres have a new voter turnout model for ‘Lazy Labour’. The key takeaway from this is that in mainly poor constituencies turnout is 20 percentage points lower than in mainly affluent constituencies. Not too posh to be politically pushy…
Much amusement as Andy Burnham’s favourite blogger continues to damage the Labour cause. After Burnham moved yesterday to distance himself from dodgy photoshop nutter ‘Dr’ Eoin Clarke, it emerges that Team Miliband also viewed the proven bullsh*t artist as an asset:
“When one Labour staffer attempted to dismiss Clarke’s latest laughable graphic, the two staffers were heard saying ‘we must not underestimate Éoin Clarke’.”
Guido suspects that there was a touch of academic solidarity occurring here…
Much has been made of ‘Dr’ Eoin’s eminent thesis on radical Irish feminism, but what does he actually do as a day job? His fans are quick to point out his academic background when defending his dodgy data and daft campaigns. He’s not even a real teaching academic:
He’s the librarian and tea-boy at a third rate university…
Most of the analysis of the pollsters’ collective nightmare has blamed the ‘Shy Tories’ – people who planned on voting Tory but didn’t tell the pollsters. Ipsos MORI have a different theory: that ‘Lazy Labour’ supporters not turning up to vote skewed the numbers.
The final MORI poll suggested 12.5 million people would vote Tory, just ahead of 12.2 million voting Labour.
They weren’t too far off on the Tory number – 11.3 million voted Tory on the day – but some 3 million Labour supporters went missing. Where did they go? MORI chief Ben Page says:
“we think not voted. Predicted turnout 82% day before. Was only 66%”
Their analysis suggests it was young left-wing voters not turning out on the day that explains the difference. The Russell Brand effect…
This British Election Study survey shows Indy readers are a mixed bunch and as many back the coalition parties as Labour. So that endorsement will please and anger readers in equal measure. No surprises in the data.
