The Tories’ big election strategy is to talk up their supposed economic competence by claiming that Britain has the “fastest economic growth of any advanced economy”. And they’ve got the figures to prove it. Or have they?
Unfortunately not. Here’s the graph that tells us what’s really happening. The blue bars show Britain’s GDP – the figures the Tories use to convince us that they’re growing the economy. But the red bars show GDP per capita – our GDP per head of population: (click to see charts more clearly).
Ooopps! GDP/capita is going nowhere. What’s really happening is that due mainly to uncontrolled immigration, the UK population is going up by 300,000 to 400,000 a year. Since the Coalition came to power in 2010, the UK population has increased from 59,840,000 to 64,510,000 – a rise of 4,670,000. To cope with providing public services for all these extra people, the Government is having to borrow and spend billions which are then included in our GDP figures making it look like GDP is going up. For example, just this morning the Local Government Association announced it needed another £12bn to provide sufficient school places for the rapidly increasing number of children in Britain.
Now let’s deal with the Government’s claim that “Britain is performing better than other developed countries”. Well lookee here folks (click to see clearly)
Yup, there we are – fourth from the bottom when comparing the change in GDP/capita since 2007 rather than just GDP (this chart is only up to end 2011, but Britain’s GDP/capita has been stagnant since then, so little has changed). And just look at some of the countries doing better than us in change in GDP/capita since 2007.
So our Government’s claim that Britain is doing better than other developed countries is total and utter bllx!
Of course, some things are going up. Our national debt has doubled from around £700bn in 2010 to £1.5trn in 2015. And the amount of taxpayers’ money we’re having to cut from public services to pay interest on our ever-increasing debt has, of course, also shot up in spite of the Government’s desperate attempts to manipulate interest rates down:
But on the key figure that the Tories use to claim economic competence – an increase in GDP – what we’re really seeing is mainly the effect of an increasing population as GDP/capita is pretty much flat.
However, what’s quite amusing is that Labour daren’t expose the Tory lies about our economy improving because that would draw people’s attention to Labour and Tory uncontrolled immigration. And both Tories and Labour are desperate to avoid talking about the public’s main concern – uncontrolled immigration – as only UKIP actually plan to do something about it.
Similarly, all the politically-correct supposed ‘journalists’ at the BBC and Channel 4 daren’t expose Tory lies about a growing economy as they too want to avoid mentioning immigration.
As the election approaches, I hope to expose more of the political parties’ lies that the mainstream media choose to not mention.
Still, one thing the Government has achieved has been to increase our foreign aid budget from £7.9bn a year to over £12bn a year which has, as our video shows, made some African rulers very happy indeed:
A beautiful blog. I like the truth. At the moment we are being fed a load of rubbish.
Our population growth rate is 0.6% per year. Our GDP growth rate is 2.9%
Article failure.
Call it an overspend or call it spending more than you earn, anything but a deficit which the public doesn’t get. 165bn overspend per year mounts up in 5 years even if its now at 90bn. This is supposed to austerity..haha.