Tuesday 28 April 2015

6 Things The Papers Don't Tell You

1. Immigration brings money into the UK


Nigel says benefit tourists are coming over here, using our "international health service". The Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration have tested this idea, through research of the facts (an interesting way of working which Nigel thinks is 'bloody foreign nonsense').

Between 2001 and 2011, EU immigrants to the UK contributed 34% more to the budget than they took out.

In the case of non-EU migrants, they paid in 2% more (through taxes) than they took out. Overall, immigrants brought in an extra £20bn to the Treasury's budget. We have more to spend on the NHS, thanks to immigration. Thank you, migrants!

2. Immigrants are not all benefit tourists



Immigrants are actually 45% less likely than UK citizens to claim benefits

3. Public spending is not all going to lazy alcoholics on Jobseekers allowance


55% of the welfare budget goes to pensioners, who haven't suffered from any cuts. Of the money that does go to Jobseekers allowance, they are not all Benefits Street delinquents. Just 0.3% of people on benefits have been on them for over 5 years. There is not a "culture of dependency”.

4. You are not alone in thinking that it doesn’t feel like a recovery



47% of us think the country has got less fair under the Coalition. Just 12% think it has got more fair. Pay has gone down by between 5.9 - 9%, depending on how you measure it. These are not the “good times”.

5. It is not entirely Labour's fault that the 2008 crash happened



Mervyn King, former governor of the Bank of England, was asked if it was Labour's fault that the banks were unregulated, allowing the crash to happen. He said:

"I am not going to talk about individual parties’ culpability because I think the real problem was a shared intellectual view right across the entire political spectrum and shared across the financial markets that things were going pretty well”.

All mainstream politicians were fairly blind to the risks in the banking sector. The Tories blame Labour, calling it “Labour’s Great Recession”. But most the deregulation had been done by Thatcher and Major, and in 2008 the Tories were not exactly screaming for more controls on the banks.

In fact…


6. The Tories wanted there to be less regulation of the banks in 2008.


In 2007, Cameron endorsed a report which called for “the regulatory burden” on banks to be "reduced year on year”.




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