One Tory down…

Lord Young's resigned as an unpaid government adviser, for saying in public what the rich men governing us are saying in private about what he described as the 'so-called recession' (go here for an economist's assessment of his claims).

The multimillionaire gave an interview to the Daily Telegraph, and thinking he was amongst friends (hint: journalists are never your friends), uttered these pearls of wisdom:

 "For the vast majority of people in the country today, they have never had it so good ever since this recession – this so-called recession – started, because anybody, most people with a mortgage who were paying a lot of money each month, suddenly started paying very little each month. That could make three, four, five, six hundred pounds a month difference, free of tax. That is why the retail sales have kept very good all the way through."

the Conservative peer also said “people will wonder what all the fuss was about” when looking back at the Government’s spending cuts, the deepest in more than 30 years.

He described the loss of about 100,000 public-sector jobs a year as being within “the margin of error” in the context of the 30 million-strong job market as a whole. 

Scant comfort for the individual human beings he - like Stalin - dismissed as statistics - like the 500,000 civil servants due to lose their jobs, and the pensioners who need decent interest rates to keep afloat on their savings.