More Farage Nonsense

Another of Nigel Farage's ridiculous claims on the ITV debate on Tuesday night was that the fact that the average worker in the UK has had a poor deal over the last ten years with wages stagnating or falling was entirely the fault of immigration.  He neglected to mention that in those ten years the UK has been through the worst financial crisis in over a century, two recessions and the largest fiscal consolidation in it's history, including a multi-year public sector pay freeze.  This of itself accounted for a significant proportion of the real-terms drop in income for most of the workforce.

He also forgot to mention that the UK is not alone in this - for example, the median male income in the USA is now lower in real-terms than it was in the 1970's.  This has nothing to do with immigration.  The main driver of wage stagnation in recent decades has been globalisation, increased competition and the growing income inequality between rich and poor.  This is an inevitable consequence of capitalism and is not a bad thing so long as governments are willing and able to intervene to redistribute income and to put a legally enforceable floor under wages.

Unfortunately the UK government since 2010 has done a poor job in this regard.  It has cut taxes for the rich instead of which it should have raised them.  It continues to allow the super-rich to avoid taxes through their use of tax havens.  It fails to collect anywhere close to the appropriate level of taxes on the UK operations of global corporations.  It has slashed corporation taxes, further contributing to an international race to the bottom, despite there being no evidence it will result in the higher overall tax take claimed.  In combination with the above it has also removed a significant number of the transfers (benefits and tax credits) that previously helped to redistribute income.  These transfers should not be considered as the drag on economic performance portrayed by the government but as a social necessity which ensures that the nation's income is shared fairly.

The government may have failed the public on taxes and redistribution but, worse, it has conned them with its 'living wage'.  The real living wage as calculated by the Living Wage Foundation (http://www.livingwage.org.uk/) is predicated on previously-existing in-work benefits remaining in place and is also set at a higher level than the government's measure; as those benefits have now been abolished, the governments living wage is nothing more than a gimmicky rebadge of the minimum wage.

So I agree with Farage that Britain deserves a pay rise but his analysis is completely dishonest.  The British public deserve better than to have to listen to any more of Farage's nonsense - rejecting it on June 23rd, then campaigning to have the UK Government collect more taxes and to introduce a real living wage would be a good start.