"We have a wider gap between the haves and have-nots in this country than any of us have known" says Owen Smith (Labour leader candidate if you haven't heard of him, which most of us hadn't till the other day) as he set out his stall for what will be a very left wing Labour party, whoever wins.
But actually inequality was higher under Labour. The Gini index of income inequality was 34.7 in 2006-07, before the economic crisis. It is now 32 - a lower figure means greater equality.
As for austerity, government spending last year was 40.1% of GDP - higher than under Labour for 11 of the 13 years it was in power.
These figures were published in the Sunday Times at the weekend but they aren't new or, to me anyway, the slightest surprise.
It's why it really gets my goat when opposition politicians bang on about austerity. Ms Sturgeon irritates me the most but she's far from the only one.
Just this weekend, also in the Sunday Times, Tristram Hunt referred to the "pain of austerity being unfairly targeted". (As an aside Hunt, even though he's much less dangerous than the Corbyn/McConnell axis which I think I'll start calling "New Militant", irritates me as much as any of them....perhaps because he's such a wimp). Of course, it's legitimate to question spending priorities and very much the role of the opposition. Trident v health or education, for example. Or overseas aid v health or education. (As an aside I only realised this week that overseas aid is 0.7% of gross national income, not 0.7% of spend. At £12.2bn it's more like 1.6% of spending this budget year). But don't blame any pain on a mythical austerity chum, it's about the choices that have to be made.
The problem these people have is that they have no suitable pejorative term for spending a bit less than other people once, totally unrealistically, planned to spend. As I said in an earlier post, that's a strange kind of austerity.
The problem I have is that government spending continues to run way above the long run 37% of GDP that is regarded as sustainable*. So it is adding to the burden that our children and grandchildren will face. You could argue this is the worst kind of taxation without representation. We are literally spending their money; money they will have to pay because we spent too much on services for ourselves. And the future world will no doubt be even more challenging for the club of cosseted nations of the West plus Japan.
There's been a lot of stuff about generational inequality lately. The biggest problem we are bequeathing them is massive public sector debt.
I know there is an argument about accounting for public investment, e.g. in infrastructure. I've got no problem with accounting for that sensibly. But it's necessary to recognise that most infrastructure projects have hugely long payback periods and many never realistically pay back the original investment. (This would be true from the original canals -very few of which made money for their investors through to the Channel Tunnel, where the original investors lost their shirts). Companies account for investment, but they often have to take painful write offs and I don't believe it would be prudent to account for all public sector investment fully on a depreciation basis. And the cash still has to be found to fund the investment up front, so there are still interest charges.
Also this week we read that real terms pay in the UK went down more than 10% since 2007, according to the TUC, more than anywhere in Europe bar Greece. The Guardian gleefully said "UK joins Greece at bottom of growth league", quoting the TUC General Secretary who said that "wages went off the cliff" after the financial crisis. Owen Smith (who's he again?) had a lot to say about it in his speech on 27 July. Angry was a word he used a lot. The Treasury made the point that living standards, which also depend on tax and benefit levels, had increased to their highest ever levels, wages had continued to rise faster than prices and that employment increased substantially in that time. There's something odd about these figures and I suspect it's with the TUC interpretation. I seriously doubt that more than a small number of people have had anything like a 10% pay cut in real terms. Some 2 million jobs have been added in that time. Many may well be at low wages, diluting the overall average. But even if they were all at minimum wage, I estimate that would only dilute average wages by around 3%. I'm hoping someone I can trust publishes an analysis that explains this apparent contradiction.
But if Citizen Smith ever has his way, I won't need to worry about it. Indeed none of us will, as he wants equality of outcome, not opportunity. So everyone will be average, whether they work hard or not, so why bother? There's no official antonym for "meritocracy", though one website suggests "mediocracy", but maybe we should just say "Soviet".
Incidentally, for younger readers the blog title harps back to PM James Callaghan, returning to our shores in the 1978/9 winter of discontent. Anecdotally he said "crisis - what crisis?" when challenged about the state of the country, in particular industrial unrest. Though he didn't actually say those words. The lasting images from the time are of rubbish in the streets and reports of bodies lying unburied in mortuaries. As all this was just starting to escalate, the prime minister had gone to an economic conference in Guadeloupe in the West Indies. Looking tanned, Mr Callaghan returned to be asked how he was going to deal with the problem. "I don't think other people in the world would share the view [that] there is mounting chaos," was what he actually said. (I am indebted to the BBC website for this information). "PM plays down problems" might have been a more accurate headline, but The Sun headline was "Crisis? What crisis?" It suited the mood of the nation and has since become part of political folklore - and helped to bring Mrs Thatcher to power.
Politics feels quite like the 70s and 80s at the moment.
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