Media Lies And Unemployment Figures: Unemployment Still Half Of Tory Years.

Rupert Murdoch's Sky News feed yahoo and most other media and along with the tabloids they are lying through their teeth about unemployment figures.

They claim the following:-

"[at 2.4m] Unemployment in the UK is now at its highest level since the summer of 1995".

and even more shamelessly lie that:-

"It is predicted that dole queues will stretch past the three million mark next year.
But an even gloomier forecast from the Centre for Economics and Business Research says there could be as many as four million out of work.
This would be far worse than the 1980s peak under Margaret Thatcher."

These Tory cronies are just loving it. There is no mention that the LABOUR FORCE SURVEY figures they quote only started being used by this Labour government in 1997 and that they are DELIBERATELY (because there can be no other reason) not comparing like with like by comparing these LFS figures with the CLAIMANT COUNT figures (see graph above) which were the only measure under the Tories. The figures above are independently recognised as comparable and go back to 1971.

There is only a brief mention of the claimant count figures hidden (as usual) near the end of the SKY article and these lies are repeated everywhere from the usual suspects MAIL/EXPRESS/STAR/SUN/TIMES/STANDARD and Daily Mail owned METRO, to even the BBC and MIRROR. People will actually believe unemployment is as bad as the Tory years when in fact it is still better than 1997 when Labour came to power.

The truth is shown in the graph above - as you can see, unemployment is still FAR BELOW the Tory highs when 3.1m were on the CLAIMANT COUNT as opposed to 1.58m today. So the truth is unemployment is still HALF WHAT IT WAS UNDER THE TORIES.

Of course, nobody reads my blog, so it is a bit of an unequal fight between me and the facts and the Tory media lies which are read by just about everyone. C'est La Vie!