Today shadow chancellor Alan Johnson got 'himself in a tangle over national insurance figures.' Watch it here, the interesting part is from 4:00...
The FT reports this as
'Alan Johnson caught out over National Insurance figure
Sky have published a clip from this morning of Alan Johnson appearing not to know the figure for the employer rate of National Insurance. It’s another moment that threatens to erode his public reputation after several weeks of low-level errors and stumbles.'
The BBC, however, only manage to report this at the end of a long piece headlined 'VAT rise to 20% will stay, Cameron hints'. In fact you have to read all the way down through the long article to the very end:
'But Mr Johnson was criticised after appearing to stumble over the current rate for employer's National Insurance contributions in an interview on Sky News.
Lib Dem MP Stephen Williams said it showed Labour was "completely clueless on basic economics".'
"... employee VAT"... 20% or 12.8%?!
So the BBC state that 'Mr Johnson was criticised after appearing to stumble'; 'appearing to stumble'; it is clear that he didn't know the rate. If he didn't know, he could have 'fessed up and said so but he tried to evade answering the question and then answered/guessed wrong. If this had been a Conservative shadow chancellor this would have been headline news, it was a Labour shadow chancellor so there is as close to no coverage as possible.
If one relied on the BBC for one's news then one would have no idea as to the real story. The BBC are guilty of protecting one of their team, the Labour team. The BBC have shown their bias, why should we pay for their propaganda?
3 comments:
Not only did he not know that Employers NI is 12.8%, he seems to lack the mathematical skills to realise that increasing it to 13.8% is not an increase of 1% as he stated, but is actually an increase of more than 7.8%.
Good point, anonymous.
Johnson is not only incredibly stupid, I suspect he is also incredibly lazy !
Still, he is a great asset to the Government !
One part of the BBC that did not gloss over the issue was the ever excellent "More or Less" on Radio 4 which went back to look at the Treasury estimates of how much money would be raised by the taxes, and discovered that Osborne's VAT increase would raise £12 billion whereas the Labour NI increase would only raise £3 billion, or to put it another way, to raise the same as the Conservatives, the Labour NI increase would have to put 300,000 people out of work (not surprising because NI is closer to employment costs).
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