Post by Teddy Bear on Nov 28, 2011 20:05:01 GMT
One of the tools the BBC uses to justify their agenda are polls. What's not disclosed by the BBC, is which sector of the public were approached to obtain this figure.
Judge for yourself.
Judge for yourself.
The country is being held to ransom by Wednesday's strikes
By Steve Doughty
We learn, from the BBC, that six out of 10 people support the public sector strikes.
According to a poll commissioned by the Corporation, young people in particular are backing state workers and their unions. The noble struggle to save the pensions of those who serve the people from the Tories and their greedy banker friends, as the BBC didn’t quite call it, has especially strong backing from women, etc…
You can write the rest of the BBC report for yourself. I’m sure you could make up the bit about the midwife forced to go on strike for the first time in her life because she fears having to work when she is ‘a little old lady of 65’.
I have never believed opinion polls since I was with Neil Kinnock’s election campaign team at the time in 1992 when they were said to be seven per cent ahead of the Tories. I will never forget the happy confidence of Kinnock’s staff as they celebrated after their highly successful rally in Sheffield.
Kinnock, you will remember, capitalised on this great public support by easily defeating the weakly-led Tories and spending many years in Number 10. Or would have done, if the polls the broadcasters swore by had been anywhere near right.
But there is another reason to think the BBC’s survey is wrong. Out beyond the cosy right-thinking world where broadcasters live, people are talking about this strike, in the pubs and the shopping malls and the sports grounds. And not much of what they are saying reflects the idea that Unison and the GMB and the rest are speaking for the general public.
What they are saying reflects the numbers behind this strike, not the numbers touted by the various propagandists, but the hard state statistics which tell as close to the truth as you are going to get.
Last week the Office for National Statistics said that an average full-time private sector worker gets £25,000 a year compared to £28,802 for an average full-time public sector worker.
Unions keep telling us that public sector workers collect pensions that are terribly small. All those school dinner ladies and crossing patrol men will have to survive in retirement on just a few pounds a week, they say.
So, when you have dried your eyes over the BBC midwife who fears having to work until she reaches the age of 65, try this one. According to the ONS, the average annual pension in the public sector is £7,841.
Not much to live on, sure. But only a third of private sector workers have a pension from their job at all, and where they do the average pension pot is £26,000, which will produce around £1,400 a year.
People who work in the private sector are not complete fools, although many wish they had had the brains to switch to a public sector job around 1997.
They know their final salary pensions, the safe, secure, generous ones enjoyed by nine out of 10 public sector workers, were taxed out of existence by Gordon Brown in order to pay for vital public services, like pensions for public sector workers.
Mr Brown’s taxes on pension funds don’t affect the majority of public sector workers, because they don’t have pension funds to speak of, their pensions get paid straight out of our taxes.
You can get the idea of the real cost of public sector pensions by looking at the local council workers, who do boast of having their pensions paid out of a genuine fund to which they contribute.
Their pension contributions are in fact so inadequate to meet the costs that last year council tax payers were tapped for nearly £6 billion in subsidies for town hall pensions. That swallows just under £400 of the council tax of a benchmark Band D taxpayer, or 28 per cent of all the council tax collected.
Many of the people who are paying that money will be relying on the value of their homes for any kind of decent old age. They do not relish the prospect of watching the council officials who are currently bullying them about bin collections or parking fines lording it over them in retirement just as they do now.
Public sector workers do not seem to realise that they are no longer popular among the people who work in business and industry, and who outnumber them five to one.
A teacher may choose to lecture parents about how they are damaging their children’s education by taking an affordable holiday in term time. She may be right. But if she then chooses to go on strike in term time – on top of all those ‘training days’ that teachers do not scorn to take – she is not going to be everybody’s favourite.
If ministers were to stop listening so carefully to the BBC, and pay a little more attention to the noises in the country at large, they might find the will power to stand up to the union bosses.
Because of their own historic failures, unions no longer count for the great majority of working people in this country. A government that decided to stand up to those that remain, on behalf of the rest of us, might find itself unexpectedly popular.
By Steve Doughty
We learn, from the BBC, that six out of 10 people support the public sector strikes.
According to a poll commissioned by the Corporation, young people in particular are backing state workers and their unions. The noble struggle to save the pensions of those who serve the people from the Tories and their greedy banker friends, as the BBC didn’t quite call it, has especially strong backing from women, etc…
You can write the rest of the BBC report for yourself. I’m sure you could make up the bit about the midwife forced to go on strike for the first time in her life because she fears having to work when she is ‘a little old lady of 65’.
I have never believed opinion polls since I was with Neil Kinnock’s election campaign team at the time in 1992 when they were said to be seven per cent ahead of the Tories. I will never forget the happy confidence of Kinnock’s staff as they celebrated after their highly successful rally in Sheffield.
Kinnock, you will remember, capitalised on this great public support by easily defeating the weakly-led Tories and spending many years in Number 10. Or would have done, if the polls the broadcasters swore by had been anywhere near right.
But there is another reason to think the BBC’s survey is wrong. Out beyond the cosy right-thinking world where broadcasters live, people are talking about this strike, in the pubs and the shopping malls and the sports grounds. And not much of what they are saying reflects the idea that Unison and the GMB and the rest are speaking for the general public.
What they are saying reflects the numbers behind this strike, not the numbers touted by the various propagandists, but the hard state statistics which tell as close to the truth as you are going to get.
Last week the Office for National Statistics said that an average full-time private sector worker gets £25,000 a year compared to £28,802 for an average full-time public sector worker.
Unions keep telling us that public sector workers collect pensions that are terribly small. All those school dinner ladies and crossing patrol men will have to survive in retirement on just a few pounds a week, they say.
So, when you have dried your eyes over the BBC midwife who fears having to work until she reaches the age of 65, try this one. According to the ONS, the average annual pension in the public sector is £7,841.
Not much to live on, sure. But only a third of private sector workers have a pension from their job at all, and where they do the average pension pot is £26,000, which will produce around £1,400 a year.
People who work in the private sector are not complete fools, although many wish they had had the brains to switch to a public sector job around 1997.
They know their final salary pensions, the safe, secure, generous ones enjoyed by nine out of 10 public sector workers, were taxed out of existence by Gordon Brown in order to pay for vital public services, like pensions for public sector workers.
Mr Brown’s taxes on pension funds don’t affect the majority of public sector workers, because they don’t have pension funds to speak of, their pensions get paid straight out of our taxes.
You can get the idea of the real cost of public sector pensions by looking at the local council workers, who do boast of having their pensions paid out of a genuine fund to which they contribute.
Their pension contributions are in fact so inadequate to meet the costs that last year council tax payers were tapped for nearly £6 billion in subsidies for town hall pensions. That swallows just under £400 of the council tax of a benchmark Band D taxpayer, or 28 per cent of all the council tax collected.
Many of the people who are paying that money will be relying on the value of their homes for any kind of decent old age. They do not relish the prospect of watching the council officials who are currently bullying them about bin collections or parking fines lording it over them in retirement just as they do now.
Public sector workers do not seem to realise that they are no longer popular among the people who work in business and industry, and who outnumber them five to one.
A teacher may choose to lecture parents about how they are damaging their children’s education by taking an affordable holiday in term time. She may be right. But if she then chooses to go on strike in term time – on top of all those ‘training days’ that teachers do not scorn to take – she is not going to be everybody’s favourite.
If ministers were to stop listening so carefully to the BBC, and pay a little more attention to the noises in the country at large, they might find the will power to stand up to the union bosses.
Because of their own historic failures, unions no longer count for the great majority of working people in this country. A government that decided to stand up to those that remain, on behalf of the rest of us, might find itself unexpectedly popular.
