The BBC left-wing propaganda never rests. It does not matter whether it is the Today programme, comedy programmes or social science. It is relentless.

Yesterday Laurie Taylor, a left-wing academic, was interviewing another left-wing academic about inequality. This was all under the guise of a non-partisan programme about social science called "Thinking allowed". Now Laurie Taylor is a very clever man with a lively mind. But he also has his left-wing prejudices. His interviewee yesterday was arguing - we were told this was on the basis of objective data - that Britain was a particularly unequal society and that inequality is highly damaging.

I was not able to listen all the way to the end however, at the time when it was being established that Britain was particularly unequal, Laurie Taylor did not think to query whether the evidence was reliable. My view is that he wanted to accept the 'evidence' and therefore did not want any doubt to be cast on it. However if he had thought to get in someone who took a different view of these matters, he would have readily had reason to doubt the figures.

For example, in the 1990s, the Department of Social Security, as it then was, studied the lowest income decile in Britain to find out what they did in life. You would think they were low-paid unskilled workers, wouldn't you? But the remarkable discovery was that a surprisingly high proportion of them fell into two categories: builders and accountants. In other words, these were people who were either fixing their tax affairs so that they appeared to earn little or nothing but who, in fact, were making plenty, or else they were plain crooked. The figures did not truly represent the condition of poor people. The figures were not reliable.

A second discovery was that people who were supposedly extremely poor had a remarkable amount of consumer durables.

A third factor, which would be obvious to anyone who knows anything about welfare benefits, is that those on income support (as it was) were not allowed to have more than a very small amount of capital, otherwise they would lose some of their benefits. So what do people on such means-tested benefits do? They have every reason to arrange their affairs as carefully as any tax avoiding "greedy banker". They buy consumer durables. They buy objects like gold which will not appear on bank statements or savings accounts. They simply spend the money by taking holidays. They "give" money to close relatives who will then "give" it back at a later stage. In other words, those on means-tested benefits have reason to reduce their capital if they have more than a small amount. This is one of the damaging unintended consequences on people's lives. It is also a reason wholly to distrust statistics on the assets of the poor.

But none of this was mentioned. The propaganda rolls on.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Media, including BBC bias • Politics • Welfare benefits

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