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ndeed, the Bank governor noted that UK wages were stagnant, and - coupled with high inflation - this had led to the longest decline in the real value of take-home pay in the UK since the 1920s.
Cameron, Clegg and Osborne all went to private schools with fees now higher than the average annual wage. Half the cabinet went to fee-paying schools - versus only 7% of the country - as did a third of all MPs.
After falling steadily for decades, the number of public school MPs is on the rise once more, 20 of them from Eton alone - five more MPs than the previous Parliament.
Top Labour politicians are less posh than the Tories or the Lib Dems but they are increasingly middle-class, Oxbridge-educated and have done nothing but politics.
Labour Leader Ed Miliband graduated in philosophy, politics and economics (PPE) from Oxford and was pretty quickly working for Gordon Brown. His brother David also did PPE at Oxford and was soon advising Tony Blair.
New shadow chancellor Ed Balls also went to Oxford after private school to do - you guessed it - PPE. It was there that he met his wife, the new shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper, who also happened to be doing PPE as well.
Inflation Is So Much Worse Than We're Told
Tuesday, January 25, 2011, 10:00 am, by cmartenson
Inflation is actually much higher than what the BLS claims it is; something that purchasers of college tuition, pharmaceuticals, or health insurance know all too well.
To give the BLS some credit, they must try and estimate a single rate of inflation that applies to everyone equally. But that is a completely impossible task. An octogenarian living in Seattle on a meager pension and taking lots of prescription medications will have a totally different inflation experience than an 18 year old living in their parent's basement eating Ramen noodles
Why This is Important
As a refresher, inflation in the US is calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) in a measure called the Consumer Price Index, or CPI. It is used by the Federal Reserve to justify its money printing policies, by the federal government to calculate cost-of-living adjustments (COLA) for the entitlement programs (e.g., Social Security), and to set the interest rate on inflation-adjusted bonds known as TIPS. Indirectly, the CPI influences interest rates, the stock market, and a host of salary and pension negotiations each year. If the CPI is too low, even by a single percent, the impact is in hundreds of billions of dollars.
Bank of England chief Mervyn King:
standard of living to plunge at fastest rate since 1920s
Households face the most dramatic squeeze in living standards since the 1920s, the Governor of the Bank of England warned, as he reacted to the shock disclosure that the economy was shrinking again.
By Robert Winnett, Deputy Political Editor 9:41PM GMT 25 Jan 2011
855 Comments
Families will see their disposable income eaten up as they “pay the inevitable price” for the financial crisis, Mervyn King warned.
With wages failing to keep pace with rising inflation, workers’ take- home pay will end the year worth the same as in 2005 — the most prolonged fall in living standards for more than 80 years, he claimed.