No, I didn’t either.
But that’s what Polly Toynbee says:
… it does nothing for the 62% of adults who earn too little to pay tax.
Oh hang on, what’s this Lord Bonkers is saying?
It’s not that 62 per cent of people don’t pay tax, it’s that 62 per cent do pay tax.
How out of touch with the lives of ordinary people do you have to be to make a mistake like that and not spot it? It hardly encourages you to have faith in Toynbee’s judgement as a columnist.
You think someone at the Guardian would have spotted it though.
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28 Comments
Ah, Pollyanna … the Italian second-home-owning, private-school-children-sending upholder of “Socialism” (aka
NewLabour).Perhaps she thinks that two thirds of people have Italian villas
“The mother was poor, the father was poor, the butler was poor …. “
At least the Guardian corrections and clarrifications column is probably somewhat more read than in other papers as they have to make so much more use of it.
Polly bashing has of course always been a favourite sport among Tories.
I think Lib Dems have always had problems with Polly, a journalist who seems to consistently promote LIb Dem policies, but somehow sticks with Labour, even as they pushed right wing.
Is this article really about poor proof reading at the Guardian? Or displacement activity for the mounting horror over what a liberal newspaper like the Guardian is going to be saying about us for the next five years?
Toryboys,
Lib Dems have never liked Polly. She was an Owenite in the SDP, then left to join his rump party rather than the mainstream Lib Dems. So there’s a considerable amount of history here that predates the coalition by over twenty years.
It doesn’t come as a massive suprise to me that Polly Toynbee, self-declared multi-millionaire friend of the little people, has no clue about the reality of the country she lives in. It’s not like she very regularly comes out of her closeted metropolitan elite world.
I even question that 38% figure though for adults who don’t pay tax. To pay tax you only have to earn 6.5 grand. I just don’t believe that 38% of adults, earn less than £6,500 a year. To earn that little you’d have to both have no job or no pension and pretty much no benefits.
This graph shows the bottom quartile as ending at £14,000, well above the rate to pay income tax. So unless I’m deeply confused, less than 10% of adults don’t pay tax, making polly even more confused than we or anyone possibly ever thought.
http://conservativehome.blogs.com/.a/6a00d83451b31c69e2013484b96801970c-500wi
Foregone conclusion
Looks like we are learning everyday about all the things that the Tories and LibDems have always had in common!
“This graph shows the bottom quartile as ending at £14,000, well above the rate to pay income tax. So unless I’m deeply confused, less than 10% of adults don’t pay tax, making polly even more confused than we or anyone possibly ever thought. “
The graph is based on households, though.
@StephenW I believe that the 38% figure includes all adults (e.g those over 18) including those who are not engaged in economic activity – such as students and stay-at-home parents who would not appear on your graph.
Looking at the big picture for the moment I think we can sketch for the first time the ” No ” campaign in the AV referendum. The one thing AV had going for it was its inoffensiveness. Even if not in favour / not bothered how many voters were realistically going to give up Coronation Street on a wet Thursday to vote No?
By front loading the austerity and by using the comfortable majority afforded by coalition to do it a sophisticated but doable reframing of the question becomes possible by the NO camp.
If YES/NO in the referendum is a cypher for whether the country accepts the paradigm shift from majoritarianism to coalition or not then the challenge for the NO camp is make people realise that this dullest and most technical of changes is actually an existential one. A tough gig but…
Front loaded austerity delivered by a coalition allows for the reframing. You could end up with
AV = Coalitions = Easier to get shafted = NO
My last post here because readers should be aware of how much “liberal” censorship is going on.
Looked at my last 5 posts which did not call anyone “stupid” ( a default position of some) nor swear etc.
Instead I quoted Voltaire, Shakespeare & Mill.
Each post failed to get through the bamboo firewall.
Make of that what you like.
[Comment from The Voice: your Shakespeare comment, for example, has appeared on the site: https://www.libdemvoice.org/nick-clegg-why-we-have-to-do-this-20022.html#comment-128901 – it may either be that the comment was delayed and so you didn’t see it if you looked back before that, or also sometimes a cached copy of the comments page is served up. If you think you’re not seeing the latest comments it is worth trying the refresh option in your web browser.]
Yesterday’s G2 had Copernicus saying the universe revolved around the earth, the science editor who wrote it clearly didn’t mean that, but it was surprising it wasn’t picked up.
There was an article a few weeks ago discussing the use of “area of Wales” and “area of Belgium” as commonly used measurements. Despite giving the figures – 20779 km² for Wales, and 30528 km² for Belgium – it finished with “Belgium is one and a third Waleses” (or similar).
Mistakes like this are easily made, but also ought to be easily corrected. A particular problem is the lack of people working in journalism who have some type of science/maths background. Given the number of stories that rely on some numeracy, it ought to be almost mandatory for them to have at least confidence in maths to good A-level standard.
Sorry, I meant decile.
Thank you for your explanation. That goes some way to explaining the much higher figure.
It’s still a bogus figure though, then, in different ways. That number of adults will include millions who don’t need to work or are living off students loans or other means and who so aren’t on the breadline.
It’s not only a wrong statistic (as she’s got it the wrong way round), it’s also to a lerge degree an irrelevent statistic.
So, Toryboysnevergrowup –
What’s your opinion of this Polly Toynbee lady, then?
@Henry- “I think Lib Dems have always had problems with Polly, a journalist who seems to consistently promote LIb Dem policies, but somehow sticks with Labour, even as they pushed right wing.”
-If you actually read Toynbee’s column, you’d know that she was pretty scathing about Labour while they were in power and urged people to vote Lib Dem, so that STV could be introduced.
Given that most of us use our names on this site, maybe Toryboysnevergrowup would like to do that too.
As for the mistaken statistic, everybody makes mistakes right?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/feb/15/tories-pregnancy-mistake
http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/vote_2010/factcheck+lib+dem+manifesto+in+focus/3612992
The point holds, raising the income tax threshold does nothing to help the very poorest who do not pay income tax… nor is there anything shocking about the revelation that the income tax threshold increase by itself helps the richer more than it helps the worst off. In fact, this very blog had a post defending itself from that criticism because when Left Foot Forward wrote (as the IFS later did) that the income tax threshold increase was regressive, it failed to take account of the (now scrapped) mansion tax’s and the (mutilated) CGT rise’s redistributional impact.
https://www.libdemvoice.org/evidence-based-left-foot-forward-only-if-you-ignore-the-actual-evidence-18370.html
Now, it is a good thing that the policy has been adapted so that the richest do not benefit as much as they previously did. But the point that this is by no means a tax measure that will especially help the poorest holds, regardless of mistakes on stats.
Why should Toynbee bother with facts that get in the way of a good story?
Daan – it may not help the poorest but it does help the poorest workers – a group who were heavily over-taxed by Labour.
It also increases the incentive to work.
It clearly also helps all basic rate taxpayers, but I would argue that £200 in the pocket of someone on £8K probably makes more difference to them that to someone on £30K. I wa salso glad to see that other measures were taken so that higher earners don’t benefit from the change.
“It also increases the incentive to work.”
What the hell is the point of “increasing the incentive to work”, by cutting benefits, if no work is available?
And what effect do you suppose that 25% cuts in public spending will have on the jobs market?
Forgiveness is not something easily won, and dear Polly Toynbee for all her charms has built a deep reserve of suspicion with a lengthy partisan history of seeking to undermine the LibDems through various inaccurate descriptions of policy and other misrepresentations which go back decades. And that’s not to mention her list of bad decisions proved damaging in hindsight.
It’s because Ms Toynbee has such a low track record and is regarded with such suspicion that her endorsement is of dubious value and probably now costs more votes than it wins – so it’s arguable that it was just another desperately and deliberately pro-Labour move ahead of the election they were losing. Her’s is the kiss of death – she knows it and she chooses who to give it to knowingly.
But if the price of liberty is eternal vigilance why is anyone complaining that the scrutineers are scrutinised themselves? We’re watching the watchers; proving our beliefs through action.
Is it so wrong to ask why she continues to be taken seriously since she trades almost exclusively on reputation anecdote and gossip, not fact? How long can her employers continue to damage themselves by keeping her prominence?
And as such, perversely, Ms Toynbee’s continuing existence in the columns has become primary evidence of persistent conservatism in society. It would cause a dilemma for her not to approve!
it’s a typo. the real quesion is ‘How out of touch with the lives of ordinary people do you have to be’ to abandon every thing you promised as the pre-election lib dem party, and support the ordinary people-hating tory party policies.
Of course Polly Toynbee’s not the only one who’s so out of touch with “ordinary people’s lives” that she fails to spot an arithmetically ridiculous mistake. 🙄
@Anthony Aloysius St
““It also increases the incentive to work.”
What the hell is the point of “increasing the incentive to work”, by cutting benefits, if no work is available?”
The line that you quote is about the rise in the income tax threshold, not a justification for cutting benefits, so your response isn’t massively relevant.
However, the question that you raise is fair. i’m broadly sympathetic to your view, but there is a counter response. There are some jobs out there that are horrible and low paid – say toilet cleaning in a hospital – and which pay only a little bit more than benefits. if you had the choice of getting 60 quid and not having to do that, or getting 80 and having to do that, it might not seem worth it. However, if the difference between working and not working was greater, say with a ten pound benefit cut and a couple of pounds extra in your pocket from an income tax cut, you might decide to swallow your pride and get out there and do the job. It might be a horrible job, but then life isn’t fair, as my parents were so fond of saying.
Naturally, this argument works if there are jobs but which are low paid and not particualrly desirable. if there really are no jobs at all, or rather if you aren’t getting them, then the issue is whether benefits enable you to live, and we’ll have to see how that pans out.
@ Kell
“it’s a typo. the real quesion is ‘How out of touch with the lives of ordinary people do you have to be’ to abandon every thing you promised as the pre-election lib dem party, and support the ordinary people-hating tory party policies.”
1. the libdems haven’t abandoned everything. read the coalition agreement and the libdem manifesto and see how much overlap there is. sure, they ahvent achieved it all within 6 weeks of taking office, give them a year or two to keep their promises on electoral reform, green policy, and education, and then make your judgement.
2. as for supporting the people-hating tories, well, i certainly hate them. but in a grown up world you have to put that aside and deal with reality. and the reality was that labour didn’t have the votes or seats to give them a mandate to continue governing. what would you have done as cleggy the day after the election?