IS IT WORKING?

It's Friday. It's financial. It's Friday Financial with JULIAN SAYER.

Any healthy economy needs a full and skilled workforce. It benefits employers and more importantly, gives a lot of spending power to a service driven economy.

Five years of austerity and we owe roughly £69,000,000,000 more than we did, while the

average income fell from £24,100 to £23,200, a percentage drop of 3.8%! In the meantime we are being told the economy is recovering and unemployment is coming down. This is true, unemployment has been reduced from its peak of 2.7 million in 2011 (2008-2014) to today's figure of 2.33 million. I could argue about how these figures have been compiled, but in today's article I want highlight the effects of these changes in our economy and then discuss future trends.

New figures from the Office for National Statistics reveal the depths of low pay and the grotesque chasm between a rich one per cent and the other 99% of the country.

Four in five new jobs are in sectors averaging under £16,640 for a 40-hour week. Working full-time on the £6.31 hourly minimum wage would gross just £13,124 in a year, and an explosion of part-time jobs shows millions of workers can’t even earn that pittance. This isn't good for a consumer based economy. Remember, in the UK 78% of our entire GDP is service based, and any fluctuations in our spending habits has huge ramifications.

Then comes the issue of the kind of jobs that are being created? Part time and zero hour contracts have ballooned since the start of this recession. The scale of the use of zero-hours contracts has been revealed after official figures showed that nearly 583,000 employees – more than double the government's estimate – were forced to sign up to the controversial conditions last year. Almost half of zero-hour contract workers have had their shifts cancelled without any notice, according to the first in-depth study of the way more than 1 million people on the controversial contracts are treated.

Two out of five workers on the contracts said they had been informed only hours before starting work that a shift had been cancelled. A further 6% had been told as their shift was about to begin. The study also found that 20% are sometimes or always docked wages or penalised in some way if they are not available for work. These contracts, which allow an employer to hire staff without an obligation to provide any minimum working hours, are used widely in the care industry, hotel and leisure sector and by many retailers. In the last two years public sector organisations have transferred staff to zero-hour rotas.

BBC: BLUFF. BLUSTER. CENSORSHIP.

HARRY BLACKWOOD reports that even the BBC switchboard operators are doing the bidding of The Establishment.

REMEMBER the days when the BBC was synonymous with balanced coverage, impartiality and good reporting? Well, you must be very, very old.

Sadly, those days are long gone, but there's one thing that's absolutely certain; it's going from bad to worse. The best illustration of how the BBC simply trots out endless piles of propaganda on behalf of the powers that be, can summed up in just one word. It's the ECONOMY stupid.

For the last few months, we have endured a regular diet of good news from the BBC. Unemployment down. Number of people in work up. Wages might start to rise ... soon. House sales picking up.

It's been endless good news about the economy. Britain is booming.

The impartiality machine must have been well and truly turned off at Broadcasting House. So blatantly propagandist has this nonsense been that the BBC may have just arranged for Government Ministers to do a PowerPoint presentation live on the news or civil servants reading out a press release on Blue Peter.

But I'm guessing they must have been getting complaints from those of us in the real world, because on Tuesday morning they pressed the reality check button and sent their business editor Steph McGovern out to talk to real people about the economy.

Guess what? Whole different ball game. Steph went to a market in Leeds and aside from a financial advisor whose interests it's in to talk up the economy, the consensus seemed to be that Britain's economy is going down the pan.

THE BRITISH BULLSHIT CORPORATION

Are you thinking that with so much Government propaganda and 'interference' now is the time to adjust your sets?

Proudly telling you what the government wants you to think.

ByHARRY BLACKWOOD

I'VE been a huge critic of the BBC for a long time, so it may surprise a lot of people to know that I worked for them for a while.

Considering the money they waste and how much the top brass are paid, working for the BBC in an 'ordinary' capacity isn't going to make you rich; in fact the pay is crap. But I'm really glad I spent some time working for 'auntie'. For starters I enjoyed the work and especially the interaction with listeners, but best of all it gave me a useful insight into a totally dysfunctional organisation that nowadays is nothing more than the mouthpiece of the Bullshit Factory aka The Establishment.

There are some good people working for the Beeb, but largely it's infested with middle class, posh people from privileged backgrounds and top universities who have no idea what it's like in the real world. Arse and elbow spring to mind.

A recent story that featured on BBC Breakfast illustrates my point perfectly. They reported on a survey that showed personal saving in the UK was at an all-time low and queried why.

Well, I'll tell them why: just about every working class person in the country is on the bones of their arse. They can barely put food on the table every month and pay for fuel and electricity without stashing a few hundred quid every month into a flaming ISA or a savings account.

The further down the pecking order you go, the worse it is. It's no wonder that pay day loan sharks like Wonga (big Tory donors) are reporting record profits. No wonder also that Food Banks are opening up across the nation at alarming rates.