Jubilant jeers from the government benches and bold growth forecasts thinly disguised an inconvenient truth in last week’s Autumn Statement: this apparent recovery too often isn’t being felt far beyond the Square Mile of the City.
In places like Hull, which I represent, there isn’t any recovery at all for families seeing their budgets being squeezed ever tighter. For them, prices are rising faster than wages month after month, leaving people an average of £1,600 a year worse off in real terms. Unemployment is still higher now than it was in March 2010. People forget that by 2005, under Labour, unemployment in the north was the same as the national average of 5% – it’s now 9.6%, set against a national average of 8%.
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