Average wages would currently be lower than CPI, I point out.

If you want a different form of linkage, let’s talk about a basic income.

Under either CPI or RPI benefits lose substantial value over time. Since the uprating was changed from being linked to average wages in 1979 to inflation, basic unemployment benefits have lost a third of their value. I do not see how this ‘works’ unless success is defined by creating problems for someone else to clean up decades later.

yhe tories have only one the welfare argument among those who have rarely if ever been forced to use it with 80+% of the media controlled by non dom oligarchs without british interests at heart and with editors in the ‘very comfortable indeed bracket it’s hardly surprising they brief against welfare and that the bbc fearing for it’s charter and licence income does little more on welfare than reproduce tory press releases verbatim as fact which they aren’t

i don’t know what benefits you are on but mine have fallen in real terms not least because council tax benefit is now discretionary and tory councils pay the minimum mine went up , i live in a tory area, by 105% in a year real terms 1% increase is a reductionI SEE LABOUR AS THE LEAST WORST OPTION BUT TO SUGGEST DISABLED BENEFITS ARE BETTER UNDER THE TORIES IS SOMETHING OF A SICK JOKE
treborc1 must be the only one

Why should they “do something about them” if they work? Quite simply, RPI is the correct model. The model we have now, which is “lower massively every three years” (not even CPI), is wrong…

And Labour are not going to “face up” – I advocate stopping trying that and start demanding proportional representation.

The government makes the rules, Labour didn’t do anything about them last time and that’s why I have no time for Kate Green. Prior to the Coalition, New Labour was harsher on benefit claimants than any government since the 1930s and ‘the means test’ meant an inspector coming into your home to count how many towels you had. A scrounger back then was someone with more towels or other such ‘luxuries’ than they needed.

Until Labour faces up to their actual 1997-2010 record on social security and not keep passively accepting the one invented by journalists and political opponents(which benefited Labour’s policies because the public never knew how harsh they really were), I can’t trust anything they say.

Ah yes, they followed the rules at a time of low inflation. Evil, evil! Hmm.