What did the Chancellor actually say?

If I was to say to you, “This is simply amazing” you would think I am giving praise.  But if I said to you, “This is simply amazing.  It’s so inaccurate you can scarcely believe it”, you would have a totally different appreciation of the point I was making.

I use this little grammatical juggling to illustrate what happened after the Budget this week.  

If I ask you “what is the government doing to the self-employed?”, if you have had even a half ear open this week, you will know that they are going to penalise them in some way.  Leave them worse off. 

Only, that is actually the exact opposite of what the Chancellor is going to do.

The second part of the Chancellors proposal was, and I paraphrase, “the self-employed now get the full state pension and will get further benefit entitlements later on…not only that but their NICs will still not be at the same level as employed people’s and they are in fact having some contributions reduced”.

But what did the BBC report?  Not even half the full story.  All they reported was that the Chancellor was increasing NIC’s for the self-employed.  Indeed, the BBC’s top economic editor, Nihal, speculated that the Chancellor was in some way vilifying the self-employed, calling them cheats who were dodging paying their full whack.  Er, what?  Where did he get that from?  Certainty not from the Chancellor.

But the BBC further compounded their error by allowing Labour’s John McDonnell to claim that the self-employed have got absolutely nothing back.  Which is simply not true.   So why did the BBC not challenge him and not let him get away with it.

Good question.  And it has only two answers.  One, sloppy journalism.  Or two, bias.  You make up your own mind.

I know the BBC has slowly been going downhill but at least they should get the facts right and not spin a news story that simply is false.