 We're supposed to think that the Conservative Party are good with the economy. Sure, they might be cartoonishly evil. It is to end the free movement of people, once and for all. But ultimately, rich people are good with money. That's why they're rich. There's just one problem with that theory, however. It's not remotely true. The Tories are better on the economy, so says political common sense. And while they might be challenged when it comes to compassion and social justice, in a market economy where taxes from growth pay for public services, they're usually considered to be the safest pair of hands. People who think that it is their right to take benefit and do nothing for it, those days are over. Yeah, you're a club, them and eat their bones. Except when you look at their records since they came to power, first the Liberal Democrats in 2010, then by themselves, and then since 2017 with the DUP, they're a bigger disaster than Prince Andrew on the television giving an alibi to the BBC's Emily Mateless. You were there with her that night. When judging economic success, you want to look at three things. The first is growth. The value of everything being produced, like making a car and consumed, like buying a car, over the course of a year. This is called GDP or gross domestic products, but GDP and isolation can be misleading. Indonesia's GDP is bigger than Switzerland's, but nobody would say it's outperforming the home of Cuckoo Glockson and Roger Federer. So a better measure is GDP per capita. That's the size of the economy divided by the number of people. The second measure is productivity. Productivity means how much you get out for how much you put in. Measuring this for the economy is actually pretty straightforward. You get the GDP per person figure and divide it by hours worked. This gives you an average of the value, you, me, your friends, family, neighbours, and so on produce in a single hour of work. Then there are wages. For much of the 20th century, rising productivity meant rising wages, meaning a virtuous cycle, which in effect made everyone better off. The economy was more productive, meaning workers benefited more from a larger expanding pie. Ride with the young adults who are buying 70% of all homes sold. Except over the last 10 years, specifically since 2010, that's not been happening. On GDP per capita, Britain is now poorer than it was in 2007, the year before the financial crisis. In fact, it's around $7,000 poorer per person. And this is from 13 years ago. Now, in fairness, we can't blame the Conservatives for the financial crisis. And it's also important to say we can't blame Labour either. What they did was a bailout so big that in effect it saved capitalism. Don't take my word for it. Here's Congressman Paul Kanjowski speaking on American television in early 2009. Would have collapsed the entire economy of the United States and within 24 hours of the world economy would have collapsed. It would have been the end of our economic system and our political system as we know it. So given all that, let's start from 2011, one year into the coalition government. As you can see, GDP per person is only slightly higher now, eight years later than it was then. And it's, in fact, lower than in 2013. Put this in historic perspective, and you see the problem is pretty significant. This is a level of economic stagnation that's never happened before. During the 1970s, sort of the news as an example of economic calamity, GDP per capita tripled. Labour taking us back to the decade of flares and fish fingers with pineapple? We should be so lucky. The reason for that is productivity, output per person per hour works. This is related to GDP per capita because without rising productivity, you can't get rising economic growth. Here as well, we've seen stagnation for a decade. That means an average hour's work today, despite improving technology, isn't producing more value than it did 10 years ago. Indeed, Britain's productivity now is more or less the same as it was in 2005. That's 14 years ago. Again, it's important to be clear about this. This has never happened before. It's unprecedented since the light bulb, the Napoleonic Wars, the invention of capitalism, even the first season of France. In 2018, the average hour of work in Britain produced $52 in Germany. It was $60 in Denmark, $62, and in the Netherlands, $65. In Ireland, it was, wait for it, $84. In concrete terms, that means the average British worker is producing in an hour what it takes in 45 minutes for someone in the Netherlands. What's more, that divergence is getting worse. By 2025, the UK will be nearly a third less productive per hour than Germany. That matters because, as I noted at the start, you can't have pay increases unless you have rising productivity, which brings us to the final part of the tour's economic record, wages. Rising wages matter because if inflation is higher than wage increases, then in real terms, you're actually getting poorer. It's a bit like being on a really slow treadmill. If you start to stand still, you're actually going backwards and eventually, you fall on your face. Rule wages remained 5% to 10% lower today than they were in 2008. Like GDP per capita and productivity, that has no precedent. But of course, the Tories came into power in 2010, so let's start there. As you can see, real pay is the same now as it was then. And of course, the measure of inflation used here doesn't include the biggest expense of all, namely housing. Given what's happened to house price over the same period, it's inarguable that the average person is poorer today than when the Tories came to power in 2010. Even that figure doesn't tell the whole story, because it doesn't include the self-employed, who are around 15% of the labour force. They've been hit worse than anyone else, seeing incomes fall by 20% between 2008 and 2016, from 34,200 to 27,400. Self-employment was Margaret Thatcher's answer to the future of Britain's economy, but rather than creating prosperity, it's making people poorer. And this is the ultimate measure of conservative failure on the economy. Until 2010, poverty was generally something limited to the unemployed, the sick and pensioners, people who didn't work. Increasingly, however, it's something which impacts working households more than anyone else. Work, it turns out, often doesn't pay. 20 years ago, only 37% of those in poverty lived in a working household today. That figure is closer to 60%, meaning you're more likely to be in a working household and poor than in one that doesn't. For all the talk of the Tories creating jobs, which they have, these jobs are poorly paid with the taxpayers subsidising corporations exploiting cheap labour through corporate subsidies, like housing benefit. The growth of these jobs also explains why we're so unproductive as a country. We need more people installing wind turbines and caring for the elderly rather than shelf stacking in Poundland or working as a security guard for G4S. Those hit hardest by the growth of in-work poverty of children. According to the IFS, there are 4.1 million children living in poverty and things are predicted to get even worse with that figure expected to rise to 5.2 million children by 2022. In Peterborough, Luton and Manchester, child poverty is above 35%. In Blackburn it goes above 40% and in Newham in London it exceeds 50%. Those kinds of figures aren't what you'd associate with economic success but with complete and utter failure. Because 1 in 3 UK billionaires back the Conservative Party, who also enjoy the support of the billionaire-owned press, you probably know someone who say the Tories are better on the economy. But whether it's economic growth, productivity or wages, the last decade shows they could not be more wrong. Trusting the Tories and the economy is like expecting the Liberal Democrats to not lie on their leaflets or Nikki Morgan to be decent with basic mathematics. 50,000 more nurses if you look in 10 years time than there are today. I know you keep saying that. More than 2 million people using food banks since 2010 and 700 homeless people dying on our streets every year. It's an accurate reflection of what is happening and it's being overseen by the most economically incompetent government in British history. The hospital's generator is about to give out. Lives will be lost. Lives lost. Gone. The PR and big money donations of the billionaire class can't conceal that forever because reality somehow always finds a way of catching up.