Graphs at a glance: When it comes to the election once again "It's the economy, stupid" that should decide it. Not the national economy, but the economies of individual families.

According to a report produced by the UK Parliament immediately after the Scottish Independence Referendum of September 2014, the strongest correlation with voting "Yes" to escape the grasp of the United Kingdom was unemployment. The higher the percentage of people claiming out-of-work benefits, the higher the "Yes" vote for independence.

As Bill Clinton realised, when he won the 1992 US Presidential Election, it's "the economy, stupid". Not the national economy, but the personal household economies of millions of families across the UK.

How will this play out in the coming General Election? Having endured five years of "all in it together" austerity, which has proved beyond doubt that we really aren't all in it together, which way next?

The UK has 9 of the 10 poorest regions in Northern Europe, as well as the richest (London).



London and the South East continue to take the lion's share of the UK economy, according to figures from the Office of National Statistics.

The greatest economic benefits of the HS2 high speed rail link will go to London, according to a report by HS2 Ltd (a company wholly owned by the Department of Transport). 

With 47% of those who graduated in the last 5 years, owing thousands in student loans, doing non-graduate jobs (ONS figures):


With continuing programmes of outsourcing pushing wages down, such as the 25% cuts in salary to outsourced London Borough of Barnet staff:


And with government freezing benefits, claiming it is unfair for benefits to rise faster than wages. When benefits for the working poor are needed even more precisely because their stagnant wages are being eroded by inflation:

Politicians say we must all take some pain for the national economy to gain. The reality is it is not everyone who is taking the pain, and it is not everyone who will see the gain.

As Mervyn King said when he was Governor of the Bank of England

"The price of this financial crisis is being borne by people who absolutely did not cause it…..Now is the period when the cost is being paid, I'm surprised that the degree of public anger has not been greater than it has."

Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, in evidence to the UK Parliament’s Treasury Select Committee, March 2011.