Osborne keeps mentioning living standards, but not our record real wage squeeze
Chancellor George Osborne has mentioned living standards repeatedly (you can watch him here), but he doesn't appear to have mentioned the prolonged real wage squeeze currently gripping the UK.
Osborne has attacked the previous Labour government, saying that the fall in living standards is the result of a "failure of economic policy in the last decade".
Duncan Weldon, senior policy officer, Trades Union Congress (TUC):
We are now in our fourth year of falling real wages, something which hasn’t happened since the ’70s. The 1870s that is.
The last real wage squeeze of this duration seems to have been 1875-1878.
(TUC)