Problem is, he's not entirely wrong

Back from a few delightful days in la France profonde, and time to catch up with the UK news. A royal wedding on the horizon -- oh joy! Another lamentable England showing at football -- yawn. And so on.

The story that's most caught my eye, however, is the resignation of Lord Young, an unpaid advisor to the coalition government, after comments he made on the impact of the recession led to a political uproar. This account is from The Guardian:

Lord Young.....told the Daily Telegraph that low interest rates meant home-owners were actually better off. "For the vast majority of people in the country today they have never had it so good ever since this recession – this so-called recession - started."

He dismissed the 100,000 job cuts expected each year in the public sector as being "within the margin of error" in the context of a 30 million-strong workforce, and said complaints about spending cuts came from "people who think they have a right for the state to support them".

The former trade and industry secretary also said people would look back on the recession and "wonder what all the fuss was about".

A lot of this is nasty, old-fashioned Toryism, which is not surprising when you consider that Lord Young was a favourite of Margaret Thatcher (and is a close friend of David Mellor). But is he altogether wrong about the way "the vast majority" has experienced the recession? It's true that the upscale papers are again full of vaguely distastetful hints on how the comfortably off can tighten their belts (Smaller cupcakes? A week instead of 10 days at Verbier this winter?) Yet his lordship is surely right to suggest that the collapse in tracker mortgage rates has been an unmitigated boon for indebted home- (and second home-) owners, many of whom are dyed-in-the-wool Tory voters.

That's why it's the not the lazy Tory cant that Lord Young spouted that's the real embarrassment for the government. It's the parts that are true. Despite what David Cameron professes to believe, we're not "all in this together". If you're a welfare recipient or receive social housing assistance you're certainly going to be "in it", right up to your neck. If you're waiting on important but non-critical surgery, you may be out of luck. If you're a low-paid public servant, you could well be lining up at the Job Centre before too long. But if you borrowed up to the hilt during the recession and you've held on to your job -- and that describes millions of people in the UK, even if it's not the "vast majority" that Lord Young claims -- the worst thing you have to worry about is VAT going up in January, and maybe the loss of the child tax credits that you were just paying into a college fund anyway.

Ed Miliband has condemned Young's comments in a predictably lame way:

"....I think his remarks are frankly disgraceful and many of the people who are struggling up and down this country with the consequences of the recession that we had, the consequences of the spending cuts that we are seeing, will be insulted by his comments."

If young Ed had his wits about him, he'd have demanded that his lordship be kept around to continue providing his inadvertent insights into what the government is really up to.