In this, Part Two of the Slog’s series on how and why “official” statistics can no longer be trusted, we look at how inflation has been consistently and deliberately under-reported since the early 1980s….with the twin aims of suppressing wage demands and cutting welfare benefits.

There are at least two enormous holes in the official measures of inflation used in the developed world. First, since the sales of public housing, deregulation of education and dilution of the public health services, costs that my parents’ generation never faced have gone through the roof. Poorly controlled mortgage leveraging, huge increases in the buy-to-rent sector, private health cover and a growing pool of private school users have all caused the monthly outgoings of middle class family rearers to explode.

Yet few if any UK, US or eurozone government measures have adapted to the sea-change. In the US, healthcare outgoings are under-represented by 50%…