Surprising resistance to simple fact checking

According to Theo Paphitis (who I’d never heard of before today):

“So, technically, those of us who have a job and are still in work, and not worried about losing our job, have actually been better off, so he [Lord Young] was technically correct.”

Christopher Hope adds:

“Many grassroots Tories will say Lord Young of Graffham, David Cameron’s enterprise adviser, has resigned for speaking the truth.”

What Lord Young said, according to the Telegraph:

“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, because anybody, most people with a mortgage who were paying a lot of money each month, suddenly started paying very little each month. That could make three, four, five, six hundred pounds a month difference, free of tax.”

NSO reports that 39% of houses are mortgaged in England. That’s not a majority at all, let alone a vast one; the best you could say is perhaps “a substantial minority”. (And for those whose mortgage payments have gone down, the cost of other things has gone up, and in many cases their salary probably hasn’t; for at least some of them the balance may turn out to be negative.) So no, he wasn’t speaking the truth or even something ‘technically correct’; it was a load of nonsense and he and his supporters ought to know better.

(The Telegraph has a more detailed analysis.)