Unless you’re an avid social media user, you may have missed the fact that Boris Johnson, the man who will almost certainly become the UK Prime Minister on July 23rd, made an utterly ridiculous and truly monumental numbers gaffe on Sunday.
Despite being poised to become the most powerful person in the country, Johnson displayed an abject knowledge of one of the most important figures effecting ordinary people, wrongly guessing that the UK’s minimum wage was “at or around 10 pounds” in an interview with Sky News reporter Sophy Ridge.
The UK national minimum wage – which the Tories deviously rebranded as the National Living Wage in 2015 – is actually just £8.21.
If the UK minimum wage was actually £10 as Johnson claimed it was, a full-time minimum wage worker would receive a massive £3,723 annual pay rise.
Yet, despite the man poised to become PM displaying a truly contempible lack of knowledge about the most basic facts effecting working people, Johnson’s epic gaffe has been conveniently ignored by the vast majority of mainstream media outlets.
The media’s ignorance comes despite them, including the supposedly impartial public broadcaster, the BBC, giving wall-to-wall coverage of Labour’s Shadow Home Secretary, Diane Abbott, making an equally cringeworthy numbers gaffe during the 2017 General Election campaign.
Unsurpisingly, the UK’s media’s blatant disparity in reporting between a white male Tory and a black female Labour MP came in for huge criticism and entirely understandable claims of institutional racism:
https://twitter.com/LauraCatriona/status/1145297384408264704
Expect months and months of people ridiculing Boris Johnson for getting his numbers wrong on the living wage…
…oh wait, scrap that, he’s not a black woman. As you were.
— EL4C (@EL4JC) June 30, 2019
Incredibly, despite falsely claiming that the minimum wage was already £10, Johnson later refused to support raising the minimum wage to £10 as Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party are actually proposing.
Boris Johnson‘s priorities are clear as he promises huge tax cuts for higher earners but refuses to back a £10 an hour living wage. #Ridge pic.twitter.com/UQeofiFUVd
— Labour Press (@labourpress) June 30, 2019
Analysis
Now why would virtually the entire media completely ignore a white right-wing Tory and the imminent future PM making a horrendous numbers gaffe, but give wall-to-wall coverage, and endless criticism and ridicule over a black Socialist female Labour MP making a similar awkward mistake?
It might have something to do with the fact that the billionaire-owned, tax-avoiding UK media are both blatantly biased in favour of right-wing, pro-greed, anti-worker policies, and that it is dominated by utterly unashamed racists.
But seriously, how obvious do they want to get about it?
