This week David Cameron tried to pull a Derren Brown.
Like the TV illusionist, he wants you to believe something unbelievable.
He declared that there isn’t a cost-of-living crisis, that it doesn’t exist.
But the Prime Minister can’t make millions of people’s experiences disappear.
You know what is happening in your life.
And you know that your wages have been squeezed year after year and bills are going up and up.
When Mr Cameron uses some dodgy statistics and a graph he has seen on George Osborne’s office wall to claim everything is fixed, he just shows how much he doesn’t get it.
So many families struggle to stretch their income over the mortgage or the rent, the weekly food shop, gas and electricity, fuel for the car.
Let’s hope wages soon start to rise faster than prices, as the official forecasts say.
But that won’t make up for the £1,600 a year people have lost on average since the last election.
And this cost-of-living crisis is not just about the shrinking pound in your pocket.
It is also about who gets the rewards and all those parents who are worried about what the future holds for their kids - whether they will ever get a decent job or their own home.
Above all, it’s about people wanting to know if this country is ever again going to work for ordinary families.
Because this crisis reaches deep into the lives of most people in Britain today, the way our country is run, and who our country is run for.
We know that the next Labour government will have to be different from the last.
There will be less money around - there will have to be cuts so that we can balance the books and have national debt falling.
But One Nation Labour will not be the same as the Tories and the Liberal Democrats.
Although tackling the deficit is a really important part of building a healthy economy, it’s not enough to solve the cost-of-living crisis.
Only a One Nation Labour government will do that by making fairer choices in the way we cut the deficit and by making big reforms to build the new economy we need.
Last year, when the cost-of-living crisis was eating into family budgets and pensioners’ savings, the Government decided that the people who needed a tax cut the most were Britain’s millionaires.
David Cameron and Nick Clegg said it was right to cut the top rate of tax for the top 1 per cent of people, earning more than £150,000 a year.
Since then, anyone earning £1 million has had a tax cut worth £100,000 this year and they will get that every year it remains in place.
Labour said that was wrong.
And Ed Balls announced yesterday that the next Labour government will reverse this Government’s tax cut for millionaires.
George Osborne will try to tell you that won’t raise much money because the big earners will find ways to avoid paying the top rate.
"But official figures show that £10 billion more was raised over the three years the 50p rate existed than the Government thought at the time it was abolished.
That is money which Britain needs to cut the deficit - money which the Government is asking you to pay instead.
The highest earners should pay a bit more tax because it is only fair that those with broadest shoulders carry the greatest burden.
I don’t believe taxing people with income above £150,000 at the 50p rate will stop them working hard and contributing.
And nor do I accept the Conservative idea which says it is only worth helping those at the top because they are the only ones who create any wealth.
Labour knows that success is built by millions of hard-working people on low and middle incomes as well as the highest earners.
So to help small firms we will introduce more competition into the big banks so that it is easier to get a loan, to help consumers we will fix the broken the energy market, and to help working people we will introduce tough new rules to stop wages being undercut by recruitment agencies which hire only from abroad.
And we need to change our tax system too. We would cut business rates for small firms and, as Ed Balls said yesterday, we want to introduce a lower 10p starting rate of tax to help make work pay.
If we are to tackle the deficit, we also have to do more to control social security spending. That means making tough choices this government has ducked like scrapping the winter fuel allowance for the richest 5 per cent of pensioners.
But to deal with welfare spending properly, we will need to make big reforms to cut the costs of failure in the system. We will build more homes to get the costs of housing benefit down. We will give employers an incentive to pay workers a living wage to get the cost of tax credits down. We will introduce a compulsory jobs guarantee for the long term jobless – which means they lose benefits if they don’t take the work offered – to get the bill for unemployment benefit down.
We can pay down the deficit, make work pay and pay our way in the world too.
Together as One Nation we can earn our way out of cost-of-living crisis and build a new economy: one that doesn’t just work for a few, but works for you.
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