“THE FINANCIAL MEMORY SHOULD BE ASSUMED TO LAST NO MORE THAN 20 YEARS” J K GALBRAITH

Private Eye suggests that the Labour Party has a short memory. Shadow City Minister, Tulip Sadiq, has promised to “tear down the barriers to competitiveness and growth”. This carries echoes of the last Labour Government’s “light touch”regulation.

This was eventually followed by a period of rampant speculation and misconduct that caused the 2008 financial crisis to wreak havoc in the UK. An extended period of austerity was then introduced by the Tory/Lib Dem Coalition and the negative consequences of this are still being felt, especially by those most in need.

KEY POINTS FROM THE RECENT REPORT BY THE RESOLUTION FOUNDATION.

The Conservatives’ 14 year overhaul of social security has shifted spending away from children and housing to elderly people, and broken the link between entitlement and need for some of the poorest households in the country.

Pensioners gained an average £900 a year, while working-age families have lost on average £1,500 a year. The hardest hit groups since 2010 have been out-of-work households receiving benefits, who have lost on average £2,200 a year, and large families of three children or more, who are worse off by £4,600 on average.

The two-child limit will push 51% of families with three or more children into poverty by 2028-29. Freezes to the local housing allowance, even as rents rise 13% by 2027, will put more people at risk of homelessness. The number of families living in temporary accomodation has doubled since 2010.

THE POOR ARE DEMONISED

“There was insufficient push back from all opposition parties against the fundamental proposition that the country had run out of money because poor people being dishonest, had somehow spent it all. The Liberal Democrats were the most obviously complicit, but it showed up in Labour’s persistent failure to vote against attacks on benefits claimants. More understandable, if no less catastrophic, was its failure to dispute the idea that it was somehow responsible – through humane policy making, social welfare programmes and decent public services – for the need for austerity in the first place…Arguably, since Covid, and certainly since the cost of living crisis, the idea that people in poverty have brought that poverty upon themselves is becoming acccepted as untrue and shameful…But a ‘common sense’ in which welfare claimants were cheats had been established, and legislation, regulation and scandal – the benefits sanctions, the three-child cap, the unpaid carers prosecutions – cascaded down from it inexorably. The ‘common sense’ view, once built, endures, as prosecuted carers have discovered. It stands until it, is torn down”.

From an article by Zoe Williams, The Guardian.

COMMENTS ON THE SCANDALOUS TREATMENT OF CARERS (EXTRACTED FROM LETTERS IN THE NATIONAL PRESS)

• “Unpaid carers are saving the NHS care system billions of pounds. It is not in dispute that the vast majority of of carer’s allowance mistakes are not fraudulent. Instead of prosecuting carers for minor infractions, which have been allowed to accumulate into huge ‘debts’, is there not a case for allowing long-term carers to claim their state pension entitlements ahead of retirement age as part of a radical overhaul of this punitive system? “
• “Someone has to care for at leat 35 hours per week in order to qualify for the carers’ allowance of £81.90 per week. That is £2.34 per hour. What does this say about the value we as a society place on the hard work of carers?”
• “In 2022-23, 1.3 million careers were deemed entitled to claim carers’ allowance, but nearly 400,000 were ineligible because of the interactions with disability benefits received by the person being cared for and/or other benefits received by the carer themselves or another member of the household”.

PRIVATE EYE’S NUMBER CRUNCHING

• 14.3% – average gender pay gap in the UK, which the Daily Mail strongly criticised as “men expecting to get paid more”.
• 19.3% – average gender pay gap at the Daily Mail‘s parent company DMG Media.

PRIVATE SCHOOLS ARE DOING VERY WELL!

According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, since 2010, private school fees have increased by 50% in real terms, but this has not led to any reduction in pupil numbers. And since 2010, the gap in funding between private and state schools has increased to more than 90%.

Information issued by the Campaign For State Education.

LEVEL THE PLAYING FIELD?!!!

State schools have none left!!

“Starting with Margaret Thatcher’s government, local education authorities were encouraged to sell their playing fields for development. Others built on their own land as they expanded. Between 1979 and 1997, 10,000 playing fields were sold off. Many schools used to have swimming pools; now pupils have to be taken to privately run leisure centres. Labour slowed but did not stop the sales, then they resumed with the coalition government. ITV reported that Michael Gove intervened in 2012 to overturn advice to halt the sales”.

Judith Martin, The Guardian.

BILLIONAIRE JETS OFF

In his Budget on 6 March, Jeremy Hunt confirmed the scrapping of the non-dom tax relief scheme. One billionaire immediately got onto his private jet, with his wife, kids and private tutor, and flew to one of this other 17 houses in the world. His parting comment – “I’m not coming back”.

The Guardian

A VERY BIG QUESTION

This is an extract from an article in The Guardian by one of its leading writers, John Harris.

“A big question is one about Sir Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves, their inner circle and what will happen to their currently all-consuming caution. Here, the New Labour years offer instructive stories. Gordon Brown eventually expressed  regret about not winning support for a more radical vision. Tony Blair and his disciples, by contrast, went from insisting that their party could not get the left-leaning change that it wanted, to embracing its complete opposite: a disastrous foreign policy, experiments with privatising public services under the guise of ‘reform’, and a project that eventually lost just about all of its original moral worth…The Blair shift is always a danger; along with the kind of  factional mania that reared its head again early in the campaign, it represents one of the things that Labour will have to be most vigilant about”.