Poverty and inequality

"Can't balance budget on the wallets of the rich"? Yes, we can!

"It's an economic delusion to think you can balance the budget only on the wallets of the rich", claimed Chancellor George Osborne as he spoke to the Tory party conference (8 October). He was trying to justify another £10 billion cuts in benefits for the worse-off, on top of all the cuts already in train. Yes, you can balance the budget on the wallets of the rich! Or, rather, we could balance the budget that way. The Tories never would, and the New Labour types never would, but a government based on and accountable to the labour movement, a workers' government, could and would. Osborne's claim...

Rich get richer, kids go hungry

3.5 million children in Britain are living in poverty. That is the headline of “It Shouldn’t Happen Here”, a report published by the charity Save the Children report last week. Best known for their work with the poorest children in “third world” countries, Save the Children have launched a campaign for Britain’s children living in poverty (defined by the report as coming from a family with less than 60% of the median income). That’s the rising number of children going hungry, malnourished, in need of new shoes, and warm clothes; always excluded from school trips, unable to have friends round...

Double dip? Or prolonged soaking?

Double-dip? It’s more like a prolonged soaking. Unemployment has been high, around 8%, since 2009, with only small and temporary improvements. Youth unemployment is particularly severe, standing at 22.6% as of June 2012 — a 9% spike since late 2007. The number not unemployed but working part-time only because they are unable to find a full-time job is rising, and is now over 600,000. Real wages have been falling since late 2009. No improvement is in sight, and a eurozone crash may bring drastic worsening. This is more than just episodic bad luck as a result of snow, the Royal Wedding bank...

John Lewis cleaners' strikes make gains

A strike campaign by cleaning workers at John Lewis' flagship store in London's Oxford Street has forced bosses to back off from a cuts plan, as well as winning wage increases for workers. Cleaning contractor ICM (part of the Compass Group) had been planning to make compulsory cuts to cleaning workers' hours, meaning a loss of pay, as well as making compulsory redundancies. The workers' strikes have succeeded in halting the cuts plan. Not a single worker will now face redundancy. Although the key demand of the strike, to win a pay increase to the London Living Wage of £8.30 per hour, has not...

Unemployed? Depressed? Just snap out of it!

Despite my university education, my job training, my various other random qualifications, and the endless volunteering I have undertaken, I am at the Job Centre, again. It is a familiar routine: sign on, see your advisor, show job search activity, don’t be more than five minutes late, don’t eat, drink, loiter, or talk on your mobile and please leave quietly if it so happens you are left without any money because of “technicalities”. All around is the unknowing glare of shame that people possess in their eyes having most probably watched the Jeremy Kyle show or read this morning’s Sun. They...

Top pay soars, average pay slumps

While the pay of bosses of the top 100 companies rose 10% in 2011, average household incomes are slumping. A new report by the Institute of Fiscal Studies finds that in 2010-11 mean household income (the average of household incomes) fell 5.7% and median household income (the income of a middling household) fell 3.2%. Both averages are below their 2004-5 level. The one-year fall in 2010-11 was the biggest since 1981, and the longer-period fall is one of the largest on record. http://www.ifs.org.uk/pr/hbai2012.pdf .

The poor kept poor

Thatcherism was reputed, despite its right-wing drift, to increase social mobility. The gap between the rich and the poor increased, but maybe the chance of people from poor backgrounds becoming rich would rise. A grocer's daughter became prime minister. Proverbially, East End barrow-boys became ultra-rich financial traders in the City. In fact, however, social mobility is decreasing. Poor children born in the 1970s are more likely to be poor in adulthood than poor children from the 1950s. 33% of top journalists are supplied by Oxford university alone. 54% of them, as of 2006, had been to fee...

What is jubilee?

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines Jubilee 1 - a year of emancipation and restoration provided by ancient Hebrew law to be kept every 50 years by the emancipation of Hebrew slaves, restoration of alienated lands to their former owners, and omission of all cultivation of the land. 2 - a religious song of black Americans usually referring to a time of future happiness. The Hebrew usage is said to be based on a custom by Babylonian kings of decreeing, irregularly in the Babylonian case, a general cancellation of debts. Thus the Jubilee Debt campaign demands the cancellation of debts for poor...

How the Tories fuel the inequality crisis

On 27 April Barclays Bank bosses will face protests from shareholders at their annual general meeting. They will question the bank’s decision to pay a £5.7 million extra to boss Bob Diamond last year in the guise of a “tax equalisation payment”, and the total £17.7 million paid out to him. Another two bosses, Jerry del Missier and Rich Ricci, are being paid £6.7 million and £6.5 million. The labour movement should not leave protest to well-heeled shareholders. We should be raising an outcry against such pay-outs, and demanding that the big banks, already dependent on public subsidies, be put...

Taking stock, April 2012

Document for 21 April joint meeting of AWL industrial and trade-union fractions, amended in the light of 21 April discussion. Click here to download as pdf . I An analysis in January 2012 by a right-wing thinktank, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, showed that so far only 12% of the Government's planned cuts to welfare spending and only 12% of its planned cuts to spending on public services have been implemented. There is 88% still to come. The cuts so far have not reduced the government's Budget deficit, because they have depressed most incomes so much as to cut tax revenue even more than...

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