Poverty and inequality

Battling a 2.5% pay offer in FE

Workers from Lewisham College joined the University and College Union (UCU) strike of 23 Further Education (FE) colleges on 6 and 7 October. Two further days next week and three the following week. Six other colleges are striking on other dates. The picket was lively, noisy and well supported by students and other supporters. The strikers rally heard speakers from Lewisham College, an RMT tube driver, UCU speakers from Lambeth College and Goldsmiths University and from UCU General Secretary, Jo Grady. Speakers pointed to the increased salaries of the college's principal and the leadership of...

"Heeds not the shriek of penury"

Behold a gorgeous palace that amid Yon populous city rears its thousand towers And seems itself a city. Gloomy troops Of sentinels in stern and silent ranks Encompass it around; the dweller there Cannot be free and happy; hearest thou not The curses of the fatherless, the groans Of those who have no friend? He passes on - The King, the wearer of a gilded chain That binds his soul to abjectness, the fool Whom courtiers nickname monarch, whilst a slave Even to the basest appetites - that man Heeds not the shriek of penury; he smiles At the deep curses which the destitute Mutter in secret, and a...

Focus on energy efficiency

It is good that campaigns such as “Don’t Pay” are promoting the need to fight energy poverty, rising bills, stagnating wages; even if we critique their strategy for doing so. Martin Thomas in “Wage rises, price curbs: where to push” ( Solidarity 641 ) is right that the “most effective working-class response to price surges [is] to push for wage and benefit rises”. However, on one point he is (and I know he recognises this) off-beam. On the serious issue of energy poverty, he adds that we “push for the labour movement to campaign for public ownership and democratic planning of the energy...

Beat the winter catastrophe

On 13 August , the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF), with the TUC, the National Education Union, and dozens of charities and campaigns concerned with poverty, called for the package of relief payments announced in May to be at least doubled. That was £1,200 for worse-off families, through a variety of payments. The JRF reckons that worse-off households face an average of £2,800 increased costs, so similar relief plus 130% would do what the May package promised. The JRF and others also call for deductions from benefits for debts to be eased or paused. As of November 2020 (the most recent...

Make wages spiral!

A wage-price spiral would be better than the poverty spiral we face now. Prices are rising about 10%. If wages catch up by rising 10%, workers still lose out, but only temporarily, in the catch-up time. If prices rise 10% and wages rise three or four per cent, then workers are six or seven per cent worse off, and not just for a year. Even if price rises slow down in 2023, we have a worse starting-point for the whole future. But, the Tories reply, if workers win 10% rises, then companies will “have to” raise prices by even more than 10%. They don’t “have to” at all. If everything goes up 10%...

Women's Fightback: Not shock absorbers, but fighters!

My mother’s mental arithmetic was second to none, and her management skills were astonishing, in the days before Excel spread sheets, her accounting skills were fine tuned to the penny on the back of brown envelopes. Despite having little time for hobbies, but perhaps with a secret desire to run away with the circus, she perfected plate spinning and juggling. She was, during the 1970s, a domestic poverty manager. The pay for this relentless work was exhaustion. The sort of exhaustion that comes from constantly putting a brave face on things, of traipsing from shop to shop to save pennies here...

Michael Marmot: “We need to restore the funding councils have lost. There’s no way round it”

The only speaker in the opening plenary of the Progressive Economics conference held at the University of Greenwich by the Progressive Economy Forum on 11 June was Professor Michael Marmot. Marmot is director of the UCL Institute of Health Equity and author of the famous “Marmot reviews” on health inequality . Measured in tone and heavy with statistics, Marmot’s speech was a powerful indictment of the Tories’ policies and urging of the case for a clear alternative. His work is a yardstick against which the lack of strong proposals and campaigns from the labour movement - and particularly the...

Strike to push up wages and benefits - Squeeze profits, tax wealth

In the midst of the cost-of-living misery, the Sunday Times has released its “Rich List” for this year. Rishi Sunak and his wife Akshata Murthy are on for the first time; their £730 million puts them 222nd. The total wealth of the thousand richest individuals or households listed is £711 billion, up 8% from last year. The combined wealth of the top 250 is more than that of the entire list five years ago. In 2019 the UK had 151 billionaries; in 2021 171; and now 177. The richest thousand are only a small minority of the capitalist class in the UK, and many other capitalists are doing well too...

Drive out the Tories! Drive out their policies!

A few days before Solidarity went to press, Tory MPs and the Tory press were declaring that critics of Boris Johnson over the “Partygate” scandals should shut up. “What a farcical waste of time and £460,000” shouted the front page of Daily Mail . Then on Monday 23 May new photos of Johnson, apparently showing him making a speech making a speech at a packed party, drink in hand, reopened the affair. Johnson and co. are a disgrace. But even the Partygate misdemeanours are a relatively minor part of that. They didn’t just ignore lockdown rules they insisted on for others, but oversaw policies...

Fight back against Sunak's inequality push

After the 23 March Spring Statement from Rishi Sunak, the UK’s richest MP with personal wealth of over £200m, the government’s own Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) predicts that average real household incomes will fall 2.2% over the next 12 months — “the biggest fall in living standards in any single financial year since ONS [Office of National Statistics] records began in 1956-7”. Meanwhile, the latest gross rate of return (profits) for private non-financial corporations was 10.8% (Q2-3, 2021), up on the rate in 2019 Q2-3. The FTSE share index, a measure of capitalists’ expectations of...

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