The Institute for Fiscal Studies reported yesterday that:
Almost all [Universal Credit] claimants are benefiting from the temporary £20 per week uplift in UC, due to expire at the end of September.
How much that uplift matters to family incomes varies substantially. On average it represents 12% of entitlements, but for a quarter of claimants (1.2 million) it makes up at least 20%, while for another quarter it is less than 8%. That variation comes from differences in circumstances.
Five million claimants are, in that case, about to suffer very significant cuts to their incomes that will have three very obvious effects.
First, there will be a substantial fall in demand in the economy, making this policy very costly to the government.
Second, there will be an increase in poverty.
Third, children will suffer, but mothers will suffer the biggest impact.
This was published on the day that Johnson talked, meaninglessly and without policy proposals attached, on ‘levelling up'. What his government is actually doing is driving people into poverty in the UK.
It is very hard to make up callousness on the scale that this government evidences, almost daily. This is a shocking example of it. And what is most shocking is that this government remains popular. It's as if humanity has been sucked out of us as a nation.
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This is probably the single most depraved thing the Government has done in the last 11 years. Taking food from children’s mouths. Adding to parent’s anxiety. These decisions are taken by people who have no experience of ever being hungry or having to work out how to make their budget stretch to ensure the bills are paid every week
Paying a decent minimum wage would reduce hardship and the need for some UC payments providing pride and self esteem to the most deprived areas of the country and the people who live there
How much longer ought we depend on the likes of Marcus Rashford to feed the kids over the summer holidays. A callous act that hurts the most vulnerable
“It’s as if humanity has been sucked out of us as a nation.”
It has. Vast swathes of the country (I’m talking England) have no empathy, no anything.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/jul/15/gb-news-shows-attracted-zero-viewers-after-boycott-over-taking-the-knee
I do not watch GB News & have little sympathy for the channel. However, it is clear that large numbers of the English lack a key requirement to be considered human: empathy.
2500 year ago, the Greek playwrights wrote some of their plays (Oedipus Rex is a good example) with a view to educating the audience in terms of empathy. Clearly, empathy has passed large sections of the English by. Which leaves an open question: if the Greeks thought it worthwhile to inform the populace about empathy – what countervailing force has been doing the opposite to the English? I’d suggest 40 years or toryscum government and a meeja happy to help. Callous governments need a base – this one has it in a “every-man-for-himself” English populace and a meeja that has over more than 40 years encouraged such attitudes.
I suggest that there is a real risk of the government triggering serious unrest in a number of areas, Northern Ireland and cities in the mainland UK
Really? I’d have thought it was top of any Tory MP’s CV. The more callous the better.
Listening to the Today programme people appear to continue to be supporting the Conservatives still because they believe assorted well honed inaccurate views about Labour – they associate Labour with debt, antisemitism, factionalism etc. Starmer’s response is to continue to say he has a mountain to climb and that Labour needs to improve. Its hardly a positive selling point. Labour fails completely to ensure that the population associate Conservatives with cruelty on an epic scale enacted in numerous ways and with corruption and cronyism. That is what Starmer should be selling, not that he’s inherited a broken party (and proceeded to break it even further).
Re the association of Labour with debt. Yes, that is a good one. Labour are associated with the charge of how will things be paid for, the threat of raised taxes, increased debt, etc. That’s rich coming from Tories who have always increased the debt level in the country, but seem to think it’s ok as long as we feel wealthy from house prices going up 10-20% a year. If you are lucky enough to own a home that is.
The Tories have never got debt under control and when we had austerity, they were successful in putting the blame for that on the Lib Dems post financial crash.
Tories have always created debt when it suits them. They always punish the worse off in society when payback time comes. That will happen again when the bill turns up for the pandemic.
They never worry about how it will be paid back as long as they can keep enough people happy, usually Tory home owner voters basking in the glory of more house price inflation. Meanwhile, the Tory press will whip up reminders of the past when Labour were in power, high taxes, the IMF, trade union power, etc.
No one seems to ask the Tories who is paying for everything now and who is going to pay when Tory payback time comes. I think we know the answer to that one.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-52663523
Timothy Snyder would call what the sort of activity Johnson is engaged in sadopopulism, deliberately making things worse rather than better. He mentioned the concept on a youtube talk in 2017 in relation to Trump. But it seems to me that the notion applies just as well to Johnson.
The term is wholly appropriate
It is quite hard to make this square with their “levelling up” agenda, so I would not be at all surprised if the £20 uplift is made permanent in the autumn. Particularly if they can find a way to target it at people living in Conservative seats. A COVID or Brexit dividend, if you like.
Dont forget of course the ‘Triple Lock’ which will give those of us below pension age & younger pensioners who get the New State Pension an extra 8% but which might be cancelled
We had our children in 2003 and 2005.
I love them both deeply and it has been a pleasure knowing them.
But with great sadness I wish we had not bothered.
Our wealth as public sector workers has been eroded for years, but especially since 2010 under Tory austerity. I have come to realise that life with children is now all about fear- not having enough to support them, not the joyousness that accompanied the earlier years.
And that comes with an overwhelming sense that you cannot protect them from things like an anti- social Government.
You bring something into the world and you are powerless to protect it from people like George Osbourne, Theresa May, Michael Gove, Priti Patel and Boris Johnson and their murderous lying stupidity. And it is that sense of powerlessness that really eats at you.
I do honestly wonder why we bothered to have kids, I really do, when you look at the death of paid work and the slow death of the planet.
The mediating effect of good politics between wealth and society is just missing, has ceased to be. It was all so different in 2003-05. Things have gone down hill so fast, it can only be that we were living in a mirage, some sort of phoney democracy.
We have I think been deceived for a long time about the nature of our country. I think that now wealth has removed its gloves and has lost all pretence of any rules or pretensions of humanity. This is a fight to the death for what is left. The phoney war over what sort of country we wanted after WWII is over. There is going to be a reset whether we want it or not to a harsher time.
The question for those of us who disagree with this is what we as individuals will do about it. Richard has found his means. The rest of us have to find ours.
And I would not rule anything out to get even.
I ask that question
The love is enough
Ultimately it’s what survives
But, I don’t pretend always in the way we want
I understand where you are coming from, PSR. Things are not going to be easy, and it could go in a number of different ways.
But I like to think our children are the hope for the future. I trust we all do our best to nurture young people who can become independent and make their own decisions as adults. If mine are anything to go by, they are not going to put up with governments like this. There is an alternative.
Mine are very angry….