A number of related themes are apparent in commentary on the economy this morning.
One is poverty. As the Guardian notes:
Millions of people – including one in five families with children – have gone hungry or skipped meals in recent weeks because they could not regularly afford to buy groceries, according to new food insecurity data.
According to the Food Foundation tracker, 15% of UK households – equivalent to approximately 8 million adults and 3 million children – experienced food insecurity in January, as high food prices continued to hit the pockets of low-income families.
This is a tale of destiution and misery in the UK.
They add this graph:
We have a health crisis not just caused by Covid (although that is still very real) but by the existence of poverty thanks to George Osborne and successive subsequent Tory Chancellors, soon the be perpetuated by Rachel Reeves. That crisis is not just personal; it is collective in its cost.
Then there is this in the FT:
A lack of available loans from traditional UK lenders is pushing vulnerable consumers towards unregulated credit products as they struggle financially in the cost of living crisis, according to a study.
The UK nonprime lending market — which offers loans to riskier customers with average to low credit scores — has shrunk by more than a third since 2019.
In contrast, unsecured loans from unregulated lenders, such as those offering buy now, pay later (BNPL) products, have jumped in recent years, according to research from credit-checking platform ClearScore and consultancy EY.
The result is that the most vulnerable people in the UK who need to borrow to meet unexpected costs because they have little, or usually no, savings are being forced into the highest cost, most abusive, arrangements. It was this concern that motivated a post I made yesterday: you would never have known it from the comments of the right-wing trolls who poured in during the day to offer abuse, and who got deleted for their efforts.
And finally, there is this, also in the FT but reported in a remarkably similar style in the Guardian:
Jeremy Hunt's financial planning is “dubious” and “lacks credibility” and the chancellor should not announce tax cuts in next week's budget if he cannot lay out how he will fund them, an economic thinktank has said.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) calculates that Hunt would need to find £35bn of cuts from already threadbare public services if he plans to use a Whitehall spending freeze to pay for pre-election giveaways.
A fresh round of austerity in unprotected departments would boost the chancellor's war chest for tax cuts, the independent tax and spending watchdog said, but an increase from an expected £15bn of headroom to about £50bn over the next five years would come at a high cost.
That cost will, in very large part, be seen in the perpetuation of poverty. The lowest paid will suffer tax rises. They will have the services that they need cut. The NHS, social care and housing will not be properly funded. Education, that was the route out of this, is unable to meet need. And benefit increases have not met inflation-hiked prices for basic commodities. And Hunt wants to make all of this worse.
A government unable to admit that there is Islamophobia in its rank hopes that rows on that issue will distract attention from another pressing concern, which is that its deliberate policy of prejudicing the poorest in our society is imposing destitution on millions and relative poverty on us all because of the opportunities lost to the communities in which we all live.
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Jeremy Hunt looks increasingly unhinged to me – he is obviously being pushed on by events, there is no semblance of control or mastery of his brief.
There is every likelihood that many of the electorate will fall for this ‘robbing Peter to pay Paul’ exercise.
But that is how Thatcherism marches on isn’t it?
Thank you, PSR.
Until Hunt teamed up with Mike Elms and the pair founded Hot Courses, which got a government contract to run English language courses overseas, his employment and business career had been a wreck. He’s never been the master of anything.
As this is Britain, family connections help enormously. His father, Nicholas, was a first sea lord. He inherited his seat from his cousin, Virginia Bottomley. He faces another cousin, Harriet Harman, in the Commons and used to face another, Kitty Usher. Distant relatives include the queen mother, Oswald Mosley and Anthony Blunt. If you think that’s impressive, Cameron’s even better connected.
Further to Richard’s posts today, this explains much. The above elite is sheltered. To preserve their power and comfort, others must pay.
He has always looked a bit unhinged to me. Once upon a time he was considered on the right of the Tory Party (therefore unhinged). Since then the party has lurched even further right leaving Hunt looking briefly in the post Truss world like the only “adult in the room” – well at least on a comparative basis. That is changing as Hunt now falls into line with the “fantasy wing” of the Party.
The sad thing is, he CAN promise whatever he likes as there is no chance he will be asked to deliver it. It has almost become a game – “how far can we drag Labour to the right without someone call ‘bullshit’?”…. and the answer is “quite a long way!”.
Just like people in earlier plague times we face the end of the world as we’ve known it, in particular the power structure, and as a consequence (I think I’m quoting the Sirius Report’s London Paul here) we’re seeing shit being lost on an epic scale. As the numbers make less and less sense, expect the bat-shit crazy to be announced as policy on a routine basis, a measure of increasing desperation by the giant corporations political puppets.
We need a total revamp of the benefits system and tax system. Personally I would prefer a system where everyone gets a basic allowance with add-ons for specific issues – unemployment, sickness etc and where earnings are on top of the basic allowance. Also ideally change the tax system so that NI is incorporated into income tax with higher rates of income tax on higher earners. Also some of your proposed tax changes would be useful. As for wealth I think this is a little more difficult to sort out. Turning to land ownership I would prefer an upper limit on how much an individual could own.
Preference does not make for a good tax system
My biggest worry is that rather like 1992, the Conservatives could be preparing to lose the election and go off and top up their banknote supplies and manage somehow to be re-elected
One thing I realise after last Wednesday’s House of Commons scam by Keir Starmer to avoid the split amongst Labour Party’s MP’s over the issue of pressing for an “unconditional immediate ceasefire” in the Gaza/Israel conflict being seen is the importance of human beings trying to reach the moral ground. I know that within my family this was always stressed as an important thing to try to achieve. It took me a while to figure out the reasons for this being important but it’s because human beings are very prosocial creatures who by caring for each other better enable the species survival and well-being. Seeking the moral high ground is therefore very much part of this caring.
It’s therefore all the more strange therefore that Keir Starmer chose to become a Human Rights lawyer but doesn’t appear to understand how to get to the moral high ground. This if you bother to think about it is not only true about his reluctance to recognise the disproportionate genocide that Israel is trying to impose on the Gaza population but also his failure to understand the moral implications in believing the UK government operates on a credit card. There are obviously many other areas where he is failing as his broken pledges and u-turns on policies have revealed. What is all this telling us. Well I think the breakdown of a society happens when not enough people are taught the importance of trying to seek the moral high ground because it’s a prosocial necessity!
Correction:- “It’s therefore all the more strange Keir Starmer chose to become a Human Rights lawyer …”
My argument holds since the Declaration of Universal Human Rights stemmed from the Nazi Holocaust which was genocide plain and simple. Starmer should know this as a basis for specialising as a Human Rights Lawyer but has tried hard to pretend that Israel is not engaging in genocide!
“Many of the basic ideas that animated the human rights movement developed in the aftermath of the Second World War and the events of the Holocaust,[6] culminating in the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Paris by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights
The argument you are making Cyndy Hodgson is pure what aboutery distraction!
I think I have to draw this to a close.
I think Cyndy has made perfectly fair points.
Those you are making are about Starmer as a politician, and that is something quite different.
Am interested in what a ‘proportionate’ genocide might look like. ?
The theme of ‘prosocial behaviour; aka mutual aid is one Kropotkin explored in depth, and tried to contrast with the reductive Social Darwinism used by the then conservative elite to justify their maltreatment of the poor.
As they were genetically inferior because they were poor, they were sub-human, and treating them as such was then justifiable. That squares the ethical circle very tidily, despite the moral hazard involved.
(Untermensch, proletariat, etc., all such notions seem to acknowledge and accept Social Darwinism, so it pervades wider thinking as well)
“Survival of the fittest” became corrupted from Darwin’s ‘best adapted’ to mean in practice that the biggest capitalist thugs could legitimately exploit the less fortunate, and that had scientific validation. Thatcher exploited the same mindset.
I have never understood why Social Darwinism has not been properly debunked in the last century or so, apart from by Peter and other anarchists, by left social thinkers.
It would cut the ground from under the currently thriving and regressive 19thC Tory approach, used to rationalise the innate superiority of the wealthy in creating and perpetuating an underclass, permanently just about managing, and seeking to justify this as biological fact.
This perverted concept of legitimised punishment continues to underpin social and economic policy, as Richard demonstrates, and is one of the disgraces of 21stC British politics.
Tony I used the term “disproportionate” to imply that both Hamas and the current Israeli government both engage in genocidal warfare but the latter has proportionately greater fire power.
@ tony philpin
It was debunked but not widely understood:-
https://www.unl.edu/rhames/courses/current/readings/boehm.pdf
I was being somewhat wry regarding the ‘proportionality’ of the Gazan war killings…
Thanks for the reference on competition. There are several behavioural studies like this, though I was more thinking of a historic debunking, at the political level, of the lies told by Townshend in his Dissertation on the Poor Laws.
His disinformation, which has no empirical or theoretical basis, in the telling of the Crusoe island Juan Fernandes ‘goats and dogs’ story, on which he and Malthus then based their theories, has been critiqued, yet the fictions still persist.
There are no hunting dogs. The goats were not predated as they were too agile.
That allegedly rock solid case study led to Townshend criticising the Poor Laws by claiming that poverty comes from laziness, and, even worse, that helping and supporting the poor actually increases it. Spencer then used that example and applied the false logic of Lamarckism. to feed into Victorian Social Darwinism, still so persistent amongst conservatives.
Even such a respected Darwinist as Stephen Jay Gould had a critical view of Kropotkin’s insistence that species success is more likely with intra-species co-operation, and pro-social behaviours are less the exception than the rule, but eventually he wrote an article accepting the validity of Kropotkin’s work in Siberia. There was a Marxian context to this too, which may have influenced outlooks..
I agree that pro-social behaviour does have a moral imperative. And there does seem to be something innate in the concept of ‘fairness’. The thing with Social Darwinism is it offers a rational, even scientific justification for the worst behaviour inherent in modern capitalism, and a cop out for the most cruel attitudes of modern Toryism.
The problem with the survival of the perversion of evolutionary theory called Social Darwinism is that the far right not only picked it up and ran with it, but it was aided by otherwise seemingly upright scientists. Evolutionary Psychology was and is a pile of pseudoscience (I speak as a twice degreed psychologist) but it incorporated the racist IQ tropes of the early 20th century and subsequent iterations provided support for the Murrays and Toby Youngs of this world. They see white Europeans as the apogee of intelligence, and Ashkenazi Jews as the golden cap of the pyramid (cf the “10,000 year explosion” hypothesis). (NB this is a book and hypothesis title, which horrified me). The Tory boys are the ‘sovereign men”, the Ubermensch.
You are poor because you have inferior genes. You can be treated as such by the superior beings.
I am getting very tired of hearing ‘Starmer was a Human Rights Lawyer’ as if that should mean he should care about the human rights of individuals. Every Human Rights legal case has a Human Rights Lawyer on each side – for and against the case being heard. Starmer acted to defend Human Rights abuses as well as to fight them. Under the barristers’ cab rank rule (a barrister must accept a case offered to them unless there is a conflict of interest) he is likely to have defended abuse as often as he fought against it. His previous career should mean that he understands the law, nothing else.
Oh so in your book Human Rights has nothing to do with morality or moral principles Cyndy?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights
Human Rights have everything to do with morality and moral principles. Being a Human Rights Lawyer does not. Any more than being a lawyer in criminal practice has anything to do with committing crime.
YES!!!
For instance, the ex-human rights lawyer who famously said, “I don’t believe in human rights” personifies this.
Who, you ask?
Dominic Raab
Meanwhile the rich are not rich enough and must be paid more apparently.
A quiet conspiracy is afoot to give FTSE 100 executives a pay rise | Nils Pratley
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/feb/27/quiet-conspiracy-afoot-give-ftse-100-executives-pay-rise
Grim
And a ‘government spokesperson’ has the audacity to say ‘work is the best way out of poverty’ totally ignoring the fact that the majority of the ‘poor’ are working and their wages are not enough to pay rent and feed their families. The huge gulf between what government says and the reality of the life of so many people I know makes me so very angry.
Me too
and their tactic will be to incite the poor with stories of how ‘elites’ and ‘immigrants’ are the reason they are poor.
This will be backed by the billionaire owned press who will also tell them the govt can only spend more by taxing them more. The narrative will be ‘you’ will be paying for ‘them’. Divide and rule.
This is a reason why Richard’s wealth tax proposals are so important. I hope unions, backbenchers and smaller parties will take up the message. Weak, unprincipled people will always look to what is popular and might keep people voting for them.
I live in hope.
Thanks
Implementing policies that purposefully inflict misery on citizens should be classed as a criminal act. Why is it considered normal that politicians are not held responsible by the law for degrading the well-being of society? Instead, they are allowed to criminalize poverty.
@ Milano
An argument for a Constitution? One that evolves.
This is worth a speed read:
“Iron deficiency anaemia is common among older adults, with possible causes including nutritional deficiencies, blood loss, taking certain medications, and poor absorption.”
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/iron-deficiency-anemia-in-elderly#why-it-affects-older-adults
Because the population is getting older, we should expect to see more of that graph linked to in this blog post showing a rise in nutrition-related diagnosis following admissions.
We could consider what the slope of the graph should be based on what we know about the ageing population and then compare that to what the data actually says – we could call that Sheffield Modelling.
Sorry – but I don’t buy that. The elderly always suffer mutiple co-morbidities but what is happening is new
I’d rather you didn’t speed read this. Not only the elderly will miss out on this.
https://skwawkbox.org/2024/02/27/labour-and-tories-combine-in-lords-to-defeat-attempt-to-protect-your-right-to-see-a-doctor/
The elderly are the ones who can remember seeing the same family doctor wherever they lived. I find it strange that this has had support of both labour and tory peers, when last Friday’s front page Guardian article said that seeing the same GP each visit cuts workload and improves health.
The right to see a chosen doctor makes the life of female GPs impossible as most people want to see them. As a result any such proposal is a non-starter. It really is that straightforward. It can’t be done if you want anyone who wants a life to work in the NHS.
When I was a child in the 50’s my Dad used to say “Its always better to have a female doctor or lawyer because they have had to work so much harder than a man to get where they are.”
But that is grossly unfair to them.
Agreed – this another attempt to break and discredit the service by placing unreasonable expectations on it.
You ought to try living with a teacher – the only children they are supposed to care about are other people’s – not their own – it’s hard work raising your own children and others as you work. A very family unfriendly job.
So true
Sell off two little used and unnecessary aircraft carriers to start with – rather than any NHS assets that remain.
Labour and tory lords combined last night to talk out a green party attempt to ensure that we have GPs. We will have lots of PAs instead.
Last Friday’s Guardian front page said that seeing the same GP every time is better for our health and cuts workloads.
So whose side are labour and tory lords on? Certainly not the elderly with co-morbidities. Obviously we are living too long.
PAs are the next scandal in the making
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/jan/18/physician-associates-role-nhs-england
The role of the PA. Not a qualified GP.
But they are being represented to be GPs and they do surgery.
I imagine the idea is there will be a private health service staffed by actual medical people who know what they’re doing and an NHS free at the point of delivery which is staffed by untrained innocents and is entirely useless when it isn’t outright dangerous.
https://labouroutlook.org/2024/02/28/labours-mission-for-healthcare-wont-make-the-nhs-fit-for-the-future-keep-our-nhs-public/
By John Puntis. Worth reading. KONP has a booklet out now called Restore the People’s NHS. It’s an A4 40 page document with lots of up to date information, evidence based factsheets.
Is there a link to that.
What is KONP?
Well, the good news is that it isnt just the poor that are suffering
https://inews.co.uk/inews-lifestyle/im-mortgage-broker-middle-class-clients-in-debt-cant-afford-lives-2926829