The Guardian reports this morning that:
Hundreds of thousands of children and older people have been plunged into poverty in the past four years, according to a stark analysis laying bare the challenge to families trying to keep up with the cost of living in Britain.
[New] research from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) found almost 400,000 more children and 300,000 more pensioners in the UK were living in poverty last year compared with 2012-13, the first sustained increases in child and pensioner poverty for 20 years. The foundation warned that decades of progress were at risk of being unravelled amid weak wage growth and rising inflation.
We already know the UK's NHS cannot deal with the crisis it is facing because of the ravages of austerity and unnecessary deaths are resulting.
Now we know that the lives of hundreds of thousands are also being blighted by austerity. And the trend is deeply worrying:
Those of us who campaigned against austerity always said it was wholly economically unnecessary and so instead had the primary aim of shrinking the size of government to suit the whims of the wealthy at cost to those dependent on the state. And so it has proved. To ensure that the UK's largest companies and wealthiest people are sitting on hundreds of billions of funds they have no idea what to do with hundreds of thousands of people are living lives of completely unnecessary poverty.
If we had a court for economic crime I would charge George Osborne and David Cameron.
But let's be clear that May and Hammond have done nothing about it and so are equally culpable.
It's time to face the reality that we live in a country which has decided that many lives do not matter so long as the lives of a few are, literally, enriched.
Austerity has succeeded as Osborne and Cameron planned. But the price is enormous. And don't forget it includes political populism. Those who have been deliberately mistreated don't tend to forget it.
NB Please don't believe Tory claims that inequality is reducing: Larry Elliott explains why, here.
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Most people are rightly outraged by the US tax reform Bill currently being passed by the Republican congress. Yet had the combined Tory changes since 2010 been presented as one bill it would have been seen the same way as a clear act of robbery against working people to create tax breaks for the rich including reducing corporation tax from 28% in 2010 to just 18%. The GOP is simply catching up in one move what the Tories have done to us by stealth over 10 years, using the same rationale, and with the same effect on our deficit.
I rather hope that these tax avoiders and rentiers realise that they are destroying the very society that provides them with their wealth and protection. No tax paid means no armed forces, no police, no fire brigade and very few doctors or nurses. perhaps they can start to grow their own food and harvest with a few serfs. And so back to the Tory future we go!
Given we’re supposed to be leaving the EU, it is indeed odd that we’re still reducing our armed forces. The govt. appear to think we’ll not be needing them, why? The suggested rationale for this was that we’d be part of a European force; clearly, if we Brexit, that won’t be the case. What’s the agenda then? Are we to become part of America? Given the ongoing efforts to hand our social security and NHS to their insurance companies, and given America’s deep involvement with our existing nuclear capabilities, I’m wondering more and more if that isn’t the case.
It’s acceptance that we’re now a very minor player
Sorry, Christine, but they simply don’t care: “Am I bovvered? Nah!”.
They think they can simply retreat into gated enclaves, in which all those services are provided (out of the comparatively small change from their accumulated billions – just 7 men in the USA hold as much wealth as the bottom 50%!!), while the “savages” outside can go hang, surviving on a “Blade Runner” setup, because the 0.1% are on their way to stitching up the business of wealth creation so effectively, while simultaneously devising an automated economy that will have less and less need for people’s work.
These serfs will “earn” a subsistence pittance, either by insecure work, or by a minimal Universal Basic Income, using a “currency” that can only be exchanged in outlets owned by the1%, so that even their meagre pittance will be servicing the 1% (already contemplated in the Government idea of paying benefits in “gov coin”, only exchangeable at approved places!!)
And, of course, the 1% will have completed the corporate capture of Government income streams (already part way their, with leeches Branson siphoning off NHS funding, or suing when his contract bid fails).
As I said, ” Am I bovvered?” says the one-percenter. “Nah”, he replies, “everything going along smoothly”.
RBS has announced the closure of a large number of branches, most significantly many in small rural communities in Scotland, where they provide important local services, especially in important in servicing the local cash economy, which may cover a large geographical area with limited public transport (notice, so I am not accused of wandering off the point, this includes poorer members of the community who depend on a cash economy and are not mobile, and elederly who may not be internet-literate, or wish to trust online security).
I have just heard a proclaimed “accountant” (representing local businesses) from the Highlands suggesting (on a BBC Radio Scotland phone-in) that the problem is less RBS, but rather the requirement people have recognise, presumably as a universal good, to embrace the cashless society. Part of his argument, as I understood it, was that a cashless society will eliminate sole-trading, cash-only tax-dodgers. The problem, therefore is not RBS, but cash itself.
What this accountant fails to point out, is that a cashless society does not just deliver tax; it delivers us all, everybody, wholesale and unavoidably, into the hands of the banks. I do not doubt that the banks desire a cashless society. The banks have been discouraging the use of cash for decades. I discovered in business in the late 20th century that banks were not actually very keen on handling cash. It costs money to handle cash; a cost of business taht banks find onerous and costly. They like creating money, not handling cash (save the Scottish banks printing banknotes).
Accountants, it seems, think they are merely being professional and competent if they deliver us into the hands of the banks, like prisoners. The Banks! I rest my case.
Accountants are rarely, these days if ever, aligned with the interests of society
Too true. Life is ruled by incentives and the wrong incentives are ruling as otherwise the outcome would be different
What amazes me is that poverty is considered relative by the statisticians. Thus at a stroke and by definition a certain percentage will always be in poverty.
What strikes me as how do they get the fixed percentage to move unless they use the total numbers instead of the percentage. Otherwise it would be a very boring graph I presume.
As a matter of fact poverty is relative
That’s how we humans perceive it