Following Osborne’s triumphant releasing of pensioners to unlock their annuity contracts to spend how they will, there were many siren voices raised that that risked exposing many vulnerable elderly people to crooks and scammers selling dud investment projects as the road to riches. The results have turned out even worse than feared. City of London police are now having to wage a huge campaign against the use of some of the Square Mile’s most prestigious addresses as a cover for scams purporting to sell overseas land for investment as well as wine, diamonds, etc. Police say such scams cost mostly elderly and vulnerable people at least £1.7bn last year, with fraudsters typically returning to their victims a second timein the guise of ‘asset recovery specialists’ who pursue lost money for a fee. Continue reading
Posted by Michael Meacher
The Labour leadership contest is a classic example of how it should not be fought
Sadly, but predictably, the Labour Leadership struggle has been so much mired in bluster and hysteria that its true potential significance has been largely obscured. A contest of this kind should start, not with who it is claimed has the style and presentation to be the most plausible leader, but with what it is argued is currently wrong with the country, what policies are necessary to put those things right, what mechanisms are proposed to achieve that, and how should they be funded and delivered.
Arguably the most pressing problems for Britain at the present time can be summarised as follows. What were the causes of the financial crash and the consequent prolonged downturn, and what lessons need to be learnt to prevent a recurrence? Does the manifest lack of adequate reform of the financial sector make it likely there could be another catastrophic slump again soon? Is austerity the right policy to cut the deficit? Continue reading
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Hypocrisy of the Tory “workers’ party”: making it impossible to strike
Strike action, fox hunting, the BBC, Europe, migrant benefits – never underestimate the Tory capacity to identify things that aren’t problems and then attack them. The number of days lost to strike action is on average less than a tenth of what it was during the 1980s. It’s not even as though strikes are constant – and certainly workers themselves are reluctant to strike because they themselves suffer the most – or have an enormous impact on productivity nowadays. Of far greater impact is the UK’s under-investment in skills, which is something that unions want to work with the government to fix. But the government’s latest proposals will upset the balance between employers and workers, tilting it much too far in employers’ favour and many of the proposals will make it far harder to resolve disputes fairly. Yet good employers know that the best way to resolve problems at work is to sit down with workers and talk it through, trying to find a compromise, rather than using statutory power to ride roughshod over workers’ rights to impose authority by default. Continue reading
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Brown has a nerve to lecture us on economic credibility or winning elections
It is hard to believe that Brown had the gall in his anti-Corbyn diatribe to declare that “the best way of realising our high ideals is to show that we have an alternative in government that is…neither a pale imitation of what the Tories offer nor is the route to being a party of permanent protest, rather than a party of government”. The prime reason that Labour lost 5 million votes between 1997 and 2010 was, apart from Iraq, the fact that a very large minority of Labour voters did think precisely that – that under the regimes of Blair and Brown Labour was indeed ‘a pale imitation of what the Tories offer’. It’s also why UKIP gained 4 million votes at the election three months ago because a huge chunk of the electorate had indeed come to the conclusion that ‘they’re all the same’. Continue reading
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Cameron-Osborne’s vendetta against the young could prove their downfall
Osborne really has got it in for young people – unless of course they are poised to inherit their grandparents’ £1 million home or will benefit from a higher inheritance tax threshold. It will be young people who cop it from changes to universal credit that will deduct benefits faster as they earn more. That will cost 3 million families an average of £1,000 a year according to the IFS. Altogether some 13 million families, over half the population, will lose an average of £5 a week as a result of extending the freeze in working-age benefits, tax credits and local housing allowance, until 2020. Continue reading
