The Labour campaign continues to make good progress whilst the Tories lurch from one failed artifice after another, and Ed Miliband is increasingly taking command with growing confidence. The election has nevertheless drawn attention to a disturbing penumbra of alienation from the whole process. In poor white working class areas the number of households who […]
Posts under ‘Earnings’
Britain’s pay: from £28m 8 weeks into a job to £0 a week on zero hours contracts
Apr 19th, 2015 by Michael Meacher.Some of Ed Miliband’s most popular announcements have been his pledge to abolish non-dom status and to hunt down aggressive tax abusers , not only making them pay up what is owed, but also a fine of an equal amount on top. He would be even more popular if he found a formula to deal […]
Share:
Productivity is central flaw in Tory economic argument
Apr 5th, 2015 by Michael Meacher.One of the company bosses signing the Telegraph letter sought to clinch his case by saying it was ‘madness’ to abandon the government’s economic policy since it was only half done and they needed to ‘finish the job’. But what is half done? Not reducing the deficit since it was £118bn when Alistair Darling’s two […]
Share:
Who do these presumptuous Telegraph letter-writing businessmen think they are?
Apr 4th, 2015 by Michael Meacher.What does it matter what these 103 businessmen say who’ve signed the Telegraph letter? None of them wrote the letter – it was a party political stunt concocted by the Tory party to to get some cheap publicity in praise of themselves. But why does the Tory party think these names matter? It’s not as […]
Share:
Another hit for low-paid workers revealed – one of Osborne’s £12bn hidden benefit cuts
Apr 2nd, 2015 by Michael Meacher.Following my post on the further £12bn welfare cuts promised by Osborne if the Tories win, I received an email from one of those persons who read it, Sue Tuke, with some devastating new revelations about how the proposed cuts to Universal Credit when self-employed claimants miss their monthly targets will likely be part of […]
Share:
Zero hours contracts are a weapon of workplace control
Apr 2nd, 2015 by Phil Burton-Cartledge.I’m glad Labour is making some good noises about zero hour contracts. It’s even better that they’ve met the stupid and entirely predictable letter from Tory supporting business chums that, shock horror, support the Tories with a signed letter of their own featuring people on zero hour contracts. For all their money advantage, so far […]
Share:
Poverty is the real difference between school attainment levels
Apr 1st, 2015 by Dave Watson.The Scottish Government’s Parentzone website has published data on the performance of school leavers. The Daily Record highlighted how these figures show a shocking class divide between the wealthiest and least well off areas of Scotland. This is Dave Watson’s opinion piece in the Daily Record that ran alongside the article. In it he argues that the difference […]
Share:
Does the party of the welfare state talk tough because it doesn’t know where the centre ground is?
Mar 29th, 2015 by David Osland.Sometimes I suspect that not a syllable escapes the lips of Rachel Reeves unless it somehow encapsulates the pitch for the latest Channel Four eat the poor documentary while simultaneously disgusting a sizeable chunk of Labour activists. Most recently, her declamation that Labour is not the party of the welfare state and doesn’t represent those out […]
Share:
NHS staff in England are being treated even worse than other public sector workers
Mar 27th, 2015 by Michael Meacher.It was Nigel Lawson, I think, who once opined that the NHS was the nearest thing the British had to a religion. If so the government has treated its priestly acolytes uniquely badly. The average real pay of NHS workers has fallen by over 10% since 2009. No less than 40,000 are paid below the […]
Share:
Osborne’s boasts were lies – his was not a budget for a prosperous Britain
Mar 25th, 2015 by Michael Meacher.The truth finally came out. Osborne claimed that the deficit was being cut this year when in fact that is only due to the exceptional delaying of tax payments till the end of the fiscal year by the super-rich in order to take advantage of the reduction in the top income tax rate to 45%. […]
